malampuzha yzkshi.. kaanayi

Kanayi’s Yakshi turns 47 this month but still makes gawking men go weak-kneed. A tribute to the power of art and the demons it can tame

She sits naked, all of eighteen feet, in a straddled triangular posture – challenging every man’s libido and fantasy. She seems to be in ‘unmaadam’, a joyful madness, even as the verdant grass caresses her long thighs in an orgasmic state of union with nature.

 Nestled in the foothills of Western Ghats, in hearing proximity to the cascading waterfall of Malampuzha, ‘Yakshi’ stands out as the biggest nude woman sculpture in the country to date. Yakshi turns 47 this October and Kerala 65 in November.

At first sight, Yakshi seems to represent the mythical character she is: an unbridled goddess of sensuality and a creature of the wild. But a closer look reveals she is definitely much more than that. For one, she is not ashamed of her nudity, nor does she strike a coy position; instead she holds up a mirror to viewers, as she looks upwards into the sky, as if empowered enough to take the world into her.

For sculptor Kanayi Kunhiraman, Yakshi is a union of the manifold aspects of womanhood, her sensuality, fertility, empathy and freedom, the ultimate possessor of the natural wealth of the earth.“There is nothing obscene in her nudity and if  people feel so it is because they are conditioned to see women in that way,’’ says the 78-year-old sculptor. After completing a two-year sculpture project, Akshara Shilpam, in Kottayam in June this year, Kanayi is recovering from a severe sprain and is undergoing ayurvedic treatment in the state capital.

Kanayi Kunhiraman

In all his works, Kanayi was perhaps searching for that elusive love and motherhood, he missed so much in his fragmented childhood. He was forced to run away from home at the age of 16 to Madras, in order to escape the clutches of his tyrannical father who was a murderer. “If it was not for the one life-long love, that is sculpture, I would have been long dead by now,’’ he says.

It was in 1968 that the state irrigation department approached Kanayi for installing a work of art in the park adjoining Malampuzha dam. “They were not getting enough tourists. The park was remaining unused and they wanted to make it a major tourist attraction,’’ he recalls. Kanayi had just returned from London after completing a three-year Commonwealth scholarship course in sculpting at the famous Slade School of Fine Arts at the University of London. “The exposure gave me an opportunity to interact with world’s best painters and sculptors,’’ he says.

During his stay, he travelled across Europe and studied the works of modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. “I realized while Indian painters like Ravi Varma looked westward for artistic formats, painters like Picasso were inspired by tribal African art forms,’’ he says.

Yakshi, for him was a sort of going back to his roots, but with a modernist expression. But the concept did not occur to him all of a sudden. Kanayi stayed in a hostel in Palakkad near the dam and for two months he would roam the countryside to find a suitable expression for his work of art.

 Then, one day he observed that the contours of one of the hills in the valley resembled a woman lying with her tresses flowing.  “I then decided the sculpture should be that of a naked woman in tune with the wild mountain landscape. I envisioned various postures and finally came up with the posture of a woman who is ready to take in or maybe deliver a new creation into this world,’’ he says.

But once Kanayi began to work on the sculpture with the help of ten local chisellers, news spread that he was making a naked statue and there were protest rallies to the site to stop the work.  He was forced to stop work for three months but fortunately the protests died out and he began his work again.

“We used to work from eight in the morning to six in the evening, braving the sweltering Palakkad sun. One day as I got down from the bus, a group of locals beat me up for apparently denigrating Indian culture. They asked me to go back or else they threatened that my dead body would be seen floating in the dam.  But I did not bother to file a police complaint which would have escalated the situation and instead continued with my work silently,’’ he recounts.

Kanayi was influenced by Dadaism and the works of Marcel Duchamp who believed in the notion of anti-art. “I would never want my sculpture inside a museum. I believe sculptures should be in public places so that it connects people to that unseen force beyond the routine life,’’ he says.

Art critic Vijay Kumar Menon – who was commissioned by Lalit Kala Akademi to write a book on Kanayi’s work –says the Yakshi myth is an integral part of Indian tradition. “But over a period of time we had good yakshis and bad yakshis. Kanayi’s larger-than-life Yakshi blends into the wild landscape of Malampuzha symbolizing an unmitigated freedom,’’ Menon says.

All his later sculptures, be it the Jala Kanyaka at Thiruvananthapuram, Mother and Child at Kannur, and Mukkola Perumal at Kochi, touch the aspects of love and nature in all its forms. Kanayi still remembers how tribal people staying in the Malampuzha forests began worshiping Yakshi once it was completed, lighting mud-lamps in front of the statue. Yakshi had come up at the exact spot where the tribals had a small stone shrine of Yemuramma, a tribal goddess, which was removed for the construction of the dam. “Was that a sheer coincidence or divine interference, I still do not know,’’ Kanayi wonders.