But why did we not say, at once, what struck us most forcefully on entering this studio, before our eyes and our breath became attuned to an interior that is a simulated exterior, a chaos that is a calibration of micro-scales of order? When we climbed the brief flight of steps, brushed by the branches of the Saptaparni tree, and a panel opened in the great arched metal doorway, we found ourselves suddenly standing among the highly stylised yet shockingly lifelike figures that make up a recent group of sculptures, which Radhakrishnan has titled ‘Freehold’.

 

Marvellously ductile, these gymnastic figures ride at anchor in the air, and dance through space; they leap like Minoan bull-runners, snatch like zephyrs in mid-flight at a passing breeze, float on imagined clouds, turn cartwheels, do hand-stands, dive and levitate, defying gravity and the body’s natural justice. Acrobatic in their buoyancy, they subvert the conventions of the sculpture that stands politely on its pedestal in a gallery: airborne despite the heavy metal of which they are made, some of these figures maintain only the most fleeting or tenuous contact with their bases. One touches its base lightly with its palms, for instance, while another nudges it lightly with a knee; and yet, behind this deft illusionism of lightness, the sculptor

has been hard at work, devising measures of support, poise and balance.

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The initial attractiveness of these figures may lie in the fluency with which they negotiate space. They delight in their precariousness and volatility; their high-spiritedness embodies their creator’s delight in exploring the polarities of gravity and lightness, delicacy and robustness, air and earth. Each of these figures is a dancer captured for a moment in metal: lyrical in gesture, archetypal in impulse, movingly human in detailing. At a deeper level, these are bodies in which the binary of the voluptuous and the spiritual has been overcome by a conception of incarnate grace. Their splayed palms propose a mudra drawn from the vocabulary of classical dance; the fluid limbs decline conformity with the laws of anatomy, legislating for themselves an origami physique. No posture is impossible for these figures. They seem to have achieved the condition of siddhas and yoginis: the renunciates who, in Indic religious culture, isolate themselves from society to seek mystical bliss, and also develop magical powers through the prolonged and arduous performance of ascetic selfdiscipline. And look closely at the columnar bases to which these figures are nominally attached: these are not simple utility devices, but rather, are covered with a hieroglyphy of figures symbolising the lifeworld in which consciousness, language and symbolism are born; and in which Self must define its relationship with Others. The bases  stand for the uniquely peopled planet we inhabit, the mass of humanity that forms the reservoir from which Radhakrishnan’s figures emerge, signifying the highest perfectibility to which a human being can aspire. Superficially, the sculptor’s project may strike some viewers as bearing an affinity to the Nietzschean cult of the future genius, the Superman who inaugurates the next step in human evolution; but this is a mistaken reading. There is no trace, in Radhakrishnan’s work, of Nietzsche’s fevered desire for man’s self-overcoming by solitary and dissident effort and the radical transvaluation of bourgeois values. On the contrary, it seems spiritually in accord to the Buddha’s doctrine of the overcoming of the self through technologies of self-restraint and compassionate interdependence.

 

The sculptor’s choice of title for this recent suite of figures intrigues us. A freehold is an estate in land, inherited or held for life: a tenure that cannot be snatched away  from one by arbitrary policies or rack-rent claimants. Still savouring the metaphorical resonance of the term, we break the word into its syllables on our tongues, unwittingly throwing a paradox into relief. ‘Free/hold’: the gesture invokes the dialectic of liberty and bondage, necessity and freedom. In Radhakrishnan’s account, this dialectic must be resolved, not through agitation, but through tactical fluency, the gift of slipping in and out of domains. These figures remind us that life must be treated as a verb form rather than a fossil noun, a choreography of alternative futures rather than a freight of deadweight pasts.

 

We see that ‘Free/hold’ could also refer to the minimal touch by which Radhakrishnan’s figures subscribe to the shared construction of reality that we describe under the rubrics of society and culture, while retaining the right to investigate their own truths and manufacture their own  universes of meaning. In Indic thought, such a claim to autonomy is described as sva-rajya. Note, though, that the sva-rajya embodied by Radhakrishnan’s figures has more in common with the spiritual emancipation that exercised Coomaraswamy, Tagore and the early, philosophical Gandhi than with the pragmatic leitmotif promoted by the later, activist Gandhi. Radhakrishnan is a celebrant of the soaring self, one that is actuated by a transcendental rather than a territorial conception of freedom. And although he chooses to articulate this vision through sculptures that are defined by mass and occupy volume, the soaring self is not restricted in its movements: instead, it is given a new lease of expressiveness, an extension of allusive range. I would hazard the view, to be argued in more detail later in this essay, that such a self gets a powerful grip on reality by the paradoxical gesture of renouncing any possessive claim to it, as monopoly or birthright. 

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Radhakrishnan’s studio is capacious enough to hold a variety of such fruitful paradoxes. Born in Kottayam, in the southern Indian coastal state of Kerala, the sculptor studied at Tagore’s legendary university of Santiniketan in the heartland of eastern India. Basing himself in India, he gives himself the latitude to work across a gamut of sites: he lives and works in Delhi but spends fruitful periods of activity in the South of France; he has installed open-air sculptures in France, executed large bronzes in Denmark, and shown in a variety of exhibition, workshop and urbanscape contexts both at home and overseas. Like all major artists, Radhakrishnan is an athlete who thrives on challenges, casting his work around formal problems of torsion, surface detail, scale and location. He works constantly at the artisanal processes by which his visions are incarnated in bronze, making fresh discoveries as he tends the refiner’s fire, inventing himself out of the impasses into which temperature and gravity can lead the shaping hand.

 

And yet the overwhelming majority of his sculptures have evolved from precisely two figures that came to occupy his imagination when he was a student at Santiniketan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A man who walked into the artist’s life, who called himself Musui and became a compelling presence; and a woman, whom the artist created as Musui’s counterpoint and companion, and called Maiya. Between them, these key protagonists have dominated Radhakrishnan’s image-making practice, recurring and manifesting themselves in a plurality of guises, playing now one role and now another. The sculptor has constantly renewed the freshness of his first encounter with these beings, updated his sense of their

meaning in his life and the auguries they bore towards him. The archetypal simplicity of their presence and the minimalist grace of their form belie the splendidly elaborate masquerade through which they have projected themselves over a quarter of a century. In a Jungian sense, as the scholar R Siva Kumar has pointed out in his sensitive and insightful writings on Radhakrishnan, Musui and Maiya are the animus and the anima, the twinned aspects of the self: “when the opposites complement each other, as in the double image of Musui and Maiya,” he writes, “we ... recognise the two ends as marking a continuum.”