Kamala Suraiyya was every inch an artist. Her words ran wild and free, so wild they ruffled the delicate moral veil of her readers at the time. Her paintings did that too. An exhibition she held in Kochi in 1994 had 22 works, majority of which were nudes.
She warned Cyril P Jacob, who organised her first and only exhibition in the city, about the nature of her works. ‘The Unfinished Women’, as the show was called, drew huge crowds. People who adored her poetry and novels were curious about Kamala Das’ painterliness. Her nudes were elegant creatures, basking in the glory of their very being. Though she didn’t call them self-portraits, she said every painting of hers was a reflection of herself.
A few works, however, in order to avoid controversy, were “clothed”. “It is my mind that I am laying bare. And they are asking me to clothe it,” she is believed to have said. The show that was held at the Woodlands Jewellery Hall from October 7 to 12, was inaugurated by then chief minister K Karunakaran.
Cyril, founder of art residency Palette People in Vagamon, feels art has played a huge role in bringing her back from a troubling phase. “Her husband had just passed away, she was low and often complained of illness. I believe that art brought her back to life.” After the exhibition, she started taking part in literary and social events, art demonstrations and even restarted her travels. She wanted to continue with her art, but failing eyesight prevented her.
Over a year, Madhavikutty (as she was popularly known) produced 22 paintings, 18 of which were sold out in the exhibition. It all began when her niece Anuradha Nalapat was holding her maiden art show. Madhavikutty inaugurated it and spoke of how her life had begun as an artist and how she had learned art in Calcutta. If only someone helped her, she would revive her interest, Madhavikutty had declared. Cyril offered help and she gladly accepted.
“That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between my family and chechi,” says Cyril. When he told her that he would need at least 20 to 25 paintings to hold an exhibition, Madhavikutty seemed intimidated. She wasn’t sure of being able to complete that many works in a year’s time. However, she delivered on her promise, working swiftly on one painting after another. “Her sense of colour and figures is that of a mature artist. Art would have been a special space for her. She painted from her memories, often using her fingers rather than the brush,” Cyril says.
Cyril has five of her works—three nudes, one of a purdah-clad girl and the other, of a mother and child.
Cyril and his wife Molly treasure the painting of the purdah-clad girl she had gifted them. It shows a girl, whose vibrant eyes shine through layers of white wrapped around her body and face. “It was done much before her conversion to Islam,” says Cyril. All her paintings were done in oil on canvas.
To acquaintances and friends such as Cyril, who knew her towards the end of her life, her quirks and inconsistencies almost came to define her. “She would speak for hours together; she loved to talk. And for us listeners, separating fact from fiction was next to impossible,” says Cyril. She would be talking about something mundane when she would suddenly lapse into the lyrical. After her conversion to Islam in 1999, she narrated events that led to her decision to embrace Islam, which seemed to Cyril whimsical.
She always lived by her own rules, loved to dress up, wear jewellery and enjoyed limelight. “I was only 14 when my father sent me to learn art when we were living in Calcutta. I fell in love with my instructor and my father stopped my art classes,” she had said.
To artist and founder of Orthic Creative Centre, T Kaladharan, she was an original—unpredictable, warm and full of life.
A few days after his wedding, he along with his new bride, visited Madhavikutty, a memory he still recalls. “She gifted us a nude painting done in ochre. My wife comes from a family that was not into painting, and I wonder what she, as a young woman, might have thought of the work.” According to Kaladharan, ochre was one of her favourite colours. She had once written about him at one of his children’s painting camps. “Those were the days when I used to wear masks and costumes to my camps, just to amuse children. She wrote about me in a column for The Economic Times,” he says. “The thing about her was that few people would dare to articulate their thoughts the way she did.”
Madhavikutty’s stories sometimes might have been broken threads that would seem puzzling to the average human brain, but to her, they were a seamless blend of imagination and reality. Her story lives on.