Artists’ Village as Counter-Infrastructure? KCS Paniker, Cholamandal, and Placemaking
On the main Chennai–Mahabalipuram road, driving south from Chennai, keep an eye out for the signs proclaiming “Cholamandal Artists’ Village” on the eastern side of the road. Turning there, you’ll enter the shade of the remnants of a group of trees, most prominently a massive banyan that anchors the site and shelters sculptures and benches tucked into its tap roots. A gallery, two houses for visiting artists, a small workshop space, and an outdoor theater are located nearby, punctuated by outdoor sculptures made and installed by generations of artists—those who made homes there and those visiting from afar. Walking through one can hear the pounding of hammer on metal, the scraping of canvas frames being moved, and the greetings between neighbors. You might notice an elaborate relief decoration on a gate, an open courtyard filled with materials for sculpture, a porch sheltering an easel, or a sketching pad abandoned on a chair. The road winds through tamarind trees and palms, past stray dogs and the occasional cow or goat, eventually leading to the sea (Figures 1, 2. 3, 4).
Figure 1. Undated photograph of the entrance to Cholamandal, courtesy Nandagopal family.
Figure 2. Banyan tree at Cholamandal entrance, with sculpture in foreground by Irish artist Niall Walsh (Head, 1988-90, granite), photograph by the author.
Figure 3. Gallery entrance as it appears today, after renovation by Shilpa Architects in 2012.
Figure 4. Undated photograph of some of the early buildings at Cholamandal, courtesy Nandagopal family.
This “village” was the creation of a group of artists in 1966, a moment when the road was much less trafficked, when they could see the sea from the new houses they built in the neighborhood (Figures 5, 6, 7). These artists were led by KCS Paniker, who was Principal of the Madras School of Art at the time. He had watched for years as his promising art students were forced to take up non-art world jobs, a problem both then and now. And so Paniker sought to leverage the commercial potential of crafts like batik, metalwork, wood carvings, and jewelry to gather funds to build a physical and community space that would enable them to pursue the art they were passionate about: painting, printmaking, and sculpture (Figure 8). At a time when commercial fine art galleries were few and far between, finding an audience and a market for contemporary art was difficult, if not impossible. Thus, in seeking to help his students and find a space for artists to thrive, the founding of Cholamandal Artists’ Village created a piece of art world infrastructure in a context where a shared space for discussion, criticism, debate, and creativity was largely absent.[1]
Figure 5. Artists at Cholamandal in its early years (Paniker top row, third from left), courtesy Nandagopal family.
Figure 6. Artists in discussion on the beach (D. Venkatapathy and M. Senathipathi standing), undated, unattributed photograph, from Josef James, Cholamandal: An Artists’ Village, courtesy James family.
Figure 7. Paniker with artists at Cholamandal during construction, courtesy Nandagopal family. Pictured: bottom step, left to right: unknown, Peter, Paniker; middle step, left to right: M.V. Devan and ACK Raja; top: Ramanujam
Figure 8. Paniker looking at batik samples, August 1965, courtesy Nandagopal family.
Over the next few decades, Cholamandal achieved much of the vision that Paniker had in mind for it. Artists purchased or helped to purchase small plots of land, built homes and studios in community with one another, carved out shared performance, discussion, and exhibition spaces—including a gallery—and continued to support themselves with craft sales via domestic and international wholesalers and selling directly to the travelers on the main road headed to tourist destinations to the south. Visiting artists from other regions of India and from around the world started to stay for weeks or months, making work alongside and with colleagues who lived in the Village (Figures 9 and 10).
Figure 9. Sketch by S.G. Vasudev from c. 1968 brochure, sketch c. 1966, copyright S.G. Vasudev, with permission of the artist.
Figure 10. Front of a brochure about Cholamandal, published c. 1968.
Cholamandal still exists today, although many of the founding artists have died, and amid the transformation of suburban Chennai, with new, non-artist owners taking over the homes the artists built, the “artist” element of the village has faded somewhat. Still, some of their sons and daughters became artists themselves, others work to preserve the legacies of their parents and grandparents, and new voices come to carry on the spirit of the community. As a result, many of the shared spaces remain, including the gallery, and the community continues to find ways to share their work and archive their pasts.
Cholamandal is an “infrastructure” in its physical presence and its shared community vision, certainly. But I have also begun to consider what it would mean to think about the Village as a “counter-infrastructure,” one that was founded precisely to work against the grain of larger capital and political forces in play in the mid-1960s. Countering, to be clear, does not erase infrastructure—the Artists’ Village was not anti-infrastructural—it absolutely constituted a network of people and a built environment, all of which was dependent on larger flows of capital and people in the region. But it carved out a place for countering the prevailing norms in a region around Madras (now Chennai) which focused primarily on performing arts and music, and it created of a space of belonging for a group of people who came from diverse linguistic and regional communities. The counter-infrastructure at Cholamandal isn’t just about the walls of the gallery or the visiting artists’ housing or the outdoor amphitheater (following Karin Zitzewitz’s work). The act of placemaking as counter-infrastructure also, in this case, seeps into and shapes the artworks that emerge from the built environment: making a place for art in the physical world finds form in the works of Paniker and his contemporaries.
“The counter-infrastructure at Cholamandal isn’t just about the walls of the gallery or the visiting artists’ housing or the outdoor amphitheater . . . The act of placemaking as counter-infrastructure also, in this case, seeps into and shapes the artworks that emerge from the built environment.”
Embracing Maximal Language Diversity
Cholamandal was founded in 1966, amid a deeply felt and often violent anti-Hindi, pro-Tamil protest movements that shook the country during this decade. A major reorganization of India’s states on linguistic lines took place in the 1950s, splitting off the northern Telugu-speaking portion of Madras State to form the state of Andhra Pradesh. These national-level political reorganizations meant a consolidation of the southern portion of Madras State around a majority (although not entirely) Tamil-speaking population.
In one culminating political flash in 1964, a man named Chinnasami set himself on fire shouting “Death to Hindi! May Tamil flourish!” He was followed by five others in the following year. Two years after Chinnasami’s suicide, amid these violent clashes and difficult political battles, Cholamandal was established. On one level, this is just correlation or coincidence, and my conversations with those who remember Cholamandal’s early years either don’t include or actively refuse this context. Nonetheless, the major political focus of the decade leading up to Cholamandal’s founding, extending to the renaming of the state as Tamil Nadu, or land of the Tamils, in 1969, involved ethnic-linguistic battle lines, ones inflected with a deeply felt devotional movement and overwritten with caste politics.
As someone born in Coimbatore to a Keralan Malayali family, who spoke Malayalam, Tamil, and English, surrounded by artists from across southern India who themselves occupied what Sumathi Ramaswamy calls, following Rosi Braidotti, a “nomadic consciousness” of a polyglot, always in between languages and homes, how could Paniker and his colleagues not feel the pressure of the ethno-linguistic politics that swirled and came to a head during this long decade? Filipina art critic Marian Pastor-Roces has aptly characterized the majority of South and Southeast Asia—and Chennai is a central hub in this region—as a space of “maximal language diversity.” I propose that Cholamandal should be read as countering the emergent ethnic and linguistic infrastructures that excluded the polyglot artist community Paniker had nurtured at the Madras School of Art. The anti-Hindi protests were themselves, of course, countering a larger national political norm. But many in the movement did so via an argument around the purity of Tamil language and culture, rather than a plurality of voices that comprised the southern Indian region. Cholamandal’s group of artists, hailing from a variety of language backgrounds, constituted a plurality—a countering force in the face of the national demand for Hindi or the local demand for pure Tamil.
The Counter-Infrastructure in the Paintings
This counter-infrastructure as written in and through the artworks made in the 1960s as Cholamandal came into existence. Paniker, for one, changes his idiom in the 1960s, from experimentations with floating, ethereal figural forms and garden-jungle landscapes, to, in 1963, the series that he would continue until his premature death in 1977, a series called Words and Symbols. How does one counter an infrastructure—both the national government’s focus on Hindi and state politics around Tamil—centered in a language politics based on purity and exclusion? Paniker answers this not only with the founding of Cholamandal as counter-infrastructure, asserting the primacy of the fine arts and creating a space for a multi-lingual, multi-cultural community, but also in an artistic practice that directly takes on the question of language, meaning, and belonging. Paniker’s work brings us back to the richness and multiplicity of language—the language of painting (color, line, texture), the communicative potential of symbol (in mathematics, science, and religion) and the twinned practices of reading and writing via signs and scribbles.
Paniker’s painting in 1963-64 shifts dramatically to explore the power of text, diagram, and symbol, drawing on a wide range of citations from across diverse visual cultures and notational practices (Figure 11 and 12). He uses math equations, geometry, and other imagery related to science in dialogue with astrological charts and symbols drawn from Keralan practices of magic. (You will probably see something you recognize in his works—he includes fragments both specific and general, like entwined snakes or a generic bull or water buffalo form, which appear in many world cultures across time, or a stick figure human, or tables of data, or star shapes—this allows the work to speak, in fragments, to a plurality of audiences.) He uses text—Roman script and a hint of English at first, and then shifting fully to the script used to write Malayalam, sometimes spelling out words from both that language and Sanskrit, sometimes spelling out nonsense. These works draw you in to decode them only to rebuff any attempt at doing so, forcing a confrontation with how we know what we know and whether these sign systems—each designed to parse a complex universe— themselves always fall short of transmitting understanding or knowledge.
Figure 11. Paniker painting in his Cholamandal home, c. 1968, courtesy Nandagopal family.
Figure 12. The finished painting, KCS Paniker, Words and Symbols, 1968, oil on canvas, 66 x 49 in. Paniker Art Gallery, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, courtesy Department of Museums and Zoo, Government of Kerala and courtesy Nandagopal family.
As languages are inspiring devotional and political sacrifices of body and life, fomenting violence across the region, reorganizing political borders and reorienting individual identities, what does Paniker’s turn to language, script, and writing mean? In reading his paintings as, like Cholamandal itself, a counter-infrastructure, I see Paniker embracing and welcoming maximal language diversity. Paniker, in his paintings, gives us a language that can be read but not understood, opening that middle ground of mixture and porousness between language communities and across varying levels of comprehension and understanding.
The gambit to explore language is also centrally bound up with Paniker’s artistic project of claiming, for himself, the genealogy of not only the artistic history of the subcontinent but truly of the world. Here I see him turning, in his Words and Symbols paintings, to rework and rethink the philosophical and pedagogical work that Paul Klee and others in the Bauhaus did as they thought through a new language of painting in the early decades of the twentieth century. The language of painting here includes text—often a lot of text—but puts it in dialogue with the other elements of painting, including color and its communicative power, line, texture, brushwork, the layering of pigment, the use of figural, animal, and linguistic forms detached from their referents, the engagement with music and spoken text as a way of working through the materiality of paint. One might therefore see his move to the textual in his painting as a double-counter, as it creates a new infrastructure for thinking the language politics in southern India and a new infrastructure for thinking about Indian art’s relation to the art of Europe as the hegemonic infrastructural center of artistic modernism.
“Cholamandal’s group of artists, hailing from a variety of language backgrounds, constituted a plurality—a countering force in the face of the national demand for Hindi or the local demand for pure Tamil.”
Paniker is not alone among the artists at Cholamandal to pursue these crucial questions. The large-scale, deeply hued paintings of Velu Viswanadhan, whether his earlier work via triangular forms and diagrams drawing on Keralan aesthetics or his more recent decades of interrogating color, depth, horizon, and space—all these center on new languages of color. P. Gopinath’s use of color, too, can be understood in this context—its boldness simultaneously embraces and challenges the presumption of what constitutes an “Indic” color palette. We see deep oranges and saffrons, yes, but they escape their somber tones into brightness; his willingness to push color relations to their extremes forces viewers to engage with the natural world he depicts—birds, trees, plants—outside of representational color, and situates it within a structured space with letters and numbers, geometries and repeated patterns that evoke furniture and textile design. Several artists in Cholamandal pursued a more monochromatic language of line at Cholamandal, pushing Paniker’s textual and diagrammatic experiments in new directions. V. Arnawaz, for example, traces narratives in black and brown ink tones, building fluttering forms from boxes and triangles, filling her paper with diverse and dynamic levels of ink, wash, and paint. Her language doesn’t turn to script, like Paniker’s, but she explores the possibilities of symbol, geometry, and line, building the narrative through her layered marks.
Counter-Infrastructure as Productive Failure
Paniker never claimed the Cholamandal project was an intervention that would last forever. Indeed, if you talk to those still working as artists in Cholamandal today, many will repeat this idea that it was not meant to be permanent. At present, Cholamandal’s caretakers have sought to institutionalize the museum and gallery spaces on the site but real estate realities and the ever-expanding exurbs of Chennai have meant that it no longer serves as a residential commune for artists alone. This further underscores the fugitive quality of a counter-infrastructure: it intervenes, creating a modified space for lives that might incrementally challenge the prevailing norms. But then it fades, or alternatively is coopted into the prevailing infrastructure, losing its countering quality. Cholamandal remains, however, a productive failure if it is a failure at all. And in clearing a space for the linguistic, caste, and ethnic diversity of artists working in the Madras School of Arts—these were incredibly powerful moves that enabled the efflorescence of Paniker and a wider artistic community, creating a place where a counter-infrastructure supported an incredible group of artists for a short time in the second half of the twentieth century.
Notes
[1] For more on Paniker and the founding of Cholamandal, see books by Ashrafi Bhagat and Josef James.
Citation
Rebecca M. Brown, “Artists’ Village as Counter-Infrastructure? KCS Paniker, Cholamandal, and Placemaking,” PLATFORM, August 15, 2022.
