While Musui and Maiya are spirits of the thinking mind that unsettles our habitual world, and the Human Boxes series which followed represents the collective predicament that sometimes drives the powers of self-transformation out of human lives, the ramps are a deft conflation of these two sculptural ideas – the singular iconic image and the variously ordered clusters of identical anonymous figures – into a single gestalt. Each of the Ramps (2004-2006) consisted of a sixteen-foot ramp peopled with hundreds of small (about a foot tall) figuresof Maiya and Musui, with a large figure of Musui or Maiya as a higher being at the top, towering over them. The three ramps with Musui as Sri Ramakrishna, Maiya as Ma Sarada, and Maiya as Serket were thus variations on the same theme. The small figures form a stream of humanity moving up and away from us as people on an escalator. But here the crowd is not faceless as in the Human Box series; they are miniature images of Musui and Maiya, of gesticulating men and women typecast by their features but distinguished by their gestures. On closer examination we see that for all the variation of gestures they demonstrate they are assembled from mass produced units: trunks, limbs and gesturing hands grafted and oriented variously. To grasp the character and scale of this transformation we only have to look at a few photographs of the studio that show the fragments from which the figures have been grafted; images of heads, jumble of limbs and trunks, of feet and gesturing hands either strewn around or collected in boxes. Looking at them we notice that it is only the hands that have a life of their own, even prior to the grafting they are almost as complete as living creatures the rest are inert like parts of a puppet waiting to be picked up and animated. 

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The diversity of the figures covering the ramp then is the outcome of random permutations, and of the changes in the angle of vision induced by the inclination of the surface on which they are placed. Starting at the ground level and moving up in a gentle gradient it lends the figures to be viewed from various eye levels and different distances. Viewed from above the ramp is sparsely peopled, each figure appears with ample personal space around it, and being animated they look like people hurrying across a city square, like men on a mission. Viewed from a lower eye level we see them in layers, one receding behind the other. Though this makes the scene dense, almost packed, it also makes the gestures of the figures up front more discernible and thus readable. Some have the gestures of dancers in ecstasy, others of floating and reaching out to each other. Yet others have the nimble bodies, fluid movements and the perfect balance of trained athletes. And on the ramp everyone is in a swirl. What gives individuality to the twin halves of the Ramp are the two life-sized figures rising from the middle of this flux, one of a standing man and the other of a seated woman. The man has the features of Musui, the woman of Maiya; and Musui with his arm raised in the urdhavabahu posture invokes Sri Ramakrishna the saint with an earthy wisdom, and Maiya seated cross-legged with arms resting in her lap invokes Ma Sarada, the saint’s consort. But what do the two pieces, one with Musui-Ramakrishna and the other with Maiya-Sarada one reaching upwards the other gathering oneself towering over the milling crowd below mean? The two central figures are colossal in relation to the figures below but they are not intimidating. They are gentle colossi, almost a benign presence. the smaller  figures, dance as they may in ecstasy, seem to be rather oblivious of the larger figures looming over them. They seem unmindful, or perhaps even incapable of comprehending such immensity. Their gesticulations belong more to play and pleasure than reverence. And even more crucially, the smaller figures even as they gesticulate and act differently have a family resemblance to the colossal figures. Does this mean that the potentiality for transcendence is there within each one of the swirling midgets? Is it being suggested that to be imperfect may be human but to ascend to higher levels of consciousness or perfection is equally human? If yes, is the Ramp then a monument to man’s ability to rise above anonymous aggregation? And if yes again, then by choosing to say it through the images of Musui-Ramakrishna and Maiya-Sarada is he turning the Ramp into a double sign of transcendence, of rising from the common aggregate against great odds, and then of freeing oneself from the burden of uncommonness with a touch of earthiness? Is this then the incarnation of Musui as a laughing philosopher and as the down-to-earth saint of lightness? And is the Ramp an allegory, a theatre, or a labyrinth? 

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For all that we know it could also be something else, for Radhakrishnan does not use sculptures to make statements. He merely models figures in a manner that suggests that they are not merely things, but something between things and thoughts. And then leaves it to us to think along, to weave and reweave allegories with them, and to extend the labyrinth. 

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Maiya as Serket

 

Maiya as the Egyptian goddess Serket is the third of the Ramps. Serket is the Egyptian goddess of healing, the protector of embalmers and canopic jars, and, therefore, of the dead and their eternal afterlife. Here, the juxtaposition of two contrasting realities (singular and many) is further complicated by the inclusion of a third motif – a large jar into which a host of little figures, similar to the ones we encounter in the Human Boxes (see p. 343), are seen descending. This could be a reference to the canopic jar of which Serket is the keeper, but it also adds another layer of existence or reality absent in the other two Ramps. Maiya as Serket, with her open-arms gesture and beatific smile, is eternally blissful. Despite their difference of scale, the rapturous milling crowd around her appears to be responding to her, suggesting a temporary suspension of the human/divine, transitory/eternal dualities that separate them. This contrasts with the disjunction between the ecstatic crowd and the self-contained towering figures

presiding over them in the other two Ramps. However, the jar and the little figures descending into it – rendered in miniature as human bodies are in certain religious paintings to represent the soul of the dead – suggest the inevitable dissolution of the illusory empathy between the living human crowd and the singular divine. Is there a moral here? Perhaps not.