Gestures (Triptych)

This work, made on three separate canvases joined together, showcases an interplay between the powerful and the hungry. A distorted figure sporting a rotund belly has its hands resting comfortably on the well-fed stomach while two other figures have their arms stretched out and folded, almost in an act of begging. The poverty and human suffering of refugees in Calcutta in post-independent India—coming in from East Pakistan—that A. Ramachandran saw as a student at Santiniketan affected him deeply, and this work is reflective of that trauma and torture.