Ranbir Kaleka: Movements of Memory

THE WORD ‘BEAUTIFUL’ recurs frequently in artist Ranbir Kaleka’s vocabulary. He enunciates the adjective in the spirit of a declaration, usually with the stress on the first syllable, in an accent that reveals a harmonious synthesis of his Punjabi tongue with an inherited British twang, perhaps acquired during his time spent studying painting at the Royal College of Art, London in the mid-80s. We are sitting at the round dining table at his sun-lit home in New Delhi, when I realise his fondness for the word, which he uses to deliver an aesthetic judgement, always in a considered, meaningful way. He never applies it casually or callously. Like when he recounts to me the vivid nature of his memories from the age of one to five, he transports me back to the car he was in, accompanying his parents to his mother’s village near Hissai in Punjab where they would go once in two years. He remembers his father’s hands on the steering wheels, his rolled-up white shirt, and the beads of sweat on his palms. His father often would forget the exact coordinates to arrive at the village. He’d therefore interpret the smoke rising from distant fields as navigational signs. Suddenly, “like a magician had taken off a handkerchief, you saw a tiny little village with no streets,” Kaleka says, making no effort to disguise the wondrous sparkle in his eyes.

8 May 2019