Mumbiram

Mumbiram

Mumbiram is a painter and author from India known for his leadership of the Rasa Renaissance movement in Art. He is best known for his soulful renderings, in charcoal and colour media, of the folk people of India in real life situations. He is considered to be a contemporary classical painter who is inspired by real life muses with whom he invariably has a close egalitarian friendship. He is the rare contemporary artist that has introduced an indigenous art movement and a manifesto (Manifesto of Personalism). His Personalism in Art has now proliferated into the Rasa Renaissance movement that is based on the classical Rasa Theory of Sanskrit literature. It is a theory of aesthetics that puts the quality of human emotions that a work of Art or literature arouses as the criterion of its excellence. Mumbiram is equally gifted with words. His work of Euphorisms “Deluges of Ecstasy” that he composed during his 12 years in America is a path-breaking work in the prema vivarta mood.

Rich Family Heritage of Simple Living and High Thinking

Mumbiram was born in the busy Mandai vegetable market place of downtown Pune, son of an eminent lawyer Ramdas Paranjpe who was a popular public figure. His mother Anjani was daughter of eminent watercolor artist S.H.Godbole who was secretary of the prestigious Bombay Art Society in the 30´s. She was also the granddaughter of Shri Vartak the fist Indian Chief Engineer of the colonial Bombay Presidency. Mumbiram’s father was a nephew of a great spiritual master Shri Ramdasanudas of Wardha. He was also a nephew of Sir Raghunath Paranjpe (R. P. Paranjpe), first Indian to top the tripos Math exam at Cambridge. Eccentric linguist and historian Rajaramshastri Bhagvat and cofounder of the Prarthana Samaj, Bhaskar Hari Bhagvat were his grandfathers. Mumbiram inherited the ideals of simple living and high thinking from his predecessors. All these men were self-made individuals and neither inherited nor bequeathed any property.

Prodigious Child Artist and Brilliant Academic Career

Mumbiram was a prodigious child artist and won prizes in children’s art competitions. As a teenager he was attracted to Math and Science. He was top of the list when he got his Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunication Engineering in 1967. He joined the University of California where he got his M.S. in Mathematical Systems in 1968 and a Ph.D. (1973) for a dissertation in Mathematical Economics. Fields Prize winner Steven Smale was on his evaluation Committee. Another member Gerard Debreu went on to win the Nobel in Mathematical Economics.

Birth of Personalism and Rasa Renaissance

Mumbiram always had a philosophical perspective throughout his brilliant academic career. He had come to the lofty conclusion that it is the Aesthetic Choice that rules the destinies of individuals and societies. He himself was always passionately attracted to the beauty of men and women, in body and of spirit. Mumbiram spent 6 more years in America as an itinerant philosopher and artist. He was already drawing and painting soon after he arrived in Berkeley. It was an intense déjà vu experience with Art-his First Love in life. He had scant respect for contemporary American Art. He visited museums and galleries of contemporary art only to find their obsession with matter pathetic. He delved deeply in reading a wide variety of Sanskrit classics and became especially fond of the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagvatam. Krishna the ultimate hero is described as Rasaraj (master of all rasas) in esoteric treatises of aesthetic appreciation. We are all hankering after rasas. Art, music, literature and individuals that arouse rasas are all eternally dear to us. That is the ultimate aesthetic. Alas contemporary art is floundering aimlessly without any theory of aesthetic criticism whatsoever. Rasa Renaissance is an inevitability.

Itinerant Artist in America: Prema Vivarta

Mumbiram travelled much in America for six more years. The year he spent on Capitol Hill in Seattle, his idyllic year in Potomac Maryland and his two years in Cambridge and Boston in Massachusetts are the most significant. He had developed a hands-on approach to painting. Charcoal and ink and brush were his forte. Much of his work of these years remains with unknown individuals. We do have his poetic work “Prema Vivarta” or “Deluges of Ecstasy” which is now published by Distant Drummer of Germany along with 4 other translations by Mumbiram of great Sanskrit classics as the ensemble “High Five of Love”. It is lavishly illustrated with Mumbiram’s own masterpieces of Art that were independently made but were inspired by the same ideals.

Dramatic return to India

After 12 eventful years in America Mumbiram decided to return to his beloved India for purely aesthetic reasons. To avoid the temptation of coming back to America soon after, he asked the immigration department to voluntarily deport him to India. An incredulous immigration department refused to comply to his request. When Mumbiram approached the Washington Post, a young Christopher Dickey did an interview with him which appeared on the front page of the daily the next morning with the banner headline “Cruel Penance for a Brahmin!” Mumbiram had stated that he wanted to return after 12 years of penance (tapa) in the jungle that is America, in the manner of sages of antiquity. Christopher Dickey’s article had embarrassed the immigration department as well as the Indian Embassy. After enjoying the unexpected limelight for 2 weeks Mumbiram returned to immigration department who promptly locked him up in DC jail. The charge’ at the embassy confiscated his passport. At the hearing of the immigration court Mumbiram was offered a green card citing an executive order of President Jimmy Carter. Mumbiram promptly refused it and was on his way to India under escort. The Times of India had reported this curious case in a sympathetic column in current affairs which began as “The Law is an ass they say…” What was more, within a month after Indira Gandhi returned to power, Mumbiram was issued a new passport with his artist’s nom de plume included as his first name on it. Regardless, family and friends treated him as pariah. In their eyes he ranged from a burnt out academic to a wayward genius. Mumbiram’s ailing old father was one exception. Just to please him Mumbiram accepted an offer from Pune’s Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics to be a post doctoral research fellow. He found true friendship with the slum-dwelling rag-pickers of Pune, the bird-catching Phasepardhis, warli tribals near Dahanu and hill-dwelling thakars of Raigad district. These were to be his natural muses for the next 20 years of life as a classical painter of Rasa Renaissance.

Legendary Atelier in Pune’s Mandai Market

The rented house in downtown Mandai market in Pune where Mumbiram was born now lay empty and deserted. Mumbiram made his studio in that dilapidated house with a leaky roof. In that unlikely place the next chapter of the Mumbiram saga unfolded with great élan. Soon there was a steady stream of the folk people of the downtrodden lowest castes and tribes on the one hand and art lovers from far corners of the world on the other. Mumbiram’s charcoal renderings that showed proud beautiful people of India in familiar universal situations are the overwhelming favorites of the lot. They were bought because they were beautiful and full of rasa not because they were promoted by any galleries or any institutions. The joy of the amateur buyers increased manifold when they came to realize that Mumbiram’s muses that appeared in these renderings were from the lowest rungs of the Indian society, the neglected beauties of India. Some saw it as the Pygmalion story wherein the lumpen, ponderous, swarthy creatures you would ignore or pity on the street appeared as proud elegant muses of high art that adorned walls of well endowed lovely homes. Some saw it as the Robin Hood story where the artist took from the `haves´ and gave it to the `have-nots´. It was legendary; a story line fit for great novels and feature films. One gets a glimpse of that in the short movie, “Labyrinth of a Renaissance” made by Nadine Grenz.

“Forest Women Visit Krishna and the Gopis”: A Legendary Painting

A verse from the Shrimad Bhagavatam describes how the Pulindya forest women approached the adolescent Krishna surrounded by the Gopis, his cowherd paramours, on the bank of the Yamuna. The forest women could not get close to Krishna but watched the gopis gingerly placing Krishna’s delicate feet on their kumkum-smeared breasts. The forest women had to satisfy their amorous desires by smearing their faces and bodies with the kumkum-smeared grass Krishna treaded upon. The verse had fascinated Mumbiram ever since he first read years ago in America. Mumbiram made this oil painting on that theme circa 1985. The gopis surrounding the central figure of Krishna are Bollywood heroines of the 80’s. The forest women are all anonymous international beauties of different colours and creeds that are either trying to attract Krishna’s attention or swooning. The painting is full of amazing details for the discerning eye. The adolescent Krishna jealously guarded by the gopis is adorned not with gold-studded jewelry but a garland strung with forest flowers, feathers and leaves such as the forest women would adorn themselves with. The painting is unique for its subject matter as well as artistic virtuosity, treatment and perspective. It is loaded with theological and social nuances. It is attractive even to a layman. It was the central attraction of Mumbiram’s Mandai Studio for over a decade. It changed hands several times before being acquired by an executive of Mercedes Motor Company and taken to Stuttgart in Germany.

Visit to Japan: The Gokula Painting

Mumbiram’s search for Classics of Sanskrit Literature brought him to Krishna’s Vrindavan in the summer of 1987. There he met a student from the Tokyo School of Design who was attracted to Vrindavan in search of an aesthetic ideal. Gokula invited him to Japan. Their friendship brought Mumbiram to Japan a few months later. Mumbiram made several oil paintings on canvas during his stay there for a few months. These soulful renderings show a sarie-clad young Japanese women, who is passionately in Love with India. Gokula herself is said to have modeled for these and the setting is of Vrindavan in India even though they are made in Japan. These are important landmark paintings of confluence of two cultures. More interestingly they are the outcome of a classical painter’s real life romance. The ‘Gokula Auction Catalogue` fancies an auction of these paintings that never took place. It is a real life story that reads like a novel.

Flagships of Rasa Renaissance: High Five of Love: Mumbiram’s Rasa Art juxtaposed with Rasa Classics of Literature

Before that landmark house was torn down by developers in 2005, Mumbiram had completed another ambitious project that he had undertaken after his visit to Vrindavan in 1987. He has rendered four great Rasa Classics in graceful English and contemporary idiom. Vyasa’s "Rasa Panchadhyayi", Jayadeva’s "Gita Govinda" and Vishvanath Chakravarty’s "Prema Samput", appear as "Five Songs of Love", "Conjugal Fountainhead" and "Jewel-Box of Highest Secrets of True Love" respectively. A juicy folk version in Vraja Bhasha of Rupa Gosvami’s "LalitMadhava" is rendered as "Vrindavan Diaries". As English renderings of great eastern classics these are in the same league as Fitzgerald’s "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam, Richard Burton’s "Arabian Nights" or Edwin Arnold’s "Light of Asia". The fifth is Mumbiram’s original work "Deluges of Ecstasy" in the lofty Prema Vivarta mood of Love in Separation that he had composed in America. These are now published as a five volume ensemble “High Five of Love” by Distant Drummer Publishing of Germany. As literary classics illustrated by the author himself they are reminiscent of works of William Blake and Khalil Gibran.

A Life Devoted to the Aesthetic Choice

Mumbiram’s abandoning a brilliant academic career at the height of it, his saying goodbye to America after 12 eventful years, his choice of an atelier in a downtown vegetable market place, his transcending the rigid caste equations of India with the courage of art, his refusal to woo art galleries, museums and institutional funding. All these are not out of an eccentric turn of mind but are coming out of deliberate considered aesthetic choices at whatever the price to pay. He finds caste distinctions of India abhorrent. He would like to see all Indians drop their last names as these invariably announce your caste affiliation. He himself prefers to be addressed only as Mumbiram. Mumbiram is a thorough internationalist at heart and finds inequitable visa regimes and inequitable exchange rates to be atrocities against humanity. He is a vegetarian by choice, wears clothes that he designs for himself and these must be out of cotton or khadi silk. His dark curly hair is tied in a bunch behind over which he wears caps improvised out of colourful pillowcases. He likes music that can be danced to and movies that move him to tears. His study of the scriptures is profound. He insists that scriptures of different religions present only slightly differing paradigms of ‘Divine Love’. When he tells stories from scriptures young and old of all religions listen with wrapped attention. In his accounts real miracles occur when ordinary people are inspired to perform heroic deeds in defense of a just cause.

Mumbiram’s place in the history of Contemporary Art

Post-Independence Indian Art is dominated by artists of the so-called Progressive Group of Bombay “who decided to break away from the Bengal School to embrace Modernism”. Modernism rose in the West as a historical development, as an integral part of social and cultural development, its peculiarities and contradictions. Much of it was cynicism and desperation of an industrial civilization and collapsing culture of global colonialization. The distortions and voidism of Modern Art were symptoms of a materialist civilization losing touch with the beauty of human emotions. Post-colonial India deserved something better than leading artists being the Picasso of India and Frank Stella of India. These artists produced art that was prima facie irrelevant in the Indian context. Their claim to success was through high prices at auctions conducted in the west and attended by the Indian diaspora who themselves had found prosperity in the west by readily adapting to western culture. The wealthiest businesses of India today are those who outsource Indian human and material resources for the benefit of the western business interests. India, with its rich heritage and moral ascendancy owes something far better to the world. “Western art is floundering without any meaningful philosophy of aesthetic appreciation. It has become devoid of any rasa. It has become impotent and irrelevant. It has turned us all into cynics. What the whole world needs is a Rasa Renaissance. Art needs to put human emotions on the forefront all human endeavor. Only then can Art realize the mighty force it can be in shaping destinies of individuals and societies.”(Mumbiram) Mumbiram’s art is standing high on the noble Rasa Theory of aesthetic appreciation. Personalities and emotions are the domain of Mumbiram’s art. There is a wonderful symbiosis between Mumbiram’s way of life and his art. This is surely missing in the world of contemporary art. Mumbiram is presenting in his art archetypes of a transculture ethos. In the words of Mumbiram: “Art is to bridge the gap between the space age and the bow-and-arrow age. Art is to bridge the gap between the East and the West, Art is to bridge the gap between man and woman. Art is to render economic disparity toothless. Art should give wings to man.” Mumbiram sees aesthetic excellence as the force that can unite our world that stands divided by ethnic chauvinism. He sees confluences of art movements as pilgrimage places of culture. He is showing the universality of human emotions and that we are all threaded in a variegated garland of a universal paradigm of Love. Mumbiram’s art inspires us to embrace a universal aesthetic that fully appreciates the unique beauty of every society and every individual. In his vision we see the scenario of an evolved human aesthetic where cultural and bodily differences are neither limitation nor a reason for animosity or discrimination. In his vision diversity clearly enriches humanity and a just aesthetic of the human situation is indeed an achievable goal. Even before Mumbiram returned to India after 12 years in America, to produce some of his best-loved works, Stuart Cary Welch of Harvard’s Fogg Museum wrote: “Aware without being overwhelmed by such western greats as Matisse, Picasso and Steinberg, Mumbiram deserves a high position amongst contemporary Indian painters.”

References

www.mumbiram.com

www.distantdrummer.org (Distant Drummer Publications)

Washington Post: Sept. 18, 1979. “Cruel Penance for a Brahmin” (Front page interview with Mumbiram by Christopher Dickey in which Mumbiram calls America a jungle where he did his 12 year of austerities and penances)

Washington Post: Oct. 12, 1979, Interview from Washington D. C. Jail by Christopher Dickey after Mumbiram succeeded in getting deported purely for aesthetic reasons.

Times of India: Oct. 1979, Item in Current Topics that begins, The Law is an ass they say.... . (Mumbiram befuddles the Immigration Barriers)

Raviwar Sakal: March 17, 85 “In Search of Art that Transcends Culture”

Raviwar Sakal: June 16, 85 “Practice of Personalist Art” (First person accounts by Mumbiram)

Mumbiram's 1979 poster “ALIEN”, this epitomizes young Mumbiram's pursuit of the Romantic Ideal

Maharashtra Herald, June 23, 1988. “Waiting in the Wings”, an article by Journalist and author Ashok Gopal shows it is impossible for the casual eye to know the brilliant details of Mumbiram’s life

Poona Digest 1989, “Who is Afraid of Friedrich Nietzsche?”, article by Mumbiram brings out the inner workings of a creative mind

Sunday Observer 1989, “Banishing Tourist Type Visions”, Journalist Sudhir Sonalkar’s article gives a cursory glimpse about the artist living in the vegetable market place.