‘The Angst I have in me, I Try to Put it in Words and Artworks’: Anand

KOCHI:
It was in the fertile loam of the Gangetic plain that the seeds of P. Sachidanandan’s art practice took root. Watching the earthworms plough the rain-kissed soil, the civil engineer – better known today as the writer Anand – found a release for his angst.
After stints in the General Reserve Engineer Force and the regular army, Anand had seen the horrors of war in the troubled birth of Bangladesh. “When I am gripped by an intense anxiety to express the circumstances I see around me, the least I can do is write,” said Anand, who, at the age of 34 in 1970, was already being feted as the next great Malayalam writer.
His debut novel Alkkoottam (Crowd) had been published to much acclaim, but out in the plains it wasn’t just words, but also the compulsion to sculpt earth as the worms did that came to Anand. “The first attempt, a simple milestone with a human head, was my artless tribute to the creatures. Since then, there was a cross-fertilisation between sculpting and writing,” he said.
Over four decades later, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), a collection of his miniatures shares space with a monograph titled Map-Makers and Map-Breakers: Space-to-Time along the Maps – reflecting the decades of convergence between Anand’s two modes of expression.
“Art is an intermediary. Artists communicate with the ‘othered’. The angst I have in me from whatever I have witnessed, I try to put in words andalso, in a very humble way, in such miniatures. Most of them concern suffering,” said Anand, a participating artist at KMB 2016.
Just as his works speak to notions of identity, rootlessness, loss and longing, his treatise on maps and borders reflects Anand’s experience as a Malayalee far from home. “Where do I belong? What is the land that I see? What language do I use in this place?” he asks.
The fascination with maps grew with years to become an obsession, returning Anand to historic moments: Partition, the Sino-Indian and 1971 wars, among others, as well as provide a basis for an artistic consideration of what it means to draw lines on maps.
It is from this understanding that Anand rejects arbitrary divisions like those, he suggests, that exist between art forms. “Borders disappear when you consciously work and you do something or stand for something meaningful. Every meaningful act is itself artistic work,” he said.
“I don’t claim my miniatures to be major works of artistic expression, but there is an extended sense to art. There may be differences between the various art activities, but I believe that in a wider space all are interconnected,” he said.
Noting that “language is itself a form of abstract art”, he said, “Creativity and construction are two major activities that uplift man. We compartmentalise the two but they are related. Any kind of art is a medium of expression.”
For Anand, then, it is unnecessary to ascribe meanings to the multiplicity of artistic expression at the Biennale since the event as also the individual forms, styles, disciplines and traditions exhibited are all equally meaningful.
“Certain activities are such that it is not their success or failure that is the criteria. It is their very doing that is crucial. Art is an expression of freedom and cultural events, be it a Biennale are becoming more and more important to preserve and cultivate spaces for freedom,” he said.