MINIATURE terracotta figurines idle by the wayside. I am tempted, but do not dare touch them. As I await Vivan Sundaram’s arrival, his artist-assistants, Arun and M Pravat, keep me company. They are responsible for producing this sculptural queue lining the entrance of Sundaram’s massive, warehouse-like studio in Aya Nagar on the border between Delhi and Gurugram. It is half past noon, but the April sun is still forgiving.
Intriguingly, each sculptural unit seems compelled to wait too, which is ironic, since the premise behind their production was to interpret the urgency of movement through the gesture of repetition. They are perhaps best described as ‘hybrid beings’, the result of a compositional mutation or mutilation, depending on where you stand on the purist spectrum. Their sources are two-fold, though the progenitor is the same—Ramkinkar Baij’s Santhal Family (1938) and Mill Call (1956). Santhal Family is considered the first instance of public Modernist sculpture in India. A life-size ensemble of a Santhal mother, father, and child, with their dog, is cemented in a moment of transit, as they carry their belongings in an act of re- location; an image that resonates only too familiarly all these decades later. Mill Call, too, is based on animation, friezing, as it does, a Santhal family rushing to work, the title suggestive of them having suddenly heard a siren announcing it’s time to be at the factory.
