Goodbye, fellow navigator

Ranjit Hoskote pays tribute to Vivan Sundaram (28 May 1943 – 29 March
2023)

He was named ‘Vivasvān’ at birth—either by his Sanskrit scholar father K V Kalyan

Sundaram, also our first Election Commissioner, or by his Sanskrit scholar
grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, also a yogi and pioneering photographer.
Vivasvān is a name of the Vedic sun god, embodiment of the light, not only of reason,
but also of insight and wisdom.

Hardly anybody remembers his given name today. As he grew up, its grandeur
disappeared into the brisk abbreviated form by which the artist was always known,
Vivan. Yet it remained present in the boundless energy that animated his artistic
imagination, always coursing from one medium, set of materials and art-historical
paradigm to another. In his curiosity about the world, about art and its complex
interrelationships with civic and cultural practices at large. In the dedication he
brought to approaching, as an archaeologist of culture, the biographies of his
grandfather and his extraordinary aunt, one of the pioneers of Indian modernism,
Amrita Sher-Gil—and, by extension, the historical moments they each inhabited,
with their specific interplay between Indian and European modernities, Indian and
European forms of the classical, their distinctive ways of fashioning their individual
selves even while retaining the right to intervene in the Eastern and Western
societies they inhabited, defying the protocols laid down in the name of empire,
colonialism, and race.

My career as a writer on art began with an essay I wrote on Vivan Sundaram’s

charcoal and collage series, ‘Long Night’, in December 1988 for The Times of India.
Over the years, we would meet at exhibitions, conferences, lectures, at his home, in
social contexts, our conversation flowing across the visual arts, cultural history,
literature, and psychology. We participated in the same protests and were signatories
to the same petitions, such as those in defence of M.F. Husain against his detractors;
were involved in organising demonstrations across the country, such as the ‘Save
Chandramohan’ campaign. When I confronted difficulties from some sectors of
officialdom while I was curating India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice
Biennale in 2011, Vivan clapped me on the back and said, “Don’t hesitate to let us
know if you need any help or support in dealing with these problems, we are old
campaigners.”

I reviewed or wrote essayistic responses to a number of his exhibitions, and, over the
decades, strong points of affinity emerged between his evolution as a visual artist and
mine as a poet. I responded viscerally to that compelling phase in his oeuvre when
his attention fastened itself on the detritus of the industrial, on broken propeller and
cast-off engine, the stain of machine oil and the sting of salt in the air. Always, I had
loved Vivan’s fascination for journeys, for the figures of the merchant and the
Orientalist, the mid-water denizen of banana boat and the tramp ship. I dedicated
two poems to him, one of which appeared in my 2001 volume, The Sleepwalker’s
Archive, and the other in my most recent book, Icelight (2023).

I always admired Vivan’s indomitable courage, his ability to engage with plural
versions of the historical record, his refusal to abdicate the ground of the political in
favour of more comfortable zones of retreat. Most wonderful of artists, he was also an
ever-vigilant citizen. He never abandoned hope, even in the face of bleak scenarios
and unpromising medical diagnoses.

In a letter Vivan wrote me on 12 September last year, he flagged the specific aspects
of his work that he wished me to address in a forthcoming book on his oeuvre: “Done
in different places and over different decades, these works are about water journeys
and ground shelter: exile and refuge; boat and shed. It signals insecure journeys and
provisional forms of shelter: precarious life. You may now guess why I thought of
you for this body of work. Might you be interested? Will you find time?” I was deeply
moved to realise that he had followed my journey, just as I had followed his. Yes,
Vivan, I will complete this essay for you; but it breaks my heart to know that you
won’t be here to read it. Goodbye, fellow navigator, fellow tracker of reefs and
currents and vexed routes across riverscapes and oceanways!

Bloodlines, Songlines
for Vivan Sundaram

They call to you to stop, the ancestral voices.

But the winds rip them to shreds.
Will you draw breath at the cove that cusps
the bay with the ocean? You turn your oars
that way, and I dare to hope
you will bend to bearings I understand.
But at the stone overhang,
you slip on a hood of monsoon clouds
and without leavetaking, set sudden sail
for cratered shores now cooled to quartz.

Trapezing, you laugh at the past’s dry signals,

disrupt yourself, tear off the mask
and test the blade till it must spring
or snap. For you no rest
till the mastery of chance has blessed
your will with a dancer’s balance.
You do not relent, but improvise,
mount cankered hills, cross rivers in spate.
Years later, I will find your tokens
somewhere as I dig.

The detritus of storm and fire:

in your dreams, I have seen the anchored ketch
smothered by an oil spill, its canvas sails
burning. I have seen factory stovepipes
tear ragged seams through the sky’s fabric
as derricks blaze on glycerine seas,
towns unfurl in napalm trails.
The dull stutter of guns has blocked
my numb ears, sand and gravel
dribble from my mouth.

I have watched my body emptied of all its events

and tossed into the propeller stream
with a single question, asked of the water:
Is home where we start from, or is home
where our journeys take us?

[from The Sleepwalker’s Archive (Bombay: Single File, 2001)]

Swimmer
for Vivan Sundaram

Ploughing through dark waters the back a bare island

fallen from raft toppled from overloaded dhow shoved off

sputtering launch
scarred by sun salt propeller
or lash of rigging come loose in a storm

Indorsare

To write on the back

with suture preserved

as uncommon weal
to seal with welt
conclude with clot

This pitted skin is its own beach

on which gulls take off and land

Where no one can sing in the dark

 this body is its own lighthouse

island quarantined
from its archipelago

In the dim light

four plaster casts
floating
ghosts of sculpture
until decades later cast in bronze

[from Icelight (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023)]