The Life and Art of T.K Padmini

T.K. Padmini was a remarkable artist from Kerala whose body of work (created in the 1950s-60s), revealed extraordinary talent before her untimely death at just 28. R. Siva Kumar first encountered her paintings in 1973, when he was still a schoolboy, at the home of a classmate. Yet her striking canvases left an impression that would remain with him for decades. Now, as one of India’s leading art historians, Siva Kumar has brought Padmini’s work to a wider audience through “A Symphony Interrupted”, an exhibition held at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture as part of the Bengal Biennale 2024.

Following the exhibition’s conclusion, Sujaan Mukherjee spoke with Siva Kumar about his long-standing connection to Padmini’s work, the challenges of reconstructing her artistic development with limited biographical information, and why this pioneering artist from Kerala deserves greater recognition in the canon of Indian modernism.

Acknowledgements: All images are courtesy of the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi. Special thanks to Murali Cheeroth, Siddharth Sivakumar and the Bengal Biennale. All artworks, photographed by Prasenjit Bhowmik.

T.K. Padmini is a name that is unfamiliar to many of us. How did you first chance upon her work and what drew you to it?

Given the quality of her work, Padmini should have been a known-name. But she is little known outside Kerala. I stumbled upon her work in 1973 while I was still in school – at the home of my classmate, Vijayan. Vijayan’s father, E. M. J. Venniyoor was the station director of All India Radio, Trivandrum, and an art critic. They had five or six stunning paintings of Padmini in the house. I had interest in art and was a frequent visitor to the Sri Chirtalaya Museum in Trivandrum. I was familiar with the work of many masters and immediately recognized that she was a painter to be reckoned with.

There isn’t a great deal of biographical information available about her. Could you tell us a little about Padmini’s early life and how she became a painter?

That is right; there is little published material on Padmini. We have three small notes by her maternal uncle T. K. Divakara Menon, his friend and well-known poet Edasseri Govindan Nair, who supported Padmini in her quest to become an artist, and K. Damodaran, her husband.

These notes are part of a small monograph on Padmini, published by the Kerala Lalitakala Akademi (now available online in English).

From these notes, we know that she was born in 1940 into a Nair family of modest means in Kadenchery, a rural outpost in central Kerala. Her father died young, and she grew up under the care of her mother and maternal uncle. Her conservative, widowed mother was not sympathetic to her desire to become an artist, which, given the time and her material surroundings was an uncommon desire for a young girl to nurture. Luckily for Padmini, her uncle was sympathetic and willing to help, and so were Edasseri and K. L. Devassy, her art teacher at school. After completing high school in 1956, she stayed with Edasseri in the nearby Ponani for two years so that her art teacher would continue to guide her.

Later, her uncle arranged for Vasudevan Namboodiri – then a young graduate from the Madras Art College who went on to become Kerala’s most celebrated illustrator – to guide her occasionally. Through him, she became familiar with the rudiments of modern art. In 1961, she finally joined the Madras Art School to study under K. C. S. Paniker. At that time, the diploma course involved six years of study. But Padmini received the diploma in 1965 itself – in recognition of her talent! After completing her studies to ensure a career in art, she worked as an art teacher in various schools in Madras. She married K. Damodaran, a fellow artist, in 1968 but unfortunately died in childbirth the following year before she was 29.

Padmini became an artist by sheer determination and will. True, her uncle and Edasseri helped her to become an artist, but striving against great family and societal odds and becoming an artist was very unusual for girls in her circumstances. Of her paintings, few are dated. This must make it difficult to trace an evolution of her painting style or place her works on a timeline . What clues did you work with, in your curatorial process ?

That is right – very few of her paintings are dated. I think I have seen only two dated paintings. One dated 1960 (sold by Sotheby’s), suggests that she was a competent painter even before she joined the art college. Therefore, it is difficult to date her works based on stylistic evolution or internal evidence.

We can group them into different categories based on style or subject matter. For instance, some paintings are closer to observed reality, naturalistic and linear in execution; others reflect the kind of structural stress that we notice in the studies of  Madras art college students in the 1960s.

Then there are monochromatic paintings that are linear and stylized and similar to what many painters from the south did during that period. Besides these, there are there are other paintings that are linear but in a more personal manner and rooted in local experience and more intense, and finally paintings in which colour dominates and linear elements are few.

However, we can only speculate about their chronological sequence or even ascertain if they overlapped or followed one another in some sequence. There are a few hints in Damodaran’s short note, but they are not enough to date her work without external corroboration.

Padmini’s individuality comes across very strongly in her art. Did her paintings strike you as being in conversation, stylistically speaking, with others of her time?

As I have suggested, some of them have stylistic similarities with those of her contemporaries, especially with artists trained at the Madras Art School. But even these have a distinct intensity absent in others. Her paintings are deeply informed by her subjectivity which is that of a woman, and very emotionally charged. Both these aspects are uncommon in the works of her contemporaries, especially from the south, and saved her from the pitfalls of regional mannerisms that many of them cultivated. 

The everyday life of her village—morning prayers, the afternoon siesta, evening congregations—comes through in many of her paintings. Despite the cyclical, repetitive rhythm, Padmini’s images certainly do not lack vitality. Do you think it is partly because she was born and brought up there, as opposed to artists who looked at the rural landscape through an urban sensibility?

Her imagery is deeply rooted in the environment and life in her village. Her earliest sketches documented the place and the people from close. Its imprint remained strong even after she had moved to Madras. Padmini’s early experiences shaped her personality and imagination. This is clearly reflected in her paintings.

The unchanging village landscape with its temple surroundings, its earthy subaltern faces and listless bodies, its crepuscular lighting, and young women heavy with stifled dreams call up a loaded vision that is intimate, cherished and yet melancholic. We do not have many similar examples in art, but it was common among mid-twentieth-century Malayalam writers – most of who had rural backgrounds and were deeply responsive to the people and landscape around them.

They were literary modernists, rooted in the rural. Edasseri was one among them. As a poet who led the transition from romanticism to realism, he also mixed the fantastic, an element he inherited from age-old myths and Kerala’s performative traditions, with immediate natural and human reality. Padmini was a keen reader (we are told) and shared common ground with them. But the emotional tonality of her paintings was her own.

You mentioned that her life was tragically cut short at childbirth. Are there any records of how her work may have been received during her lifetime or in the years following her death?

Very little, I am afraid. However, that is not surprising. Padmini died just four years after completing her studies. Fellow artists, however, recognized her talent very early. They included two of her charcoal drawings in an exhibition in Calicut even before she joined the art college.

Padmini’s works featured in many group shows in Madras and Delhi during 1962-68 as well as the national exhibition of 1969. She also had a solo exhibition in Madras in 1968. After her death, one or two articles appeared in popular magazines. The first art publication devoted to her, was the slim monograph I have referred to. It was only published in 2004 and since then, a few more books about her have followed. However, none of them have added to our knowledge about her in a significant way. Her works are now on permanent display at the Darbar Hall gallery in Ernakulam.

It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, to be able to see so much through the eyes of someone while knowing so little about her life? You have recently edited the book on Leela Mukherjee – do you see any hope of a similar project on Padmini?

Yes, her paintings open up a unique world for us. Yet, we know little about the world she came from and how she shaped herself. I hope somebody will conduct a well-researched study of Padmini and her work sooner than later. It would be necessary to have appropriate language skills (to access existing archival materials in Malayalam). It would require an exploration of Padmini’s connections with the cultural and social life of Kerala of the 1950s and 60s. Apart from being well grounded in art history, one would have to be familiar with southern India’s art scene.