Ram Kumar

Ram Kumar was born in Shimla in 1924 and read economics at St Stephen’s College in Delhi. An exhibition he wandered into in 1945 sent him to classes at the Sharada Ukil School of Art under Sailoz Mookherjea. Soon after, he gave up his job at a bank to paint. He met S H Raza at an exhibition, became his close friend, and talked his father into a one-way ticket to Paris, where he studied under André Lhote and Fernand Léger.

The early paintings are of people alone in the city. Sad Town (1956) and Woman (1958) each won a Lalit Kala Akademi national award. Then, around 1960, he went to Benaras with M F Husain. He came back drawing the ghats with no one on them, and from then on the figures were gone. For the rest of his life he painted landscape drifting toward abstraction, in sweeping strokes: Benaras, then Ladakh in 1976, then the dunes of Jaisalmer in 1977.

He wrote all along, in Hindi: short stories from 1945, the novels Ghar Bane, Ghar Toote (1953) and Der Saber, and a travelogue. His brother was the novelist Nirmal Verma. He received the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 2010, and lived and worked in Delhi until he died in 2018. Amit Dutta’s 2015 film about him is called Lal Bhi Udhaas Ho Sakta Hai, “red can also be sad”.