Samskara Author Mimlu Sen on artist Akkitham Narayanan A grave, small and strong man with the potbelly of Ganesha. Akkitham Narayanan reminds me of the story of the competition set by the goddess Durga between her two sons, Ganesha and Kartik, to see who was quicker. Kartik was off in a flash and circled the world in a fraction of a second and came to his mother’s side. Ganesha was already there. Kartik had circled the earth whereas Ganesha, astute in the psychology of his mother, circled round his mother. He was the winner, of course. Imperturbable and kindly, tranquil, mocking, paternal, a deep rumble of a rare raga on his lips, only his tiger eyes blazing from behind his glasses belying this apparent calm. Born in the town of Kumaranallur in Kerala in 1939 into an illustrious family of Namboodiris, he studied in the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Madras (now Chennai) and received a scholarship from the Government of India. He first went to France on a French government scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1967. Narayan (as we call him) first met Sachiko, a Japanese pianist, at a summer camp in 1969 and married her. Like Ganesha, he got the right idea and has been circling around Sachiko ever since. This union provided the tripartite soil on which his art has been nourished for the past four decades — the union of ancient India with modern Japan, nurtured in the republican soil of France; the encounter of Kalaripayattu flexibility with the lightning flash vanaprastha art of the samurai of the indigo seas of Hokusai, with the burnished earthy hues of his native Kerala, albeit set against the cubist skies over Paris. His latest exhibition of masterly paintings entitled Samskara, a feast for the eyes, was held at the Indigo Blue Art Gallery in Singapore from 8 October to 8 November 2009; it showed at Art Consult in New Delhi till 23 December. In his own words in the brochure of this exhibition: “In Sanskrit the word samskara literally means ‘making perfect’ or ‘refining’ and so a samskara is a ceremony of refinement, which is to say, refining or raising an individual beyond his or her mere physical existence and marking a higher spiritual existence.” Christina Burrus, writer and art curator, says: “The mixture of his Indian roots and French culture is a hallmark of Akkitham’s artistic expression. His work reflects his search for the divine, for freedom and for immortality, which finds expression in simple geometrical, abstract, clear forms, the geographical reconciliation of ancestral Indian tradition with an aesthetic born of French cubism. The warm shimmering tones of his paintings, sometimes highlighted discreetly with gold, communicate the mystery of an age-old civilisation. Narayan invites us, in the silence of meditation, to a state of inner peace, in a spirit of universality.” Let me digress to recount an anecdote about such a ceremony of refinement. Sometimes I’ve found that looking at someone in relation to contrasted personalities can tell more than descriptions about the person, as an alaap can tell more about the main musical theme because of the sheer gravitational pull of an energy base. Paban and I were driving back to Paris one autumn day after a concert with Tox, an ace jazz drummer, in his battered old Peugeot. He was part of a floating circle of musicians and artist friends linked by nothing but a simple love of community and music, painting and sharing food. Tox suddenly braked and stopped in front of a field of giant, ripe pumpkins. He strode into the fields, looking like a modern Moses with his long flowing white beard and locks topped by a Stetson hat. He took a sharp Swiss knife out of his long cowboy boots and hacked off a large pumpkin of about 15 kilos from its roots and put it in the car, laughing at his theft. Those rich French farmers won’t miss a pumpkin, he told us. When we reached our apartment, he stopped the car and took out the pumpkin, cut it neatly and swiftly in half, left us standing with half a huge pumpkin in our hands as he drove off, grinning from ear to ear. Now Paban and I could never eat so much pumpkin between the two of us. So, in our turn, we cut the pumpkin in half and carried it to Akkitham who lived around the corner from us. A day or two later, Akkitham called us. “I have prepared something for you, so please come and get it.” He gave us a gift wrapped in a piece of aluminium foil. It was a divine halwa made from the pumpkin, cooked in pure ghee, garnished with nuts, no sugar added, sweet just from the pumpkin, unctuous and nourishing, the taste of which lingers in my mouth still. Akkitham’s paintings are similar. Over the years I’ve known him, they have grown on me little by little, till they have become an indelible intrinsic part of my world. The Samskara paintings are oils on canvas — untitled, painted between 2007 and 2009. Paintings whose stretches of sombre earthy colours, rectangles and recurring triangles of charcoal, indigo, deep russets, bottle green and ochre softened by ribbons of white enclose each other in a labyrinthine spiral. The forms bind each other, clasp each other and yet lightly turn away from each other. These forms manifested themselves to him early in life, endowed him with a clear vision of his own point in space and, since his early days, he sticks to his recurring forms with simplicity and single-mindedness. His paintings are meditative, devotional, in the manner of tankha, though post-modern; deconstructed and reconstructed. A painter sharing his deepest inner vision generously, patiently, over and over again, calming us, opening our intelligence. It’s hard for me to separate the paintings of Narayan from the music in which they were engendered, melodies and rhythms surround his daily life, and the lingering presence of a Japanese heart in his hearth, Sachiko — and their brilliant, sensitive son Agni — at 7 rue Ricaut in the 13th arrondisement of Paris. Sachiko, whose temperance and delicacy, whose childlike laughter floats around us, reasons with him. Narayan has again taken up some impossible, cussed, paternal Namboodiri posture about this or that, usually to do with the vapidity of the younger generation (this includes me and Paban), leaning over his paint-stained rough working table. Sachiko fills our cups reassuringly with brown rice tea, Agni playing the cello in the background. The honey-coloured pinewood shelves are neatly stacked with much leafed through books, walls are filled with paintings and photographs, icons of his adoration, a faint odour of rasam stews in the kitchen, a curl of smoke like the chromosomic, elliptical forms of light radiating, rising in the middle of his canvases, in between perfectly symmetrical forms, evading the huge charcoal planes and triangular wedges, bursting with life, stuffed with spirit. Narayan smiles gently as Agni teases his mother, while Narayan trundles about contentedly, sniffing his rasam and humming a deep-throated bhairavi that rumbles around us like a comforting amniotic. An inseparable trio. Mimlu Sen is an author, musician, and translator. She lives in Paris Featured in Harmony Magazine January 2010