FROM MARGINS TO THE MIDDLE PATH

When Buddhas wheel started turning

It was then that the fourth colour

On India’s tricolor emerged as never before

And the sound of shoeless feet

Was heard as music

Like never before.

                                      Benoy.P.J.

One of Raju Patel's basic innovations in the set of paintings exhibited here is his strategy of beginning with a tonally altered and slightly muddied set of basic colours. It is, one could say, the sign of the bhoomi sparsa that he has had, as a luminal being who has had occasion to experience life on an other plane. The yellow, the red, the blue or green that he work with are no more the same as those that are available readily on a European colour card. Neither are the people or objects that he depict in any way ‘fine’. But to him their everyday lives and tribulations  are worthy of a micro level attention and contemplation and a splendid source of spiritual and material plenitude that comes from a long tradition of joyous and godly existence. From his early days in Baroda, his works have exhibited a micro level consciousness about otherness and its earthly presence. As a person who has a slightly different body structure, and a slightly removed social address, he was able to fabulate these perceived distances from a benignly earthly and unadulterated spiritual position, without undue greediness and a simplicity that came from the heart of darkness. The art seldom was pretensive or high brow in its demeanour, and always exhibited the subtle awareness that it would have to shave of its brow if it did so. This did not come from a lack of training, skill or academic know how, but from a heightened consciousness that the ‘genealogy’ of the visual was not one that traced its ‘lineage’ through art works connected to one another, but that found its material from the entire universe of visual repertory of the infinite which it held with a certain wonder and humility. It refused to accept for truth the secondary status that the canons would confer it, because it was connected to the underground flows of a thousand rivers, and the flights and elevations of the hawks eye. It knew the worldly crawl of a snake as well as its many dances, because it had travelled its distances with its belly against the earth. The ‘Naga’ and the ‘naka’ ( Paradise) were never entirely separated for him, because he also was connected by streams of blood to people everywhere. In the early works one would come across a pair of shoes that was made specially for him, with erotically inserted laces and movements that happened beneath the surface, something that was easily visible for another of his kind, but almost invisible for the gaze of pomp. In it there was a litany for the differently- enabled, a noble disregard for the hegemonic  and condescendingly upturned noses of contemporary art. There was also a sense of the non representational, because it refused to fall in with the taboos both on abstraction and representation. The kid as well as the old woman has a presence in it, and it was aware of its many absences, calling them forth elsewhere, wherever and whenever it was necessary. A little object like a small hand pump for spraying poison on mosquitos or bed bugs was significant enough for it, not because of some quest for a false pretense of microcosmic non aggression which brahminical purism tried to put in place, but due to a cosmic sense of interconnectedness, and brotherhood. No little being was to be entirely eradicated to facilitate for human  medical touchiness, for the world had always had a larger logic and everything in it had its own worth. The skin was dark and brown in the sun, except in those who had succumbed to the pathological logic of dis-ease. The works have a certain ease and the people, a robust life that the inquisitive glasses and anal- eyes of materialist history couldn’t meet, and ears in which the wind played its tune, and the turning of Buddhas wheel , the many bodhisatwas, and the womanly presences of earth and nature that embraced his creed. There  was also a hand on the shoulder of the unseen that a dog on leash would fail to smell. The scooterist’s  noisy and smokey  ride was very well there, as well as its ‘civilizational’ jargon, and its amnesias, there for a careful observer to perceive. One could see that the woman was carrying a bag in each hand, similar in its posture to V.V. Vinu’s self portrait with plastic bags, or to a Raghunathan’s  pompous and sarcastic retort to it. It held both its material and human presence with a certain respect and regard, and saw through the avante -garde gambit of a high brow sarcasm directed at the commons. As an academically trained artist from a tribal background, Raju bhai could easily see through the prescriptive formulas that were attempting to stifle the art of a tribal, and could still establish a certain connection to the painting of Jangar Singh or Anand Singh Shyam, where it painted an aircraft or a car around which birds or semi -beings were left to linger. The stylistic ‘realism’ of the painting  was a thin veneer within which the kineticism of other lives was expressing itself, shrouded in a certain mystery. A Ramesh Tekam would probably recognize in it certain continuities and distinctions, though not the ones that a Bourdeiu’s  “Distinctions”  would point out. You may not find in it Buribhai’s  , Nankhusia Vyam’s , Ramsingh Urveti’s, jaydev Baghel’s  or RajKumar’s animals but still could perceive the vast emptinesses that have been left without detail by a cruel and segregating urbanism, which have undertaken to relegate the tribal to a life on the street side and in the slums, or turned them into victims of ‘criminal’ nomenclatures, devalued and humiliated, as in an ‘Uchalya’, which Raju bhai in his work undertakes to give details to. Being aware of the ‘scales’ that human beings were judged by in Brahminism, by taking recourse to an image from the movie ‘Freaks’, Rajubhai  alludes subtly to the ‘ritual status’ of dalits in the Purusha sukta (not obviously written by some woman) and Manu’s memories  which somehow had legalized the violence of the urban pot holes (obviously housed by certain ‘allegators’  which some ‘Pomo’ Pynchon’s have dreaded, but which were visible to ‘The man who lived Underground’).  It could also carry the memories of a prolific Dasharath, albeit in a certain realism, who maybe carrying a tiffin somewhere in the background. Somewhere in them we can find an opening to the contemporaneity of the middle path, refusing the machismo of futurism, racism  and Nazism and the rotten puritanism of the feudatory classes.

BENOY .P.J