A very different Bengaluru seems set to burst out of the frame, in artist Rumale Chennabasaviah’s (1910-1988) paintings.
Flowers are everywhere. Red bell tecomas droop over the boundary wall of M Chinnaswamy Stadium. Laburnums and jacarandas burst into golds and mauves by the side of the road.
There are barely any people in these views, and certainly no traffic. There are no IT parks or pubs yet.
More than 65 years after Chennabasaviah first started rendering Bangalore in his signature post-Impressionist swirls and vibrant brushstrokes, they preserve a city that is now fading even from memory.
“His paintings capture the ritusimhara or year-long sequential blooming of flowering trees that Bangalore was known for,” says Sanjay M Kabe, an electronics engineer who has managed Chennabasaviah’s art gallery, Rumale Art House, since 1999.
Last month, to mark the late artist’s 116th birth anniversary, the gallery released a book titled Rumale: The Artist in his Words, edited and translated from the Kannada by art critic and architect KS Srinivasa Murthy.
It brings together Chennabasaviah’s reflections on his childhood and his art, the Indian freedom movement, politics and nation-building, via autobiographical notes, interviews and speeches, as well as through essays by Murthy, Kabe and Kabe’s sister Shabala Nadkarni, an architect.
Now in their 60s, Kabe and Nadkarni had unique access to the artist. They knew him as children. He was a friend of their father, social worker Madhav Govind Kabe, and a fatherly figure to them, Kabe says.
HUE BEGINNINGS
Born in 1910, Chennabasaviah grew up in a wealthy family that ran a jewellery business on the outskirts of Bangalore. His intricate art drew attention even in school and, as a young man, he enrolled at Bangalore’s Kalamandira School of Arts, and then at the Chamarajendra Technical Institute in Mysore.
He was focused on oil paintings and watercolours, when Mahatma Gandhi called on the youth to join the freedom struggle, in 1930. As a 20-something-year-old satyagrahi, he met Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, among other leaders; was arrested; and would later spend nearly a year in jail.
After independence, he spent 12 years as a grassroots leader with the Congress Seva Dal.
He also served as a member of the Mysore state legislative council from 1952 to 1960. And as editor of the Kannada daily Thaayi Naadu (Motherland).
Through these years, he rarely painted.
It was only in the early 1960s, after quitting politics at the age of 52, that he truly began his career as an artist. “He was a karma yogi. He believed, whatever he was doing, he had to give it all his heart,” Kabe says.
BRUSH WITH THE ELEMENTS
Once he began painting, art consumed Chennabasaviah. He went around the city, and across Karnataka (as the state of Mysore was renamed in 1973), painting for hours in the open.
He was a plein air artist; once he had picked an outdoor spot, he would return at the same time, every day, to paint it. In this way, he captured Cubbon Park; a corner of the Vidhan Soudha; the high court; the Jog Falls; and various houses and streets, temples and churches.
He mixed colours on the paper or canvas, and not on a palette, and this was a bit like playing chess, Kabe says. One wrong shade, or a slightly drippy mix, and the whole work could go to waste.
The upside of painting like this is that his works throb with life.
In Play of Light, High Court, Bangalore (1960), one can almost hear the trees sway against the backdrop of the red walls of the court complex.
His 1980 work, Fountains, Kanteerva Stadium, is a riot of colour, movement and fluidity, arcs of white water against a sky and wall of foliage in purples, pinks and blues.
“For him, nature was not simply something to be observed and reproduced; it was something to commune with,” says Kabe. “So, Bengaluru, which in those days was a sleepy city filled with flowering trees as a result of centuries of royal patronage, was his ideal canvas.”
His love for the city and state, and his remarkable art, drew attention and affection.
He won the Mysore Dasara Award, the prestigious State Lalitakala Academy Award and the Rajyotsava Award, which is the second-highest civilian honour awarded by the Karnataka government.
In a letter dated 1968, Vinayaka Krishna Gokak, the scholar, writer and former vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, calls Chennabasaviah the “painter-laureate of the trees and flowers and rivers and mountains of India”. “He gives it a touch of magic which transforms it into fairy-land. He… brings to light many hidden beauties,” he wrote.
FADE TO GREY
He lived long enough to see the city change.
In canvases he painted in the ’60s and ’70s, we see a Bangalore all but engulfed in lush trees and explosions of flowers. These begin to dwindle from the mid-1980s, and concrete begins to creep increasingly into the frame.
“Rumaleji was not consciously documenting Bengaluru for posterity. His paintings emerged from an instinctive, almost childlike love of the natural world,” Kabe says. “But seen today, they seem to communicate the critical importance of this natural life we have taken for granted and are now losing.”
Chennabasaviah painted to the end. He slipped into a coma and died following a road accident in Lalbagh, in 1988. He had gone to the park to study a tree in blossom.
(So, how does the city of Bengaluru change in his frames? Click here for a quick slideshow.)
