Ram Kumar: A Journey Within

For the last 50 years, Ram Kumar’s paintings have continued to enthral and mystify viewers, in India and abroad be it his early figuratives, the sad, desolate and lost faces or his acclaimed Banaras series which brought an entirely original response to the ‘elernal city’ or the deeply meditative landscapes that were to follow in later years, bringing a certain inherent silence and ‘awe’ in his paintings–not to be found anywhere else in contemporary Indian art. This book is a modest attempt to present Ram Kumar, one of the foremost living artists of modern India–the painter, the person, the writer. Though it is largely a pictorial documentation, the effort has been to give a comprehensive idea of the rather reclusive personality behind such a large body of work. Some of the brilliant minds of India i.e. Sham Lal, J. Swaminathan, Richard Bartholomew, Nirmal Verma and Ranjit Hoskote have given their critical insights into Ram Kumar’s world here. Ram Kumar’s contemporaries like M.F. Husa