K.S. Radhakrishnan’s ‘On the Open Road’ a metaphor for his remarkable journey

The debut retrospective reiterates the strongest points of his oeuvre: exploration, fluidity, transgression, and unstinted joy in the force of life.

K.S. Radhakrishnan in 2016. | Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT

The metaphor of a journey comes most easily to us when we look back at life. For an artist, the metaphor becomes richer for they are looking back not only at their lives but also at the parallel trajectory of their work as it evolved in a kind of jugalbandi with their lives. The eminent sculptor K.S. Radhakrishnan’s first-ever retrospective, “On the Open Road”, on view at Gallerie Nvy in Bikaner House, New Delhi (November 19-December 14), suggests a journey in these two senses and more. The title evokes not just a road but also emphasises the openness of the road.

K.S. Radhakrishnan poses with his work at India Art Fair, New Delhi, in April 2022. | Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR

Radhakrishnan belongs both to Kerala, where he was born and grew up, and to Bengal, where he studied art at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, and where he continues to work. Given this, I am immediately reminded of powerful images of the open road in films from both these cultures. In G. Aravindan’s Kummatty (1979), children run singing and dancing after the Pied Piper-like magician figure Kummatty under the expansive sky, while in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955), little Apu and Durga dash through kaash grass fields to see a passing train. No surprise that a sculpture in Radhakrishnan’s show is called “Song of the Road”.

K.S. Radhakrishnan and curator R. Siva Kumar with “The Crowd”. | Photo Credit: Manoj Biswas 

The exhibition covers five prolific decades of Radhakrishnan’s art. A clue to the openness in this body of work is available as soon as we enter the exhibition, which starts with a section called “The Beginnings”. Here we encounter a portrait of the legendary Ramkinkar Baij along with a photograph of a young Radhakrishnan in the act of making this portrait. For the sculptor, teachers and mentors like Baij, Somnath Hore, or Sarbari Roy Choudhury have remained a vital presence. He describes their natural generosity, their habit of freely gifting their work away, and, in the case of the maverick Ramkinkar, not taking himself seriously to an extent where he used his paintings to plug holes in the roof. Radhakrishnan is grateful for the freedom he received from them.

All of us Musui

Right next to Baij stands a portrait, the spirit of which accompanies the sculptor to this day. This is the portrait of Musui, a young Santhal boy whom Radhakrishnan had met in the 1970s in Santiniketan. Musui, smiling innocently, asked for food and eventually sat for a portrait. After graduating, Radhakrishnan carried the head of Musui, and that innocent smile, to Delhi with him.

“Maiya Over The Cloud”, 2022 | Photo Credit: Juhi Saklani

In 1998, he created a work, “The Rickshaw Puller”, with Musui pulling a hand-drawn rickshaw and a crow perched on the seat. From then on, the artist gave the persona of Musui to everything he created—or perhaps he saw Musui in all of us. So, there is Musui as an acrobat, as Nataraj, an imp, a saint… picking up salt in Dandi, carrying his memories on a cart, frolicking playfully for no reason but for the pleasure of it.

Feeling the need to give Musui a companion, the sculptor created Maiya, Musui’s female counterpart. Maiya too took many avatars: a writer, a lover, a bow and arrow, or the Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro envisaged as a Santiniketan graduate. “Musui and Maiya, light in body and mind, morphed magically into others and thus stood for themselves and everyone else,” says the curator of the exhibition, Prof. R. Siva Kumar. Many incarnations of Radhakrishnan’s two protagonists can be seen in the exhibition, which spreads over two floors and also spills out outdoors.

Part of the installation “The Crowd”, 2023 | Photo Credit: Ruma Choudhury 

What is magical about Musui and Maiya is not just their morphing but also the weightlessness they manage to achieve with bodies made of heavy bronze. We have seen this even in Radhakrishnan’s early pieces from the 1980s and 1990s, like “Whirlwind” or “Durga”, which are a series of passionately twisted female figures with their heads flung back, liberating themselves from the norms of equilibrium and gravity. But Musui and Maiya, with their elongated forms and playful mode, and almost entirely unburdened by flesh, simply do not belong to a physical world ruled by gravitational pull.

Emotions and situations sit lightly on Musui and Maiya; they themselves float lightly on the pedestals given to them. “Maiya as Writer” floats upwards with her face close to the base, resting only on the hand which is writing. “Freehold Musui” is airborne too, balancing on just a hand or an elbow. In more senses than one, nothing weighs them down. Musui’s smile suggests an enjoyment of the situations he finds himself in, but also of having transcended these situations. Seeing a smiling Musui as a saviour with his eyes closed, you know that he may take the people he saves seriously but will never take himself in the role of a saviour seriously. Musui and Maiya claim the “others” in this world, making everyone intimately their own, at times playfully cavorting with each other, at times serene and transcendental (“Maiya as Ma Sarada”), at times mystical (“Maiya on the Cloud”).

The names of these works often evoke that which is indefinable: “Liminal Spaces”, “Bahuroopi”, “Ephemera”, even the neologism “Terrafly”, all hinting at the openness of the road. It is “open” because Radhakrishnan’s natural instinct is to turn away from boundaries, walls, and Laxman rekhas. Exploration, fluidity, transgression, these come naturally to him. His art speaks of openness and freedom; the road it traverses could not have been a narrow, defined, or hemmed-in space.

Highlights

• Sculptor K.S. Radhakrishnan’s first-ever retrospective, “On the Open Road”, is on view at Gallerie Nvy in Bikaner House, New Delhi (November 19-December 14)
• The series called “Human Boxes” has a large number of tiny human figures linked together, representing the “ordinary people”, while also evoking the processes of their lives
• For curator Prof. R. Siva Kumar, it is the “generous empathy” of spirit inherent in these sculptures that illuminates Radhakrishnan’s oeuvre

Collective struggle

Soon, Musui and Maiya found a community. “Radhakrishnan realised what it meant to be alone yet together when he migrated to Delhi in 1981 to forge his artistic career,” says Siva Kumar. He had his studio in Chhatarpur Pahadi, an urban village in Delhi. The land around it was allotted for housing to the economically weaker sections. In the first decade of this century, he saw small residences coming up around him, built by underprivileged people, many of them migrants, struggling to make a home and a life. In these box-like spaces, large aspirations and epic struggles were contained. “I was myself a migrant who had come to Delhi to make a living,” Radhakrishnan says. And he was inspired to start a series called “Human Boxes”.

“Ephemera”, 2019 | Photo Credit: K.S. Radhakrishnan

Here, the large number of tiny human figures linked together, sometimes in the company of Musui or Maiya, represents the “ordinary people”, while also evoking the processes of their lives. What is evident here is the artist’s empathy for these people’s aspirations and struggles, the waves of failure and success they face and celebrate. He captures the sense of a collective struggle and the flow of life as abstract geometrical forms that are both made of and broken by the linked human figures (“Human Box”, “Dissolving a Cubical Order”).

In later iterations, these tiny figures make up ephemeral memories: the smell of breakfast, the heat of bathwater, the scent of something cooking. As we spend time in the exhibition, the ups and downs of the migrants’ lives, the migrant sculptor’s memories, the memories Musui carries in his rickshaws, the little Musuis spilling over like waves from the numerous boats on display, all merge, as if to say: Life is not a thing but a process and a network. The individual and collective, the private and the social, the suffering and the celebration, all come together to weave the complex fabric of life.

For Siva Kumar, it is the “generous empathy” of spirit inherent in these sculptures that illuminates Radhakrishnan’s open road. “Once his travel companions swelled and their individuality was acknowledged, Radhakrishnan became both actor and observer… his hope, aspirations, and destiny became linked with that of others….”

“Tapasvi-Tarangini”, 2022 | Photo Credit: Juhi Saklani 

And so, the most impressive work in this oeuvre is the massive installation of 50 life-size pieces (25 Musuis and 25 Maiyas) called “The Crowd”, displayed on the lawns in front of the gallery. Each figure is caught at a different moment of movement; they may be pedestrians on a busy thoroughfare going to work or for errands. “The Crowd” invites us to step within and explore our own relation to the collective, which has the potential to be energising, empowering, as well as threatening.

A philosopher’s distance

In his most recent artistic gesture of openness, Radhakrishnan has become a student. He learnt the art of making paper from a young Santiniketan artist and, in a synergy of pulp with bronze, has created a whole new series of works in low relief. The introduction of his little bronze figurines into the liquid pulp lends an urgency to the themes he has been exploring for years: water, waves, boats on a journey, travellers across turbulent waters (“The One who Drowns, Survives”; “Musui and Maiya Become Water”).

“Musui and Maiya Become Water”, 2022 | Photo Credit: Ruma Choudhury

Exploring the self even as he explores the other, creating new forms of Musui and Maiya but also allowing them to recreate him, watching with a philosopher’s distance while allowing passions and concerns full play, and being committed to public art, as many photos in the exhibition show, “so that people can touch my sculpture, and children can play with them”, K.S. Radhakrishnan has given us art that can meaningfully call the open road, under free and endless skies, its home.

Juhi Saklani is a writer and photographer based in Delhi. She writes on cinema, culture, and travel.