Barely known histories of Indian art lend colour to this exhibition

The two artists paired in this exhibition, Life in the Deep,  K. Ramanujam and Kaushik Chakravartty, have much in common, as even a brief glance at their biographies shows. They were near-contemporaries: Ramanujam was born in 1940 in Madras (now Chennai) and Kaushik in 1946 in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Both artists attended, in their formative years, prestigious schools of arts and crafts in their respective cities. Each had to live with, contend with, a disability — Kaushik was hard of hearing and Ramanujam suffered from schizophrenia and depression; as a result of this, each artist worked in relative isolation. And both of them died at a tragically young age. Ramanujam took his own life in 1973 and Kaushik died in a car crash in Tanzania in 1975 — ages 33 and 29.

Both artists seek to erase a sense of deep space in their paintings by arranging all elements of the composition as foreground and into immediate view. And, from a historical perspective, neither of them is easy to assimilate into a “school”.

Their perspectives did not emerge through a formal movement or a place. Instead, their work is driven by fable, fantasy and, in the case of Ramanujam, a very personal iconography. If all art is, to some degree, a form of catharsis, and a revelation or outpouring of an inner emotional reservoir, this is doubly true of Kaushik and Ramanujam.

Needless to say, any meaningful juxtaposition will disclose distances as well as conjunctions. Kaushik was born into an upper-middle-class milieu, and his family had friends who were artists—Pradosh Dasgupta and Paritosh Sen.

 Without a school leaving certificate, he gained entry to the Government College of Art & Craft in Calcutta, where students with disabilities were encouraged to study craft. Kaushik, however, was determined to study art. He was accepted into the art department, where he spent five years, eventually passing with distinction in 1964.

Kaushik left India in 1969 for Paris on a French government scholarship. He studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Art and also attended the legendary workshop of Stanley William Hayter, Atelier 17. Whilst in Europe, the opportunity to visit art museums opened up a new world for him. He became interested in Chinese and  Japanese art. His works combine Asian traditions —painting in the ink and scroll format, for example—with American ones. Like the earlier generation of American abstract expressionists and colour field painters, Kaushik was concerned with the forms and energies latent in nature.

Ramanujam was born into a poor Brahmin family. He had a speech impediment and was physically stunted in growth. His brothers scorned him, he was practically homeless and penniless at times. But, since he had shown an interest in drawing at a young age— he was a failure at school— his mother took him to the School of Arts and Crafts in Madras. At this institution, K. C. S. Paniker, at that time the Principal, became something of a mentor to this strange-seeming, reclusive and extraordinarily talented young man. He soon became proficient at drawing and painting and began to “churn out pictures in an almost continuous stream”.

Ramanujam is well-known for his detailed pen and ink drawings that drew upon the singular world of his imagination. Big birds with outstretched wings and enormous serpents based on mythical nagas appear in his dreamlike compositions. Often, he would appear in these drawings, always impeccably dressed with a hat and a cigarette in hand, often astride winged figures floating through an imaginary landscape. The settings were filled with pillars and domes he encountered in reproductions of Venice, adorning them with the embellishments of more familiar South Indian temple architecture.  Life in the Deep demonstrates, despite obstacles (and in part because of them), both artists succeeded in creating unique and enduring art—a testament to resilience as well as survival.

The show remains on view till 5 November at Jhaveri Contemporary art gallery in Mumbai