Ratheesh T. Motherland.Oil on canvas. 183 cms x 214 cms. 2007.

The Empire of the Dead: A Potent Vision from Kerala

The characters in Ratheesh T’s hauntingly detailed landscapes are caught in a strange limbo, suggests Gieve Patel as he traces their movements and investigates their actions.

THE GEOGRAPHICAL SOURCE OF THE IMAGERY IN RATHEESH T’S PAINTINGS IS undoubtedly Kerala, the lush green vegetation of this tropical state on the south-western coast of India, and the dark complexion of its people. A second look reveals that that is not what the paintings are really about. Kerala is certainly present here, but the true location of these works is elusive. One would be misled if one were to look out too literally for cartographic pointers.

In an illuminating interview with Manoj Vyloor (in the catalogue for Moving Earth,Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, December 2007 – January 2008), Ratheesh gives the people who inhabit his canvases a precise sociological placing: they are dispossessed villagers. He says, “They are people I came across in my childhood through to my current life. They are mostly natives of my village and the places around...These people are tough and are day-wage earners who battle for survival and self-sustenance. They are largely ignorant of outside worlds...To me they are the natives oppressed by urbanization and related issues of the time...set aside from progressive urban tendencies due mainly to their own rigidities and ignorance...I observe them deeply...and this close view creates an inability to differentiate and classify their qualities into good or bad, beautiful or ugly.”

Assuredly, they are all these things. In the actuality of the paintings, however, it seems
to me that they are more, or shall we say less, than that. Though most of these people appear to be awake, with wide open eyes, they nevertheless emanate a feeling of being beyond touch, in the way a dead body that has been prepared for its final disposal is traditionally required not to be touched any more. And if, possibly, these people do belong to this limbo, what geographically speaking, would be the land they inhabit? How would it help then to try naming such a land on an atlas?

In the painting Motherland (2007), Ratheesh identifies the old woman swimming in the river beneath the massive blood-drenched leaf as someone from his village, someone personally known to him. This river could also be a grassy field, and she would then be crawling, not swimming. But my first viewing of the image as river is compelling, and I will hold to that. Now, if he says she is personally known to him, she is surely not known to him in the form in which she appears in the painting, where she carries a scarab’s or some other insect’s carapace as part of her own trunk. I am tempted to read this partial metamorphosis as a transitional state of being, an evanescent moment immediately after death. And how should we not think of death when so much of the rest of the painting is depicting scenes of violent dying? Considering also that she is swimming in a river which is below the surface of things, a nether river, the route to a final destination after death in so many mythologies, we would be justified in believing that this is no mere dispossessed villager. She is more complex in her given stateof being, but she is also, from another point of view, a lesser being than those who confidently inhabit the chambers of the living.

Ratheesh’s paintings do not fall into a category which I may call the ‘I and My Village’ kind of work, though an occasional figure is indeed close to a self-portrait, and Ratheesh’s village is, as he affirms, present here. His whole venture far outstrips notions of genre. It is bigger, broader, inclusive of contemplations that genre works would not be able to accommodate.

Ratheesh escapes genre in many ways – most obviously, humans depicted are not indulging in ‘everyday life’ activities. Or if they are, there are also other unexplainable things happening on the side. In Eagles (Hill 1) (2006), a middle-aged woman is chopping firewood, but her gaze has moved away from the activity towards a man who is quietly clipping her toenails with a handy nail-clipper, while he spews butterflies from his own mouth and holds a full-blown rose securely between his big and second toe. All this as though they were the most normal of things to be doing. Also, this activity is being observed by another middle-aged woman (she could also be the same woman at another location in the painting) who is sitting on her bed in the interior of a room and glaring at this man, and at the same time whiling away the moment in a comfortably cross-legged posture. Again, however, her normal ‘everyday’ posture and activity is contradicted by the fierce gaze through the bars of her window of a group of staring eagles. And there is a wheelchair behind her bed, hinting at the possibility of her being disabled.

Both the horizon and the foreground of the painting offer us things to wonder about. The
uppermost part of the painting is crowded by a seemingly endless upsurge of flying eagles, with hardly a strip of sky above them. We do not know from where these eagles rise, we see only an explosion of winged creatures and the range of their sizes suggests that they may have their source in some distant and concealed eyrie that we cannot view. The sheer number of these creatures hides the source place from us. And we could
almost miss out on seeing all this turbulent activity because the rest of the painting clamours equally for our attention, including a forest of pale, tangled branches, curved and contorted, immediately below the flying eagles. At the lower margin of the painting is a strip of gouged out earth revealing three crypts, with a foreshortened human skeleton formally laid out in each crypt. The rose bush in the centre of this strip could be said to be taking its nourishment from this ancestral graveyard.

We could now attempt making some connections. The eagle, majestic bird of prey, is fanning out in large numbers from its concealed nesting place, to seek out something from a human habitation. What would it be seeking if not dead flesh, its staple diet? And yet, none of the three figures in the dramatic central horizontal of the painting is obviously dead. Only the eagles’ instinct to go after them confirms for me my original, visceral conviction about the proximity of death. These people are either on a kind of death row, or have already passed into limbo after death. Their pretence of being engaged in so-called everyday activity is seen to be just that, a pretence used perhaps by themselves as a pathetic and desperate attempt to deny their actual absence from life. Also, their activities are patently purposeless, as though they have forgotten what useful activity might mean. And the ancestral graveyard opening out under them clearly suggests how close in space and time they are to the moment of final departure.

Is this painting, then, horribly depressing, a kind of charnel house releasing the stench of death? No, it is a delightful painting, where each detail is worked on with incredible enjoyment and control. There can be no depression where there is so much masterfulness. It is in this same seemingly paradoxical way that Grunewald’s tortured Christs are a visual feast.