14th May 2023
His artwork and installations evoked the distress of the Gulf War and communal riots and put the spotlight on migration, pollution, and homelessness.
Vivan Sundaram’s political coming of age, by all accounts, began during his years at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where he landed a Commonwealth scholarship in 1966 after being mentored in the fine arts department of the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. He was deeply influenced by British pop artists such as David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and by his tutor RB Kitaj, a British American figurative artist from a generation of abstract expressionists whose cast of characters included Rosa Luxemburg, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Dreiser and T S Eliot.
Sundaram also took a course in the history of cinema at Slade. Cinema in the 60s was living up to Russian politician and theorist Lenin’s memorable definition as the “most important of the arts” with Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Andrzej Wajda, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and others rewriting the rule book. Immersed in art and cinema, Sundaram was drawn to the counter-cultural zeitgeist of the tumultuous decade – its convulsive, liberating energy, and the spirit of freedom.
His political orientation took a dramatic turn during the 1968 anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, a revolutionary Trotskyite organisation. At his memorial meeting held in Delhi on April 17, Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik spoke about the massive rally at the Grosvenor Square where he and Sundaram were both present.
They marched with Pakistani-British activist and writer Tariq Ali from Trafalgar Square to Oxford Street to Grosvenor Square where English actor Vanessa Redgrave made a surprise appearance. The espousal of radical Left politics across university campuses in the US, and in Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Warsaw, Belgrade and Czechoslovakia – where tanks rolled to silence the Prague Spring, the strike of workers’ demanding better working conditions – and the virulent contestation of everyday reality left its impact on the sixty-eighters.
The paroxysms of the 1968 student politics continued to reverberate in Sundaram’s life. He lived in a commune with friends, incubating an emotional hunger for social transformation. He returned to India in 1970 after hitchhiking across North America, Europe, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan – drawing acclaim almost immediately when his ink drawings of the Heights of Macchu Picchu, based on poet Pablo Neruda’s 12-poem sequence were displayed.
The struggle of subaltern Latin Americans reflected in drawings such as Arise to Birth with Me, Leaves of Accumulated Autumn, Plunge My Hand, Farmer Weaver Potter, Speak for Your Mouths took an even more poignant turn when Neruda, a close friend of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, died mysteriously days after Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973.