A Deep Dive Into The Mind Of Goa's Ocean Artist

It is an ordinary canoe but on a divine mission. All its passengers are gods from the Hindu pantheon. They were rescued from persecution and were ferried to safer land. All have different heights, avatars, and powers, and some like Ganesha have many models. Each has a million or more worshippers, but in Goa’s Ark, as its artist Subodh Kerkar calls it, they appear diminutive, like newborn babies in a giant cradle.

This cradle rocks gently, swaying from left to right, hoping its rhythmic movement provides some comfort to the grieving deities whose homes were razed and their faithful killed, tortured, or made converts into the religion of the invaders. This ark, like the Biblical Noah’s Ark, regurgitates the idea that even the gods need rescuing, an idea that holds meaning on every land whose histories speak of war, conquest, demolition, and erasure of the conquered, the minorities or the marginalised.
 

Goa’s Ark alludes to the Portuguese conquests of 1510 when the Hindus rescued their deities in canoes on the rivers of Mandovi and Zuari to the water bodies’ confluence at Kumbharjua (Ponda)—outside the conquered territory. Here, the deities were rehomed in new places of worship erected. Every year, the boatmen of Adpai village, whose ancestors had ferried the idols, are given the honour of manoeuvring the palanquin of gods through the festivities.

The 2016 work oozes religiosity and can excite religious hardliners, but Kerkar insists it was not created to stir communal tensions. “Many times, right-wingers, especially the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, see my work and feel humara aadmi hai (he’s one of us). But the work and their ideologies are not correlated. It has nothing against the present-day Christians and the Portuguese. What happened in the past one must know, but not develop any kind of animosity.”
 

Kerkar, the self-styled ocean artist from Pernem, now 62, fell in love with the ocean at age six. A love rubbed off from his father, artist Chandrakant, on their long walks on the beach. It inspired the young lad to choose the first medium to create art, watercolours. In time, he veered towards medicine, became a general physician, and built a 10-bed hospital—Subodh Hospital—at Calangute beach. For eight years, the 24-year-old treated cough, and cold; delivered babies “to the sounds of the waves”; tended to elderly women “who were bored at home and just needed company”; and provide relief to countless British tourists nursing an upset stomach. “By 35, the idea of devoting my life to British loose motions felt disgusting, and so I went back to art,” he chuckles.

He started by planting mussels on the beachfront, covering large areas, sometimes 100 sqm, that appeared like water bodies running parallel to the ocean. “The theme is the ocean, I create the ocean, and the medium and the canvas (sand) are also given to me by the ocean. A wonderful confluence of everything coming from the ocean. I decided to use the ocean to create the ocean, saw it as my collaborator and signed an MoU with it.”

The initial experiments had him hooked, and then he just devoted himself to the whims of its waters and is now a full-time artist and founder of the Museum of Goa at Pilerne. “When the waves break, the surf runs under the sand. Most of the waves wet the sand that was wet before. Then a big wave goes ahead and wets new sand. Creativity in art and writing is about wetting this new sand,” he says. It is why he constantly aspires to search, find, and make new stories about the ocean. If created at the oceanfront, even better. His methods involve choreographing armies. Armies of fishermen, mussel shells, plastic bottles, soil—an upcoming idea is to make an island from the soil of every country and dissolve borders, when the soil of Israel, for instance, will mix with the soil of Saudi Arabia. In another experiment, he wants to create floating sculptures from wood, “which I will take in a boat to the middle of the ocean and throw them in, and then they will find their own coast”. And their own masters.  

His latest experiment titled Oyster Works is the first instance to manipulate the ocean. Objects, from ceramic plates to crosses, give out the illusion of lost treasures unearthed from the ship that sank centuries ago. Kerkar took these objects, had them well-cleaned, poured wax on areas he didn’t want oysters to develop, then put these cages, and immersed the whole arrangement into the ocean, immersed in the ocean for three-four years. “The gum that the oysters secrete to remain stuck to the object is so strong, it will be suitable for tendon transplant in orthopaedics.” Some traces of his ocean love trickle into another passion, reviving artist FN Souza, a Goan but barely known in his native land. A fishbone was pressed to create the thatched patterns on the clay models modelled on Souza’s artworks. But that is a story for another day.
 

Kerkar’s enormous love for the ocean is what makes him want to save it. Especially when the cages containing his oyster experiments when hauled up are at times covered in stray strands of plastic. Stories of plastic found in fish and birds or seeing cows chew on plastic also disturb him. So, he does his bit to create awareness using the plastic bottles strewn aplenty as after-party waste on many a Goan beach.

A notable mention is the installation, Moses and the Plastic Ocean. It is of two panels erected to face each other, placed before the waterfront; each panel is made up of rows of plastic bottles. It was exhibited at the 2017 Busan Biennale and offers a twist of the Biblical story of the prophet parting the waters of the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape from the Egyptians. “Today, on parting the waters Moses would have found plastic bottles,” chuckles Kerkar. The self-professed Gandhian says if the Mahatma was alive today, he would have done another satyagraha, but not with salt. “He would launch an anti-litter satyagraha, for comprehensive cleansing. The litter you see outside reflects litter inside your head. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is directed towards cleaning only the outside, while the inside is still full of hatred. To be a patriot, shouting Vande Mataram is not enough. Not throwing a plastic wrapper/bottle is the first step towards citizenship and patriotism.”