Re-discovery of painter ‘Sita Ram’

There is rich material that Losty has brought together in his book, and one needs to go over it slowly to be able to absorb all that is there in it. But I am tempted to draw special attention to at least two of Sita Ram’s works. One is a view of the inside of a godown, which was a part of the opium factory, evidently built by the British, “at Gulzarbagh, between Patna proper and Bankipore”, on the site of an old Dutch factory. It is an astonishingly intimate architectural study, level upon level of rounded brick-and-stone walls and arched entrances and broad flights of steps, with an odd worker walking or working, and a sliver of the sky peeping through an opening at the very top. Sita Ram might have seen, as Losty notes, an Italian etching of Roman structures somewhere, but this work clearly has his stamp on it: precise and loose at the same time, and forcing us to observe every possible angle that he has used.

And then, of course, there is that entirely different, and remarkably inventive, even visionary, rendering of illuminations and fireworks at Fatehgarh, not far from Farrukhabad, to which I am irresistibly drawn. Under a looming, rumbling sky rendered dark by comparison with the illumination below, there is what looks like a hazy river of lights: earthen lamps by the thousand forming towards the horizon something of an arc of a vast rainbow that has decided to descend to the earth; at two spots a conical tower as if it has burst into flames; at still another, a coliseum seen from a long distance.

In the foreground a group of men, all involved in putting up the show of fireworks stands, each figure a dark, misty presence. The loose, relaxed brushwork, the interplay between dark arcades and illuminated passages, the overall feeling of a stippled, unearthly happening, take your breath away.

All this by a little known ‘native’ painter who lay in virtual obscurity till only a few years ago.