Fair Youth Beneath the Trees: Remembering Chinmoy Pramanik – Johny ML
”Then the sun cleared the hillock in a hurry, the warmth discovering
him, the light dissuading him. But his calm, dark eyes sparkled as he
summoned the neutral witness of time to pay attention to his last act as
Gangiri Bhadra.”
– Shoes of the Dead (Kota Neelima)
Chinmoy Pramanik was not Gangiri Bhadra, the
protagonist of Kota Neelima’s well researched novel based
on the farmer’s suicide in India. But somehow, his untimely
demise brings the memories of Gangiri’s death. Gangiri
fought for the rights of the farmers, whose deaths were
written off as ‘natural’ ones. He had to sacrifice the welfare of
his dead brother’s family and his own security for this fight.
Finally, he too consumes pesticide and dies converting the
village moneylenders and power mongers, in the process, to
a new religion called humanity. Chinmay Pramanik did not
commit suicide. He was undergoing treatment for leukaemia
and when he passed away he was just thirty five years old.
He was a talented sculptor; one of the few artists in India
who were unaffected by the illness of the market boom.
As Kota Neelima observes in another part of her novel,
an obituary means nothing. It does not say anything. The
words remain hollow and the emotions drained. The death of
a fellow being induces some kind of silence in us. We behave
like rudalis. I could have avoided writing an obituary. But it
is the curse of being a writer. I do not have any other device
to show my grief. Hence, this obituary is an effort to look
into the hollowness of my own words. Arundhati Roy, in her
God of Small Things says that when a person dies, he leaves a
hollow in the space in his own shape. I could see a tall, thin
and smiling hollowness in the air; a smile seen through the
thick beard comes out from that hollow reminding me of the
Cheshire cat, but devoid of its cynicism.
I remember meeting him last at the Space Studio in
Baroda. I had met him several times before that. Head hunters
from the art scene had gone all over the place to track down
unsuspecting but eager young artists and make them cannon
fodders for the machine called the art market. I heard his
name for the first time from one such head hunter. I saw
his works. Then I met him. He was a man with minimum
words and a lot of smiles. His works were made out of small,
carefully crafted wooden chips. Together they made a form,
most of which looked like absent figures trying to manifest
in the present. For those critics and curators who were the
propagators of new urbanism and urbanology, his works
were critiques of urban growth.
What I think today is something different. His works
always grew vertically with a ridge running through its
body. At Chintan Upadhyay’s now disputed Juhu apartment
in Mumbai, he had kept one of Chinmoy’s work, in the
drawing room. During each visit, I saw this work moved
from one place to another; sometimes to his study room
and sometimes to the bed room. The work stood silently,
vertically, like a mummified form, imparting no terror but
setting the visitor in a thinking mode. Chintan was behaving
like a museum curator, never satisfied with the placement of
the work. I remember touching the work and feeling the ups