Kaleidoscope; Study for Kaleidoscope

"In 1961 while a student at Santiniketan, Ramachandran began frequenting the city of Calcutta. He was deeply affected by the socio-political situation in the city and his work was influenced by the poverty and human suffering he witnessed. Coming from Kerala where poverty was relative rather than absolute, the abject poverty he encountered on the streets of Calcutta was traumatic and beyond comprehension. Nearly fifteen years after Independence the post-famine and post-partition upheavals and conflicts were still tragically alive. With the continuing influx of refugees and migrants there were people everywhere - living on railway platforms, on the pavements, in refugee colonies - trying to find a foothold in the most dehumanising of circumstances. And for the next fifteen years it kept booming in his head and reverberating in his work." (R. Siva Kumar, Ramachandran: A Retrospective, New Delhi, 2003, pp. 69-70)

This painting, titled Kaleidoscope, is one of the artist's earliest works on canvas and was exhibited in his first one-man show at Kumar Gallery in Delhi. Extending Ramachandran's meditation on the human condition, "It is a collage of three motifs - a severed head, a headless body, and a drape - each separate and with a space of its own but complementary [...] The insensate body, the hollow shell, the anguished cry together evokes not only pain, emptiness and death but also the loss of human wholeness. They invoke man torn into parts, broken down into fragments." (R. Siva Kumar, New Delhi, pp. 86-87, 89)