Fabular Experiments
Surendran Nair's paintings are elaborate pictorial fictions, expressive claims on our attention that alternate between soliloquy and conversation. Delighting in the condition of paradox, these paintings assume various forms: they come at us as puzzling riddles and private jokes, mumbled asides and deafening proclamations, knife-edged critiques and tender parodies, baroque satires and impish elegies. The figure of the colossus has fascinated the artist for a considerable period. In some manifestations, the body of the Cosmic Man has been punched through with niches bearing a multitude of symbols signifying political parties and religious factions. In other avatars, the colossus can no longer stride the earth; for the planet has been transmogrified into one vast consumerist society, and he is weighed down by plastic shopping bags. At other points in his career, Nair has followed the destiny of a winged actor standing on a column of grand symbolic importance, rehearsing the part of Icarus; he has also documented the circus of roles played by a versatile chimera that is part man, part dragon and part megaphone.
Nair composes his paintings around protagonists and predicaments recruited from diverse image-archives: from Greek myth and Indic iconography; from heraldry and the idiom of pamphleteers and poster-makers; from the memory of his student days in Trivandrum and Baroda; from the turbulent political history of postcolonial India. The whimsicality of Nair's art (the dimension of it that tends to captivate first-time viewers, and is sometimes erroneously described as its ‘surrealism') is eminently deceptive. If these paintings are fraught with intimate meanings drawn from the artist's deepest obsessions, literary preoccupations or inherited past, they also resonate with political meanings that ripple out from the secluded space of the studio into the demagogic tumult of the public sphere.
Nair's high-spirited fabular experiments and allegorical inventions – or, in his own vivid and telling phrase, his ‘corollary mythologies' – are not intended to divert us from the urgencies of the actual. On the contrary, they offer us an enriched, a heightened and inescapeable version of the actual, shorn of official propaganda and populist anodyne. His mythologies are corollary because they follow logically from the theorems of established wisdom, but as critical responses. The actor playing the role of the doomed hero whose wings will fail him is placed atop the Ashoka column, which is surmounted by the four-lion capital that is the Indian nation-state's official symbol. This painting was exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art during the reign of a government led by Hindu-majoritarian forces that menaced the Republic's inclusive and secular character: it provoked a controversy and was taken down. The many-stamped colossus is the universe reduced to the squabbling of mobilisations based on the expediencies of identitarian politics, on ethnic or religious imaginaries that have become as real as concrete. Nair does not turn away from the monsters that roar in the arena of the Now, calling the true witness down to combat and possible slaughter.
For these reasons, Nair regards painting as no less interactive a medium than the installation or the digital interface: a coded yet inviting communication around which artist and viewer choreograph a productive dialogue. The act of painting is, for Nair, an offering of metaphors to his viewers: metaphors from which they can gauge the curve of the artist's imagination while also staging their own imaginative departures. Accordingly, the emphasis shifts between the artistic imagination and the viewerly one, from one painting to another. The artist indicates that some of his works are programmed in a relatively open-ended fashion; they function as scripts, around which viewers can improvise their own performances: some of Nair's paintings dedicated to the figure of the actor, such as ‘I beg your pardon: the scorpion act II – an actor meditating on a character of an imaginary play (Cuckoonebulopolis)' (2002), function in this manner. Other paintings in his oeuvre operate at a different threshold of entry; they present themselves as improvisation-resistant challenges and demand to be decoded by viewers: Nair's baroque-seeming allegories of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land and Utopia in his ‘Cuckoonebulopolis' works, such as ‘Mephistopheles….. otherwise, the quaquaversal prolix (Cuckoonebulopolis)' (2003), as well as his series titled ‘The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight' (1996-2000) are of this order.
“I like to think of the painting as a paatra , a vessel,” says the artist. The Sanskrit word means both vessel and role: a receptacle into which a subtly flavoured curry, homage to the tongue-prickling variety of herbs and spices, may be poured; but also the emotional dispositions, the psychic shifts, the range of moods and motives that make up a character to be played. And such a lovingly blended compound can scarcely be expected to yield itself up easily or immediately: the connoisseur, whether gourmand, actor or viewer, must be prepared to probe, to accept and to relish its intricacies.
The model of theatre, especially as distilled in the twinned glory and anxiety of being an actor, is central to Nair's art. As a child and teenager growing up in a Kerala village, he would accompany his friends to night-long performances of the stylised Kathakali theatre, a form that is descended from the classical Sanskrit drama. His fascination with the ceremonial of theatre is manifest: we see it in his evocation of the ritual of making up and presenting oneself in a persona, literally the mask of another personality; in the gestures of self-transformation that his characters perform, allowing for passage from one shape or identity to another; and in the ensemble action of animated visual image and stimulating text that characterises his paintings.
For Nair's paintings are either partly made up of, or rely quite strongly on, the word. And the word is protean here, multiform and quicksilver: it appears as the witty or lyric phrase; the passage engraved, as though in stone. It manifests itself as the annotation to the image, which does not describe the image but amplifies it, working in tandem with it to modulate our awareness of the painting and its (dis)contents. The word, in Nair's art, is the voice that seeks out its listeners, pampering them with delusions of pleasure that are quickly withdrawn and replaced by barbed revelations. Through his choice of a pictoriality shot through with words, Nair situates his practice midway between those of the writer and the visual artist. “In Malayalam, you write your painting, instead of painting it,” he observes. “The word is chitram-ezhuthu , which refers to writing, inscribing a picture.”
Not only the written word, but the word made vocal as enunciation or noise features as a vibrant presence in Nair's art. I think, for instance, of the word ‘quaquaversal', which occurs in the title of one of Nair's most magnificent paintings, alluded to above. The painting centres on various shock-fused binaries contending for verbal and imagistic power: scripture and nonsense verse vying for inscriptive control; violent king and contemplative sage haunting the same levitating body; brutal weapon superimposed on sacred mudra in the same downward-pointing hand gesture; wide-eyed victim trapped inside an actor in polychrome mask and diabolical arrow-tipped tail. ‘Quaquaversal' refers, in geological parlance, to a formation that slopes downwards in all directions equally. This could imply a general decline, an impartial movement towards apocalypse on all fronts; but the sound of the word is most delicious, fruit of a dictionary-hunt, utterly reminiscent of a parliament of quacking, squawking birds, an onomatopoeic self-joke that the artist appears to have enacted on his fascination with Aristophanes' play, ‘The Birds', in which the eponymous creatures, unhappy both with men and gods, establish a Utopia between heaven and earth, and control all communication between these realms. The triumph of the intermediate that shuttles at will between extremes of choice or location is integral to Nair's art.
The felicitous and even seamless interplay between image and phrase in Nair's art could well be an outcome of his involvement as a fellow traveller in student politics in the mid-1970s. He belonged to the first batch of the newly founded College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum: a group of eager and idealistic students who came to campus and found that there were virtually no teachers, no source of guidance or direction. Forced to find ways of teaching themselves, they sustained themselves by spending hours in the library; by joining film clubs where they were exposed to international cinema as well as India's emergent parallel cinema; by engaging with the traditional performing arts of Kathakali and Koodiyattam; and, most dramatically, by expressing solidarity with the current movements of political protest, including the Naxalite upsurge. Dissatisfaction with campus conditions peaked in a students' agitation at the College of Fine Arts, which galvanised the energies of the student body into poster-making, demonstrations and a hunger strike. Nair joined the hunger strike; he also made a few posters to help those of his friends, who were closely involved with the agitation.
The events related to the strike gained gravity from having taken place against the larger backdrop of the Emergency (1975-1977), India's only experience of authoritarian rule. Towards the end of June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded to widespread political unrest by suspending civil freedoms and instituting a police state that lasted 19 months. Since the media were subject to stringent censorship during this period, posters, graffiti and the underground mimeograph press were the only modes by which opposition to the repressive State could be expressed. Many artists and art students in Kerala, active on the Left of the political spectrum, contributed to the anti-Emergency resistance by painting political posters and graffiti in the streets. The communicative possibilities of protest in such a volatile atmosphere offered Nair a vital lesson. He saw that the distinction conventionally made between visual image and text was irrelevant. Both were quotations, equally vital as instruments of provocation: they could be twinned into a means of seizing the attention, activating a response.
Nair traces his artistic choices further back yet, to his voracious reading as a schoolboy: a habit that long antedates his earliest encounter with painting. Nair remains immersed in, and his art informed by, some of these early literary encounters. Since Communism has long dominated the politics of his home state, Kerala, Russian literature was plentifully available in Malayalam and English translation; Nair read Gogol and Dostoevsky, and was particularly attracted to the economy of detail with which the latter portrayed the inner life of his characters, and the “traumas that he put them through”.
Nair responded strongly, also, to Malayalam writers; especially to Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, VKN and Paul Zacharia. He prizes Basheer, who is in love with his characters, for his lack of malice; he enjoys VKN's anarchic, playful and occasionally insulting approach, his understanding of a decadent feudal social system; he savours Zacharia's playing up of the satirical element as a rupture opens up between static convention and the unpredictability of social situations. And indeed, Nair's paintings, when treated as an ensemble, do suggest an anthology of stories or a sequence of poems: his oeuvre of images develops into a library of elliptical texts, his figures and tableaux hinting at implied or embedded narratives.
Personae as Symbols
The act of bearing witness, of articulating a narrative about the relationships and structures that constitute one's lifeworld, can never be neutral. It is based on a particular decision to speak for a perceived truth, and against a perceived abortion of that truth. It is based on a commitment to a specific version of reality that has passed the test of value, and against the grand deceptions that threaten to eclipse it. For a figurative-allegorical painter like Nair, it is vital to establish precisely how he can implicate himself in his testimony to the Now.
This mandate of self-implication is linked to the key formal problem that a figurative-allegorical painter must face: that of investing the figure with a local habitation and a name, in Shakespeare's phrase: ‘local', not in the limited sense of a particular region, but in the sense of being connected to a locus , whether in class, history or in myth, or in a particular texture of relationships. Does a figure in such an art as Nair's represent an aspect of the Self, or any one of many Others? Or does it mark a scale of emotional investments that includes Self-contents and Other-contents, and the linkages of perception and sharing that bind them together?
Nair populates his paintings with a cast of enigmatic figures that meld the authorial viewpoint with strange, unsettling, sublime or tragic alterities. His dramatis personae include the swan-man, a centaur compounded from a horse and a man in a lungi , and the human-animal-machine composite mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay. These figures act as symbols that the artist uses to investigate a range of situations. They do not remain stable and unchanging across his paintings; the roles they play are re-defined by the logic of the various situations in which they participate. Nair assigns different valencies and changing orientations to his symbols, as he shifts them from one story to another. And yet, these are not merely empty vessels, bland and vacant of meaning in themselves. They are connected by a shared though by no means stable behavioural logic that, following Wittgenstein, we may describe as a ‘family resemblance'. With this behavioural logic, Nair's symbols modify, unpredictably, the contexts that they inhabit. With their mercurial ability to switch valency and orientation, they subvert the recognition reflexes that come to attend any symbolism, diminishing its efficacy. This, indeed, is what gives Nair's enigmatic figures the magical and ever-renewed significance-making power of the symbol.
The swan-man, who appears in a recent painting called ‘The Melancholy of the Twelfth Man', is an oblique self-image on which the artist has mapped an identification with such marginal persons as members of minorities who possess nominal citizenship of the Republic but do not enjoy any real citizenship rights in an increasingly majoritarian-dominant public sphere. Some hybrids are dynamised by the miscegenation that has brought them forth; others merely stand for intermediate, indefinite states of being. I suggest that the swan-man is not a masterfully dual personality so much as he is a figure trapped in mid-transformation – seemingly neither fully here nor quite there. Indeed, he puts me in mind of Nietzsche's chilling description of human beings as “hybrids of plants and of ghosts.”
Nair tends to agree. “In my therianthropic forms, I didn't want to use the single composite figure as a classical resolution,” he reflects. “I wanted to keep the human half and the bird half separate, not fused.” The artist sees the swan-man as a “twelfth man”, the stand-by in a cricket team. Someone with no active role, often a passive spectator like the others sitting in the stands – except that he is costumed to play, all padded up and gloved, awaiting the remote possibility of the glorious moment when he might be called in to substitute for a player who has been taken off the field hurt. An actor always waiting in the wings, script memorised, hoping that someone will call him on stage. “The twelfth man is neither an insider nor an outsider, his is a precarious position,” observes Nair. “He is the first casualty, the figure who is handed over to ambiguity by his name. If the match goes well, he is forgotten and no one misses him, but if the match is going badly, he is invoked.”
Nair's twelfth man is a figure trapped between the opposite possibilities of ‘What if?' and ‘If only'. Someone very like many millions of the Republic of India's denizens, who are technically citizens by reason of birth and residence, but who are unable to exercise the prerogatives of citizenship because of the constraints imposed by oppressive social structures and a callous political order.
The figure ‘78/6', which appears in this painting, could signify a disastrous cricket score: a mere 78 runs scored with six batsmen out. The match has been thrown away, and the metaphorical theatre of the painting implies that the contest is being fought over the nation. The figure is also the numerical equivalent of the characters that spell ‘Allah'; but the holy name of God has been broken by a stroke, symbolising the sense of embattlement and assault experienced by the Muslim community, whether in India or in West Asia. ‘The Melancholy of the Twelfth Man' is a title consciously Chirico-esque in its emphasis; Nair's protagonists are often isolated, lost or uncertain, and his paintings are charged with a characteristic pittura metafisica plangency in which are fused melancholia, isolation, mystery and an aching nostalgia for the infinite.
In other works, such as the 2003 work titled ‘Priapus at his wits' end (Cuckoonebulopolis)', the artist points up the swan-man's phallic aspect: the man stands erect and exasperated, his hands on his hips, while his swan twin remains in mid-peck, his long neck and beak pointing to the ground. In more recent works, Nair posits the kinnari , the female celestial musician, as a bearer of the artist-persona: it may be argued that this gender shift allows the artist to voice another idiom of vulnerability, another translation of suffering into exquisite grace; or at least, into gracefulness. With each figure, Nair sets up yet another signification in his multiple, ongoing portraiture of the creative self and its alterities. His viewers must trace his moves from one image to the next, as readers would their favourite author's passages from text to text.
Language, Violence, Poetry
We may focus now on the intriguing chimera that Nair assembles from a male body, a dragon tail and a megaphone mouth. This figure is repeated in a number of variations, each set in its own comic-strip-style frame, playing a different role and negotiating a different context, in the space of a single painting. Apart from the comic-strip format, Nair also re-configures a Buddhist model in this painting: he references the Mahayana mural composition of a thousand Buddhas; although supposedly identical, each Buddha is distinctive and individuated in presentation. This study in repetition without replication is enchantingly titled ‘The Garden of Forking Paths: Of Expenditures and Receipts, or Gulu Guggulu Guggulu Gulu Gulu'. Borges, Ionesco, quantum theory and the doctrine of karma blur together in this title, which echoes the Theatre of the Absurd in its boisterous knocking-around of language and the reality it claims to represent. Somewhere along our sonorous recital of this title, the civilised pretence of communication breaks down into an onomatopoeic stand-in for white-noise blather, or pretend tribe-speak satirised by generations of the politically incorrect, or the prattle of infants.
And sometimes, a language cannot be heard or understood, especially if it is spoken by the weak and marginal to the powerful. Consider, for instance, ‘Et in Ayodhya Ego', a painting that insistently activates our political imagination. This mysterious painting marks the convergence of several concerns for Nair. The setting is that of a monument set up in draft, as it were; its hybrid architecture combines Mughal and Rajput elements, as well as the kitsch aesthetic of official art in postcolonial India. The figure memorialised here is Nair's swan-man, appearing paradoxically light and balletic in this rendition as the picture of a sculpture. He occupies, in a just slightly off-hand and off-centre fashion, the lotus pedestal on which a departed leader or semi-legendary hero may stand in a town square anywhere in India.
The swan-man appears here in another avatar, another valency. He is not the melancholic twelfth man but the subject of homage, who – by his synergy with other factors in the painting – ironises that homage. At one level, in its stance and tenor, this painting satirises the tendency, in Indian public culture, to glorify figures far beyond their natural desserts. At another level, it serves as a vehicle by which Nair disclaims a public culture from which he wishes to unsubscribe, disinherits himself from a history to which he does not wish to become an heir.
We have noted that, in Nair's private mythology, the symbol is modified by, and modifies, the elements that surround it (parenthetically, the artist's strategy may be compared with the analysis of an art-work's affective capabilities in classical Sanskrit aesthetics, where the dominant bhava or emotion of an art-work is deemed to affect, and be affected by, its subsidiary emotions, whether supportive, sanchari , or fugitive, vyabhichari ). In ‘Et in Ayodhya Ego', the swan-man could be the oddball, the marginal stranger who is sometimes propelled centre-stage by fortuities and radically transformed circumstances. In this avatar, he seems to symbolise, with his hieroglyphic speech, Everyman estranged from the political process, an individual who has been derogated in actuality but remains a fossil symbol of the Republic, in whose name the polity functions. But the polity has been forever tainted by the violence of Ayodhya, the schismatic assault on the Indian nation's composite character.
As its title demonstrates, this painting holds a significance beyond the merely satirical. The title alludes to Poussin's masterwork, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego', as well as to one of postcolonial India's worst political catastrophes, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992, by Hindu right-wing militants. The speaker of the line engraved on the monument in Poussin's painting is Death, who emphasises that he is never absent, not even in the most ideal life, the life of the pastoral idyll. To those who regarded the barbarism of Ayodhya as a triumph, the painting could sound a warning: triumph, like everything else, is subject to dissolution. To those who blame Ayodhya on a particular set of political actors, it could be saying: But I, and you, and all of us were there too, and we did nothing. Nair is a political artist, but his addresses are subtle and sophisticated; he has no use for the style of the hectoring sloganeer.
Instead, he explores the power of open secrecy , of a significance that is relayed through the devices of sly anecdote and coded allegory; his paradox is veined with the special opposition between visibility and impenetrability. “When something you want to express is too personal, too intimate, it finds ways of relating itself to other things,” says Nair. “So I keep the image as a theatrical prop and connect it with things around it.” It is through such pretexts and correlates that we work our way to the core of Nair's image-constructs. Nair cherishes an artist's ability to produce allegorical scenarios that assort well with everyday circumstances while yet preserving their special inner cogency and propulsive logic. He finds this, for instance, in the murderer's tale in Kurosawa's Rashomon , which also dramatises for him the question of lyricism, one of his favoured temptations. “Lyricism is the ability to evoke something horrible in a moving way that takes you outside of yourself,” he suggests.
Discussing Aristophanes, to whose plays he often returns as a take-off point for his paintings – especially ‘The Birds', in his ‘chapterisation' of events in ‘Cuckoonebulopolis' or Cloud-Cuckoo-Land – the artist points out that the Greek master's immediate political concerns are too historically distant for him to grasp; what he responds most strongly to, is the quality of Aristophanes' imagination, especially his ability to use humour as an instrument against the tyranny of the age and place. Humour, after all, is a form of code, indeed, a play with code . Nair celebrates such a play with code in the festival that is ‘The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight', a series of 42 hand-coloured etchings that he made between 1996 and 2000, a period during which the Hindu-majoritarian forces were perfecting a politics of agitationalism, platformed on the violent mobilisation of mass resentment and the well-publicised deployment of a neo-Hindu iconography. In ‘The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight', play becomes critique: Nair tunes up the ludic so that meanings drift away from the brackets crafted to contain them; emphases shift so that allegories go awry; familiar icons dip beneath radar range of commonsense; and no symbol can be held down by the weight of convention and dogma. Here, Nair loops Bosch, Borges and Homer together with the Katha-Sarita-Sagar (‘The Ocean of the River of Stories'), the Alf Laila wa Laila (‘The Arabian Nights'), and a variegation of other archives – to generate an encyclopaedia of ambivalent symbols, hermetic gestures, aphoristic hints and chimeras, all rejoicing in the openness of secrecy .
As we speak of Nair's exemplars in classical Greek drama and Japanese cinema, ancient Indic literature and modern Latin American fiction, we realise how closely language and distortion, beauty and violence, terror and poetry are braided together in Nair's art; how they coexist in the space and duration of the same work. Look once and you find a specific nuance in Nair's mise en scene ; look again and you find its opposite, encrypted into the same meticulously detailed surface. Nair smiles: “I find this possibility of the double take fascinating.”
Origin Myths
The most perverse and pervasive of modernity's anxieties is the anxiety of origin. As communities break up, individuals find themselves atomised and exiled from histories of belonging; as the traditional continuities become increasingly difficult to imagine and maintain, groups tend to mobilise around identities that have been concocted, origins that have been improvised and shorn of all supposed impurities, drastically simplified and weapon-grade narratives that are designed and launched on the fly. Such are the fictions that exercise the political imagination of many millions of Indians today. Volatile, aggressive, exclusivist in their tenor, these fictions are invariably disseminated and enforced by violent and intolerant methods.
Since the early 1990s, India has suffered the breakdown of its early postcolonial belief in a secular, inclusive, identity-neutral space of nationality, where entitlements and opportunities would be available, at least theoretically, to every citizen irrespective of his or her ethnicity, religion or regional affiliation. In place of this belief, there have sprung up several mutually antagonistic claims to sectarian identity: some, like the genocidal Hindutva upsurge, based on majoritarianism; others, such as the Other Backward Castes movement, premised on the self-assertiveness of newly powerful middle castes claiming a history of disadvantage.
What imaginative claims can the artist assert against such juggernaut fictions, which are backed by the force of numbers and the will to power: fictions that amount to origin myths, foundational accounts for the various groups contending for State power and social ascendancy in the churning of globalisation-era India? Can the artist propose pictorial fictions that are as expressively rich as they are critically powerful, and can work against the stupor- or obedience-inducing drugs of demagogues? Can the artist's corollary mythologies compete against mass-scale manipulators? These are, after all, an individual's productions: by definition, they are episodic, tactical and guerrilla-like. Can they prod the Indian political imagination into vigilance?
Nair is preoccupied with the absent narrative, the erased glyph, the resurrected tale that is alluded to rather than announced in its entirety. Equally, he is preoccupied with the manner in which powerful fictions can move the minds of millions of people: as artist and as citizen, he has watched as spurious gospels of historical wrong-doing and necessary vengeance have turned, by repetition, into incontestable histories, myths that sustain hatred and destroy harmony. He has often asked himself how he can retrieve lost, often deliberately suppressed aspects of a shared history at a time when influential sectarian distortionists have claimed the privilege of interpreting the past. He has wondered how he can, even while opposing Hindu majoritarianism and refusing to subscribe to the pieties of popular devotionalism, pay homage to Hindu sacred art and recast Hindu iconography for his own purposes.
Wrestling with these questions, he has kept the door of versionality open, in defiance of the absolutists, insisting on the validity of his fictive accounts of plausible pasts and possible futures, his subversive approaches to myth and history. Unlike the copyist or translator of archaic texts, Nair adopts a poetics of lila , of play, of sport among appearances and realities; in the open-ended lexicon of images that he compiles as he goes along, the inherited and the innovated are difficult to tell apart as they mutate and develop varied connections with one another, like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.
This crucial move permits him to address the problem, at once deeply personal and overwhelmingly political, of deploying the traditional and the sacred in a secular setting. “I was never religious, but I always loved the artistic works of the religious imagination,” he says. But how can he articulate this interest when politicised religiosity has penetrated our society and begun to define our polity? This dilemma is rooted in Nair's experience of the mythic legitimisation of violence by the Hindu Right between 1992 and 2004, and its periodic expression in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the communitarian violence in Bombay, the attacks on the Christian minority and the State-sponsored pogrom enacted against the Muslim minority in Gujarat. Living and working in Baroda, Gujarat, as he does, Nair has witnessed this carefully plotted insanity from close quarters. This experience has sensitised him to the complexities of belonging, even if nominally, to a religious group; and to the responsibility of employing imagery that originates in a religious context or a sacred vocabulary, against those who misuse it.
Nair's use of the Vishva-rupa or Cosmic Form as a recurrent image, for instance, recovers the primordial Prajapati, Father of Creation, from whose dismembered limbs the world is created in Vedic myth, as well as the Vaishnava colossus of Mahavishnu as the World. It also retrieves other monumental conceptions of the embodied Divine, including the Jaina Tirthankara figure and the Vairochana Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism. Nair is extremely interested in the Buddhist and Jaina past of South India: a past that has been sought to be erased by Hindu nationalist propaganda. In the suppression of this past lies buried the historical record of Hindu intolerance and brutality, the destruction of shrines and monasteries, the annexation of the physical and psychological space of targeted communities.
While the historian's duty is to correct widespread misperceptions by setting the record straight with an abundance of previously unrevealed detail, the artist approaches the same problem differently: by shocking the complacencies of the viewer-citizen, by shattering the structure of generalisations that commonly passes for a world-picture. Nair's project is that of retrieving the sacred through idiosyncratic narrative – he uses the iconic in a double-edged manner, as both homage and critique; thus, he dodges Indology and anthropology as well as the pathologies of nativism and hyper-nationalism. “From the classical, I take the sense of the icon, its monumentality,” he says. “But I meld it with the gigantic kitsch cut-outs of leaders that we find in South Indian public culture. The artist, for me, must act as the vidhushaka of the Sanskrit theatre, who plays various roles and also the buffoon.”
Despite having been deeply attracted to myth since he was a child, Nair could not, for a long time, give himself the permission to use its resources in his art. Religious culture was viewed with suspicion in the Left-dominated ethos of the art school campus, both in Trivandrum and in Baroda. Meanwhile, the ‘tradition vs. modernism' debate had collapsed into a ritualised and uncritical reiteration of slogans. Based largely, in the South, on K C S Panicker and his Madras School's arguments in favour of an evolving tradition as the source-ground for identity, the terms of this debate had become fossilised; worse, it had not been revised to cope with the ideological question of the religious content of traditional form.
Many artists of Nair's generation had abandoned its sterile premises by the late 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, the debate itself began to fade away, taking with it the exhausted paradigms of East vs. West and indigenism vs. cosmopolitanism. A variant of the debate has manifested itself again in the early 21 st century, although the fixity of an essentialist identity has been replaced by the flexibility of a chosen position. The terms of the debate have also been sensibly rephrased to take account of consumerism, the religious Right, neo-tribalism and globalisation, all of which have impacted the consciousness more or less simultaneously during this period of cataclysmic economic and social change in India.
Nair has set a relatively recent work, ‘The Parable of the Swine', in the imperial tent of Shah Jehan: an ornate, bejewelled and baroque version of the austere yurt that his Turki and Mongol ancestors would have set up on the Asian steppelands. A boar stands inside it. It could be Varaha , the sublime god Vishnu in his world-saving avatar as the Cosmic Boar. But from the viewpoint of Islamic hygiene, the animal could simply represent an unclean pig, whose presence violates the camp of the Defender of the Faith. ‘The Parable of the Swine' demands that the viewer politicise himself – not by taking one side or another in the game of brutalising illusions that is communitarian politics, but by seeing sharply through the manipulations of rival ideologies, by retaining the right to shuttle among contradictory explanations.
Wagers on Communication
Nair also retains the right to invoke utterly private sources of significance in his images, even if the viewer can have no access to them: this is a dimension of privacy that informs, but cannot be inferred from, the image as publicly viewed, and adds to the ‘open secrecy' that I have proposed as a key feature of Nair's art. His images can sometimes refer back to events and people who lie concealed in his memory. The Vishva-rupa may be anchored in iconography and public culture, but he also has an affinity with the art-school model who the artist remembers from Trivandrum: a madman who claimed to be a royal, and who sat for life class with chits bearing public complaint and critique pinned to his shirt. The colossus punched through with viewing squares is also based on an eccentric judge in Kerala who, on finding his judicial robes too constricting in summer, cut squares in them to allow for ventilation. And certain personae from other periods in Nair's work refer back to the untouchable portrayed in Ketan Mehta's cinematic cult classic, Bhavni Bhavai , and played by Mohan Gokhale, with his spittoon and broom dragging behind him like a tail: a man, as the artist puts it, who is “forced to erase his own imprints” (interestingly, this figure has also influenced a sculpture-installation by Nair's contemporary from Kerala, the sculptor N N Rimzon).
Emerging from the screening where he first saw Bhavni Bhavai , Nair stopped at a roadside stall for a cup of tea; his eye fell on one of those individuals who are allowed unrestricted rights of passage in an Indian street, part madman, part holy fool, part actor. A bahurupiya , a man of many forms who cannot be caged in the coldly legalistic description of ‘impersonator'. This particular bahurupiya figure was trying to make a living by begging, costuming himself as Hanuman, the wise monkey-god who is the divine hero Sri Rama's counsellor in the epic Ramayana . In Nair's imagination, the figure of the untouchable erasing his own imprints became superimposed on this Hanuman impersonator with his tail dragging in the street. An intuitive connection was made: “The image talked to me,” the artist says. This amalgam of marginal, holy, destitute, self-transforming person sparked off Nair's fascination with the actor figure: it became the prototype for his logic of symbolic signification, based as it is on the shape-shifter who is no empty vessel.
In Nair's games of meaning, we play with origins and improvisations. And we realise that we are hedged in by impossibility conditions. Indeed, Nair is a connoisseur of impossibilities. He bewilders the viewer with long and unpronounceable names that you cannot get your tongue around. With places like Cloud-Cuckoo-Land and Utopia, which have never existed except in the mind. With people who could never be, yet might be around the corner, walking towards you – the bird-woman, the self-appointed umpire on the cricket field, the naked actor waiting to be robed in a script. “My personae are the feelers I send out to society,” suggests the artist. This private universe of constantly unfolding stories is held within a single mind; all the same, it is a setting that prepares itself for big events that are likely to explode.
In the process of writing this essay, I have accumulated various anecdotes from Nair's childhood and adolescence; some of these seemed, at first, to be beautiful asides or oblique illuminations. On reflection, however, I have come to suspect that some of these anecdotes have a critical bearing on his subsequent development as an artist, on his relationship to lost originals and the transmutation of sacred tradition into the secularised contemporary. There is much to be gleaned from this domain of the intensely personal, which is meticulously concealed beneath the witty titles, the impossible tableaux, the quixotic characters and the idiosyncrasies of phrase and image. I will confine myself here to two stories: symmetrically enough, one concerns his father, the other his mother.
Nair was only two years old when his father died, and he has no memory of him. No photograph of his father exists. The only concrete association of memory that the artist had with his father was through the ceremony of the shraddha , an annual homage intended to maintain a connection across worlds with the spirits of one's ancestors. Nair performed this anniversary ceremony every year until he was 25. The future artist was fascinated by the grammar of the ritual as a child, and the manner in which it developed an arrangement of elements; by the poetry behind the ritual; by the stylised manner in which the Divine and the ancestral presences are addressed and invited to accept the offerings of the living. Nair views the ritual as a “way of measuring the distance at which one stands from the Divine”, an apposite explanation in Kerala society, whose feudal and sumptuary social structure was articulated in public space, for centuries, through an etiquette based on precisely calibrated distances – down to the number of steps – that the members of various castes mutually maintained among them.
More intimately, as Nair observes: “So long as there is no image, I can go on imagining my father as I wish – he becomes mythic material.” This ability to imagine a progenitor, a precursor, a predecessor, has become amplified in Nair's image-making practice: it becomes metaphorical of a tradition as inheritance and ancestry, to be re-imagined for the present. Like many liberals of Hindu background, Nair opposes politicised religiosity but insists that a private meditation on myth, rite and icon remains possible to him, untainted by majoritarianism. “Such rites are important to me,” he says. “Thinking about them, I recover part of my identity.”
And when Nair wished to go to Baroda to study art, his mother defused his elder brother's financial anxieties by asking the family to cut down a “huge mango tree” to pay for his expenses. The tree, which stood in the sarpa-kavu , the sacred snake sanctuary of the family home, was Nair's economic mainstay in Baroda. An engagement with the elements of experience that are irreducible to conventional reason – with the mystical and transcendental, the sacred – is inscribed into Nair's very beginnings as an artist.
More proximately, the origins of Nair's recent body of work lie in the series of graphics and paintings that he executed during 1993-1996, as he emerged from a period when he had been subject to external pressure as well as inner conflict. In the late 1980s, he had faced criticism from fellow artists on the nature of his painterliness; such debates are typical of the intensity and idealism with which university life can be led at its best, but while they can stimulate the individual to greater rigour and accomplishment, these debates can also damage a self that is reticent, unprepared for combat, or simply vulnerable. In an atmosphere where everyone is attempting to find an individuated voice and evolve a distinctive language, some students hold doctrinaire positions, while others maintain a wary silence; some students are natural gurus, others born outsiders.
As a student, Nair was questioned on what was perceived as his dependence on the literary; it was also said that his paintings lacked ‘body', that his preference for thin coats of paint and the value of translucence was inappropriate to the supposed inner logic of the medium. When Nair went to England on a residency in the early 1990s, the confusion followed him. For four years, the artist says, he “lost his imagery”. Gradually, he emerged from this crisis: as a joke aimed at those who claimed his work had no ‘body', he took the human figure as his focus, involving it in small actions, bizarre occasions and improbable guises.
If Nair works on a near-monumental scale today, this present work is rooted in the opposite: in the miniature scale of a suite of prints, which he thought exactly right for the play of word, image and association that he wished to externalise. The paintings that he embarked on, working on small pieces of paper, proved cathartic: the series, which grew into a quasi-anthological work called ‘Multiple Images', included anecdotes, puns and jokes, even “stupid jokes”, as the artist concedes. These were notations to the self that were eventually shared with others; announcements that the artist would no longer be bound by the limited notions of painterliness or art-making that others wished to impose on him.
In these initiatives, Nair tried out the possibilities of resonance that would soon distinguish his art. Then as now, Nair has treated his paintings as wagers on communication; which is why they vary, necessarily, between soliloquy and conversation. The artist, like the writer, does not always know who he is addressing; or indeed, if there is anyone out there to be addressed. The audience for the arts is uncertain, fluid, fluctuating. Its subjectivity, conditioned by prevailing cultural prejudices or shifts in political persuasion, may not always lead it to an empathetic engagement with the art that it views. And so, hyperbolic and transitive and ludic as it is, Surendran Nair's is an art that must pass in and out of phases of being-with-oneself and being-with-others, the solitude of the studio and the sociality of the exhibition. The voice is always in utterance, the image always in play. Sometimes, and in good seasons many times, they find the sustenance of the receptive ear and the passionate eye.
(Bombay, December 2005 –September 2006)
(Courtesy: Sakshi Gallery, Surendran Nair and Ranjit Hoskote) |
