Back Metro Plus Bangalore Chennai Coimbatore Delhi Hyderabad Kochi
Remembering Mookiah
| The passing away of TRP Mookiah leaves a void in the modern Indian art scene |
Sculpture as a career for modern artists in India, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, was never an option for various reasons. The medium is physically intensive, requires infrastructure of large open spaces and is economically not viable. Yet there were artists with burning desires to visualise their expression three dimensionally.
One such artist in Chennai who emerged in the late 1960s was T.R.P. Mookiah [1934-2009]. With his demise on June 25, the modern art scene in the South has lost a stalwart. Mookiah was unassuming and genial with a warm smile.
As a sculptor closely associated with the nativist agenda of the Madras Art Movement, he was inspired by D. P. Roy Chowdhary, S. Dhanapal and Pradosh Das Gupta. His works may not have had the desired visibility because his visual language was premised on folk vocabulary. Mookiah's oeuvre in retrospect occupies an important place within the urban landscape of Chennai.
Strong rural roots
An artist with strong roots in his rural cultural background, he interfaced with its sights and sounds to evolve his personal idiom. This tendency is not just peculiar to Mookiah but was a commonality with many other artists. But he struck a posture of difference by translating through sculpture, his culture with modern sensibility.
His works are not monumental, nor are they iconic heroic representations, but it was his genius that he was able to communicate it as both monumental and iconic. This is evident in his thematic approach. The iconicity emerges from his dominant engagement with festivals such as jallikattu, folk musicians, and dance forms such as karagattam.
Jallikattu happening during Pongal is a sport that pits bulls against humans - Mookiah portrayed the climactic bloody moment signifying synoptically the nature and character of the whole through vibrant gestures and theatrical movements. Metaphorically his monumentality is not premised on the criterion of size or popular heroism within collective consciousness but marking the drama of reality to create monumental vignettes of culture for the gaze of the urban audience who may never witness these sports.
Consciously Mookiah interpolated with his lived reality through these sculptures in the 1970s, reinforcing the call from critics and art historians within the nation to actively engage with their cultural milieu, thus investing his sculptures with monumental ethos and iconicity.
Yet these portrayals were not idealistic but tempered with raw primitive vigour and spontaenity that remained salient in his works. Be it the bull or the karagattam dancer or the horse rider, his forms exuded power and strength.
Tryst with terracotta
Mookiah's preferred mediums in sculpture were terracotta and bronze though he worked with different stones. He once remarked, "Talking about my terracottas, I must emphasise, because of the nature of the material, and the ease and freedom it offers, these objects afford an insight into cultural traits, namely the customary mode of expression. In this respect, they are probably of greater value than the impressive monuments in stone."
An alumnus of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, he completed his Diploma in Painting in 1956 and Diploma in Modelling in 1959. In the same year, he received a Cultural Scholarship and a Junior Fellowship from the Government of India. After serving as a designer in the Department of Ceramics in the same college, Mookiah became the Associate Lecturer and the Head of the college's Department of Textiles.
Mookiah was vice-president at the Association of Young Painters and Sculptors. He was also a member of the Executive Board of the South India Society of Painters in Chennai.
He won the National Award in 1995 for sculpture. The title of `Kalai Chemmal' was bestowed on him by the Lalit Kala Akademi (Tamil Nadu). His expert interweaving of traditional art forms with contemporary sensibility gave his works a sense of continuing vigour that inscribes modern Indian art.
In his final rest, Mookiah leaves behind an oeuvre of restless energy.
ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT
© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu