Nanappa Art Gallery in Kochi throbs with the memories of K.C.S. Paniker, who is being remembered through the works of his oldest living student, artist Namboothiri.
N.K.P. Muthu Koya barged into the principal’s office, a young man left with no choices in life. He had to get admission at the Madras College of Fine Arts. He had no money to go back to his home in Lakshadweep. But he was a day late for the five-day test. The principal turned to look at him and listened to Koya speak in broken English. “Speak in Malayalam, son,” said the principal. Koya realised this was K.C.S. Paniker, speaking in pure Ponnani Malayalam, and looking very nice. “That is unusual for an artist, to look that good,” laughs Koya, recounting this decades-old tale from the 1960s when he had first met his mentor. Koya joined artist Kaladharan at the Nanappa Art Gallery in Kochi on Sunday, to observe the 40th death anniversary of Paniker.
Namboothiri’s Last Supper
“He could have thrown me out, ridiculed me. But he stood there, saw the stub of a pencil poking out of my shirt pocket, and asked me, ‘are you going to draw with that for the test? He then offered me a charcoal pencil, took me to the second floor of a Victorian building and instructed someone to let me take the test. Two weeks later, he spoke to me again, to tell me I got in. If I hadn’t, I would have perished in Madras,” Koya says, sitting at the Nanappa Gallery a day later, surrounded by pictures made by another student of KCS — Namboothiri.
“You’d be surprised to hear the names of his students —Namboothiri, C.N. Karunakaran, K.V. Haridasan, and M.V. Devan, who was also my mentor,” says Kaladharan, who also celebrated the 11th year of his gallery, named after his dad. “The very first show in the gallery had one picture of K.C.S. Paniker, discussed by an art critic. And M.V. Devan told me it was also his birthday — January 15.” Devan passed away, so did Karunakaran and Haridasan. Akkitham Narayanan, another student, inaugurated on Sunday, an exhibition of pictures by Namboothiri.
A wedding card he drew by cutting and pasting several pieces together on display.
Namboothiri, the oldest living student of KCS, couldn’t make it to the gallery because of ill health, but he chose 33 of his pictures for the exhibition. “Most of these are illustrations for stories, for VKN, for Malayattoor Ramakrishnan and others. Some of these were used as wedding cards,” says Kaladharan. One of these wedding invitation pictures has a man tying the knot on a woman, and if you watch closely, you will find several pieces of paper cut and pasted together. “When something goes wrong, he takes another piece of paper, redraws it and attaches it to the original, like you have stories edited by editors,” laughs Kaladharan. The exhibition ends on Sunday.
