Prabhakaran | Image courtesy: Kabita Mukhopadhyay
Prabhakaran was heir to a seamless life lived in art. His artistic career embraced the age that began from late 1980s, which was redolent of artistic beliefs and resistance suffused with individual and political dimensions. This period was scarred by the tensions triggered by the internalised conflicts caused by the Emergency, unleashing an unprecedented upheaval in the Indian socio-cultural sphere, which continued unabated. The shock generated by that dark era found creative resonance through artistic intervention, which was reflected as street plays and public rendering of protest poetry.
More than the unraveling of his artistic identity in a distant future, Prabhakaran attached greater importance to collective actions as part of social resistance. He experienced anxiety about painting, his chosen mode of expression. As with the like-minded, he also faced the problems of overcoming monetary hardship as well as the challenge of creative expression. Without descending into inertia, he naturally discovered the need to disruptively recreate academic conceptions of art learning.
This was caused in part by his aversion to the exaltation of the amorphous category of ‘intellectualism.’ Prabhakaran was quite active to the extent he could. This is exemplified by the three major exhibitions with Baroda as hub. The subsequent ones held in association with Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors in 1989 in Kozhikode and in Thrissur in 1990 were historically significant. In between, he also participated in the landmark exhibition of contemporary Indian artists held in Geneva.
Prabhakaran also participated in national camps with acclaimed artists like Bhupen Kakkar, Sudhir Patwardhan, Manu Karekh, R B Bhaskar and S G Vasudev. The discussions, exhibitions and seminars organised by this radical grouping were animated by an incandescent social imagination shunning individualism. This school resisted the mechanical attitude of certain types of mathematical, tantric and ultra-materialistic approaches. They imparted a modern liveliness to figurative expression. Sculptors and painters like K P Krishnakumar, Raghunath, K M Madhusudhanan, P K Harindran, Pushkin, Valsaraj and Alex Mathew were its main exponents.
Prabhakaran was on a solitary quest in a crowd. The hallmarks of his art was the diversity of the life he experienced. Apart from being a painter, he assimilated the influences of the whole palette of arts – music, literature, cinema, history and similar emanations of culture, which influenced his artistic orientation. Through strenuous effort he let his mind travel untrammeled which make for the extraordinary visual treats that his paintings confer on the viewer. They proclaim a credo that nothing is alien to his artistic sensibility.
Was Prabhakaran an introvert? While he was laconic and shy when talking about his life and works, he would become emotional articulation personified in matters of socio-cultural import.
I like to drive chariots
Along uneven paths
by the poet Edasseri were his favorite lines, and he lived in that spirit. Both art and life he shared equally with Kabita Mukhopadhyay, bound as they were by brush strokes.
These words should do for now, while remembering Prabhakaran.
{The original Malayalam article was published in the week-end supplement of Mathrubhumi daily dated March 21, 2021}
