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’Art & Soul

A voice of his own

This book is about how I found myself spinning inside a wheel; how I found myself being spun by what I thought I was spinning. I have tried to paint colours I have not seen.

A voice of his own

Venkat Raman Singh Shyam’s work depicting a Kabir-panthi minstrel singing a song at the door of a hut: “Pothi parh parh jag muaa; pandit bhayaa na koye, dhai akkhar prem key, parhey so pandit hoye”; Plying a rickshaw, blind-folded; Dreams; more dreams; A Gond dancing



B.N. Goswamy

This book is about how I found myself spinning inside a wheel; how I found myself being spun by what I thought I was spinning. I have tried to paint colours I have not seen. I have tried to paint the shadow of life cast by me. …light shifting on a peacock’s neck, the iridescence of sunset on a tiger’s back, the green of the hills turning the sky into earth with clouds for treetops.

The breeze is blind. It keeps knocking me this way and that. The birds, hiding in the tiles, watch my wheel… The garden lizard steals the colour of the silk-cotton flower by looking. It witnesses what we do not see….

— Venkat Raman Singh Shyam

(as rendered into English by S. Anand)

The words, the formulations, are somewhat startling, imaginative; consistently poetic. But this is how, almost without pause, and certainly without much forethought, Venkat Shyam — in sarkari terms a ‘tribal’ artist from the Gondwana region — speaks. It is as if he had never left his little village in central India, for as he speaks, he says, ‘the moon perches on the branches of a tree to watch us sing and dance Karma’.  For theirs is the soil ‘possessed by ancient spirits, by gods and goddesses whom we invoke with sweet curses: bamboo torches fuelled by jatropha seeds bear witness…’

Venkat Shyam — surely this was not the name given to him at birth — tells his story in words and images in that uncommonly engaging, and visually stimulating, book, Finding My Way, which S. Anand — Venkat’s translator, interpreter, friend, admirer, pupil — published a few months back. The story is not told in linear fashion, for the telling can start anywhere, with unsettling sudden-ness, and then trail off, to be picked up what one can call years, decades, later. In it figure an unusually wide range of people: parents, first wife, first love, Pradhan of the village, friends named and unnamed, touts and tricksters and entrepreneurs, the painter Swaminathan — the ‘discoverer’ so to speak of Gond art as we know it today, ‘uncle’ Jangarh — the man whose name is synonymous with Gond art now, Japanese patrons and Parisian clients. 

But while the story is being told, Venkat can suddenly turn philosophical or, in the next moment, break into a song. Consider this in the context of his first move to that urban nightmare: Delhi. There was no work, he says; therefore, he began to ply a cycle rickshaw. “I pressed the earth down with my rickshaw, and the earth pressed me back. I held the earth with my rickshaw, the earth held me back. My rickshaw wheel moved against the giant earth-wheel. This movement produced the roti — round like the wheel — I needed to survive on this earth… At that point, the only revolution I saw was the turning of the rickshaw wheel around an axis. I became wheel, roti, earth. I survived to tell my circular tale.” And then, taking a different, somewhat saucy turn, he adds: “Having to draw a rickshaw to survive was my story back then. Today, I have to draw a rickshaw for this book to tell you my story. Today, to tell is to sell, and it appears you are buying my story. I’m still drawing a rickshaw, and you are still taking a ride on me.”

That said, Venkat produces a drawing: a stunning image of a blind-folded man plying a rickshaw, to wherever. With that image alone — thoughtful, innovative, moving as it is — he propels us, like a bird singing in the open air, into his world of art. There is something wild and uplifting about the freedom with which he draws and paints. No boundaries are respected, no rules obeyed. He does what he does. To travel with him into his world of art is like being taken on a journey that leads to nowhere, and to everywhere. Everyday occurrences are ‘illustrated’, achievements are mocked at, visual parallels to poetry are created. In his world hyenas can break through sheets of canvas, women can balance themselves on precarious branches, men grow long tails, and animals put on human masks. Snakes slither about, lizards jump, monkeys copulate, tigers hold umbrellas over elephants. In this surreal, irreverent world, however, there is also place for images of Swaminathan seated in front of a canvas and painting, and Hussain's horses gazing quizzically at everything.

Clearly, Venkat is a denizen of a different world of ideas and images. But he has been absorbing, and acquiring, the sights and sounds of this world too. Today he possesses a smart phone and a sophisticated laptop. But yesterday, when he travelled to Europe, he was not merely fascinated by objects and phenomena that initially looked magical —  like escalators, for instance; he was also looking at the art of these new places. “In Barcelona,” he says at one place, “when I got to see the works of Dali and Picasso, I felt their language was no different from the work we Adivasi artists did on walls and canvases. It was as if a little child was perceiving the world around them like an adult. The architecture and imagery of Gaudi, especially in the extravagant church of Sagrada Familia, reminded me of the scenes from madai, the fairs that happened in our villages.”

Surprises have no way of ending. And they become even more interesting when, in the midst of all that is being narrated and painted, Venkat would suddenly break into a song: “Ram Dulari maayeke gayi/khatiya hamari khari kar gayi.” Or, in the next moment, retreat into the world of thought that a Kabir doha contains: “Kabira kharaa bazaar mein, sab ki maange khair/ naa kaahu sey dosti, naa kaahu sey bair.”

Venkat Shyam and his work are almost indescribable. But there is a statement of his which comes close to capturing his essence: “The river knows where it began”, he says; “it knows where it ends. It must have found its course after much wandering….”

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