Kansodaria's Village Universe
by Dr Ratan Parimoo

Having completed his training in sculpture at Baroda between 1983-90, Kansodaria has for many years been occupying himself with wood carving. He did them in all sizes & breadths, tall or short with wide girths & branches sticking out. He rarely chose a cubical block like solid form with inherent possibility of its four main facets restricting the extensions or rather to serve as inevitable enclosing boundary. Instead he chose irregularly shaped tree trunks with branches extending beyond its verticality and circumferences. He was thus freely able to handle the medium of wood in essentially figurative compositions so unlike essentially abstract & elemental forms that many sculptors using wood had made onlookers so used to as the only possibility of its kind.

Kansodaria perhaps instinctively was drawn to move away from such restrictions and thus discovered his own peculiar form sense. This form sense does not see any boundries for sculpture, an imaginary or notional finite beyond which it does not transgress, but there is a constant pushing outward thrust in all directions making the sculptural form appear weightless & ceaselessly moving in all directions. Since a whole lot of details & minute forms could be carved all over the main block, total form appears to be more of a conglomarate of numerous small or large chunks suggesting constant movement & an impish desire for these forms to freak out like a flock of birds moving in all directions in unbounded space. The sculptural form that emerges is infinite in space which is also boundless.

Such a character of form is usually expected in case of decorative ensemble, either of ornament by itself or maze of ornamental design that may interlace a single object. But Ratilal's sculptures are neither decorative nor comprise of decorative details but such unbounden quality is very predominant in the European `Rococo' ornament, one of the sources of which is 'chinoiseri' but there is no direct influence. One could claim that this quality is peculiar to him as an individual, which has emerged particularly while working with wood.

When it comes to his bronze sculptures with which he is mainly involved currently, no wonder in an exhibition of his sculptures in this medium, a senior critic had mistaken these bronzes as actually forms in wood, since Ratilal prefers a warm reddish patina for his bronzes which makes such a deception possible. The form sense that he evolved through working in the medium of wood, lead him to such form structures and components of imageries in his bronzes where he does not have to think of specific gravity or balancing of weight requiring emphasis on the vertical or the horizontal orientation. In his bronzes as well, not only the forms are in constant flux, but having been released from prison of vertical lines & straight plane, they seem to fly. Actually some of them are literally `birds' who are always in flight.

And thereby hangs a tale. Why does Ratilal choose such forms or form components as he does in his bronze sculptures?

The most interesting phenomenon happens to be that many aspects of his childhood experiences are consciously or unconsciously reflected in the characteristics that have been emerging in his sculptural work. As a village born child he had been attracted towards skills & works produced by master carpenter & wood carver of the village. He had also observed his own brother's obsession for embellishing farm implements with decorative designs. He remembers with much pride his mother's expertise for embroidery. These experiences inculcated childhood ambition of becoming a sculptor as well as determined his forte, so that initially he continued to work consistently in wood. Further, his childhood experiences of village life activities & atmosphere with which he had been fully seeped in, have lingered in his latent memory so that the emerging sculptural form is both a narrative as well as a landscape.

That is why his forms often extend horizontally while animals & birds are juxtaposed along with human figures. The sculpture inherently turns into a landscape space within which drama takes place. Thus space within sculpture takes on the character of space outside it, a peculiar continuity emerges between onlooker's space and space in sculpture, a quality often associated with painting or architecture.

He explains his interest in movement & force due to his peasant back ground which involves a lot of physical activity carried out with bare bodies, when limbs, postures & musculatural tensions are the fascinating sights for visual observation. It is this zest for life among the rural folks & not toils and travails to which Ratilal is responding to.

Here I make a comment on question of decorativeness, which can be the outcome of cumulative effect of a certain stylization of human body, drapery, animal limbs and bird's wings. He has himself felt this danger and has consciously attempted to avoid the pitfalls. I would therefore like to see Kansodaria's works as not handicraft oriented, but rather avoiding orientalistic decorativeness, they are intuitively expressive. A certain elongation in limbs of proportions of figures (both human & animals) results in slimness but also contributes to latent energy & tautness of forms. He prefers exertion of skills, details & complexities of design. Quite rightly he claims that so called preference for simplicity actually may be due to limitations of artist.

Finally we may take up a few bronzes specifically for eg, sculpture with a macrame woven cot placed vertically & tilted `village scene', which integrates typical Indian household object along with human figure, cat, squirrel & birds. It also refers to folk belief that a newly woven cot should not be used for sleeping immediately until it is ensured that 'yama' (God of Death) is not residing there. There are other variations on cot motif like in one case several dogs are playfully surrounding it along with two boys. The sculptural group stands like its prototype in real life lying in & surrounded by such a space which is also the onlooker's space.

When the birds flutter around a squatting village boy holding out a bowl of eatables (as if an offering) the positions & placements of these airborne creatures requires a photographic moment so effectively achieved in this configuration by Ratilal. Such a dramatic moment is also prominent quality in `chasing the thief', in which birds are pursuing the galloping dog as he runs away with another bird firmly gripped between his canine teeth. Such moments is also the characteristic in the one titled `the game of the gate' as dogs are about to perform act of jumping through a circular frame, which is a form of village entertainment.

The man-bird & man-animal integration as well as the resultant intertwining maze are effectively obtained in the `birds farm' & an untitled sculpture. In the former, two men & birds are placed in a manner along a circular form that they appear to be partly in & out of it. In the second sculpture man is placed lying on his back & lifting his legs in playful relationship with dog pushing under his armpit, while scared cat is at top of the boys raised feet in mid air providing `apex' point of configuration. The playfulness also is the situation of evoking humour in the onlooker. Ratilal is truly involved with the zest for life & natural relationship among man-animal-environment in the rural setting.

A special expertise is required to realize a perfect single time casting for sculptural forms with such complexities, when the molten metal has to flow into every kind of extensions, protrusions & masses. Ratilal Kansodaria achieves this so perfectly, flawlessly & neatly, making him one of the best young sculptors handling bronze medium in India today.