Ezhil anna, he made me from clay

Ezhil anna’s memory grips me tight and pulls me along a stream with a magical force. It takes me past colourful forests full of shadows that sing, amidst tall dancing trees, into stories of gypsy kings, and onto a mountain top. From there the world seems dream-like. Then, suddenly, anna [elder brother] throws me into the cold night air among the stars. He pushes me towards the ground until I turn into clay.

He was made of clay. His life was like that. A clown, a teacher, a child, an actor, he was flexible as clay. Ezhil anna, he made me from clay.

R. Ezhilarasan is the king of clowns, a rat jumping around, a colourful bird with a frown, a not-quite-wicked wolf, a lion prancing about... It all depends on the story of the day. Stories that he has been carrying around for more than three decades in a large green bag on his back as he travels through forests and cities across Tamil Nadu.

It is 2018. We are in a government school campus in Nagapattinam. Stacks of logs lying around, cut from the trees uprooted by Cyclone Gaja, make the school campus look more like an abandoned sawmill. But this desolate and battered look worn by the campus in this worst affected district of Tamil Nadu is getting peeled off from one corner with excited squeals of laughter from children.

Face painted in white and yellow, three red dots – one on the nose and two on the cheeks, a sky-blue plastic bag for a clown cap on the head, a funny song on his lips and a carefree rhythm in his limbs – he looked like a laugh riot. The hullabaloo was usual. This is how Ezhil anna’s art camps begin, be it in a small public school in Javadhu hills, or a swanky private one in Chennai, a remote one for tribal kids in Sathyamangalam forests [Erode district], or one for children with special needs. Anna has burst into a song, a small skit, which helps the children leave their inhibitions behind as they run, play, laugh, and sing along.

A trained artist, anna is never concerned about the facilities available at the schools. He asks for nothing. No separate hotel or lodging arrangements, no special equipment. He even works without electricity, or water, or fancy craft materials. He only cares to meet the children, to communicate, to work with them. Everything else takes a backseat. You cannot take the children out of his life. He is a man of charm and action when it comes to kids.

Once, in a hamlet in Sathyamangalam, he worked with children who had not seen colours before. He helped them use colours to create something out of their imagination for the very first time, discover a new experience for themselves. He has been creating these experiences, tirelessly,  for children since the last 22 years, from the time he began his art school, Kaliman Viralgal [Fingers of Clay]. I have never seen him giving in to sickness. His cure is his work with children, and to show up among them, he would be forever ready.

Anna completed his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Chennai Fine Arts College in 1992. “My seniors, painter Thiru Thamilselvan,” he recollects, “costume designer Mr. Prabhakaran and painter Mr. Rajmohan, were incredibly supportive of my college life. They helped me complete my degree. After a course in terracotta sculpture, I joined the Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai to experiment with art.” He also worked at his sculpting studio for a while.

Whenever we travel, whatever mode of transport – a bus, a van, or whatever is available – our biggest luggage would always comprise of things for children. Ezhil anna’s green bag would be bursting with drawing boards, paint brushes, colours, fevicol tubes, brown board, glass paints, paper and umpteen other things. He would have taken us to every possible neighbourhood in Chennai – from Ellis Road to Parry’s Corner, to Triplicane to Egmore – where one could find an art supply store. And by then our legs would be hurting. Our bill would run into 6,000-7,000 rupees.

Anna never had enough money. He would raise it from friends, from small jobs, from his own work with private schools, so that the tribal children and children with disabilities could have free art camps. In the five years that I have been travelling with Ezhil anna, I have never seen him lose his zest for life. He has never thought of saving anything for himself, not that he had anything left to save either. Whatever he earned, he would share it with co-artists like me.

Sometimes, instead of buying, anna would discover new materials to teach children all that he thought the education system had failed to teach them. He would also get them to use local material to make artworks. Clay is easily available, and he would often use it. But he would process it himself, from removing the silt and stones, to breaking the clumps and dissolving them, sieving, drying, and all. Clay reminds me of him and his life. Intertwined with the lives of kids, and flexible. It is thrilling to watch him teach the kids how to make masks. Each mask will have a unique expression on it, but the children’s faces will all wear the same expression of pure joy.

He would give careful thought to the material that he would use for art camps. His desire for perfection, the concern about delivering the right kind of materials to the kids, made him a hero to us. Every night of the camp, Ezhil anna and others would create props and materials for the next day. He would tie his eyes before a camp with visually challenged children to learn how to communicate with them. He would plug his ears before training hearing-impaired children. The way he tried to understand the experiences of his students inspired me to engage with the subjects of my photographs. It was important to connect with them before I could click. 

Ezhil anna had understood the magic of balloons. The games he played with balloons always helped him build a rapport with little boys and girls. In his bag, he would pack loads of balloons – big round ones, long snake-like ones, twisting ones, whistling ones, water-filled ones. They created a lot of excitement among children. And then there were songs.

“In the course of my work, I have realised that the children constantly need songs and games, I come up with songs and games that also have social messages. I make them sing along,” says anna. He would light up the place. Children from tribal villages would find it difficult to let him go after the camp. They would ask him to sing songs. He would sing tirelessly. Kids would be around, so would be songs.

In the camps, kids always displayed their creativity. Their paintings, origami and clay dolls were displayed. The kids would bring their parents and siblings and proudly show off their talent. Ezhil anna would make it into a celebration for them. He made people dream. My first photography exhibition was one such dream that he nurtured. It was from his camps that I drew my inspiration to organise it. But I didn’t have any money for it.

Anna would advise me to keep my prints ready whenever I had some money. He told me I would make it big. He would tell people about me. He would tell them about my work. I think everything started working out for me after that. Kruna Prasad, the theatre artist and activist in Ezhil anna’s group, gave me the seed money of 10,000 rupees. I was able to print my photos for the very first time. Anna taught me how to make wooden frames for my photographs. He had a clear plan, without which I wouldn’t have had my first exhibition.

The photographs later reached Ranjith anna [Pa. Ranjith] and his Neelam Cultural Centre. It reached many other places across the world, but the place where the idea first germinated was Ezhil anna’s camp. I wasn’t aware of many things when I first started travelling with him. I learnt a lot on the journey. But he wouldn’t ever discriminate between those who knew things and those who didn’t. He would encourage us to bring people, didn’t matter if they were less talented. “Let us introduce them to new things, let us travel with them” he would say. He can never see the shortcomings of a person. And that is how he made artists.

In the course of his work, he also realised that “children from villages – especially girls – were too shy even in school. They refused ask any questions or raise doubts in front of the teacher.” He says, “I decided to train them through theatre in public speaking. And to do this I took classes in theatre from Karuna Prasad, a theatre activist. With some guidance from artist Purushothaman, we started training children in theatre.”

To train the children, Ezhil anna also tries to adapt the various art forms he has learnt from artists of other countries. He works to make children sensitive to their own surroundings. “We screen environmental films as part of our camps. We teach them the art of understanding life – however tiny it is, be it a bird or an insect. They learn to identify the plants in their neighbourhood, understand its importance, as well as to respect and protect the Earth. I came up with plays that stress the importance of ecology. They get to know the history of our plants and animals. For example, Sangam literature mentions 99 flowers. We get children to draw them and sing about them as they play our ancient musical instruments,” anna explains. He creates new songs for the plays. He makes up stories about insects and animals.

Ezhil anna has largely worked with children from tribal and coastal communities. When he ended up working with children from urban spaces sometimes, he found them lacking in their knowledge of folk art and livelihoods. He then started working towards incorporating techniques from folk art – including Parai, which uses drums; Silambu, performed with an anklet-like ornament; and Puli, a dance form that employs tiger masks. “I firmly believe in the importance of taking these art forms to children, and preserving them. I believe that art forms have the potential to keep our children happy and free,” Ezhil anna says.

He knows how to create beautiful moments. Moments in which kids and adults smile. He helped me recreate such moments with my own parents. When I was wandering aimlessly without a job after finishing my course in Engineering, when I started developing an interest in photography, Ezhil anna told me to be with my parents too. He shared stories about his relationship with his mother; how she had single-handedly raised him and his four sisters after his father’s death. It is through these conversations about his own mother’s struggle that Ezhil anna made me think about my parents’ efforts in raising me. That is how I came to value my mother, photographed her, and wrote about her.

When I started travelling with Ezhil anna, I also began to learn to organise plays, draw and paint, create colours, and started teaching kids photography. It opened a world of conversation between children and me. I listened to their stories and documented their lives in photographs. When I took photos after talking to them, playing with them, dancing and singing with them, it became a celebration of sorts. I went to their homes with them, ate with them, spoke to their parents. I realised that magic happens when I take photographs after conversations with them, after sharing time with them.

In the last 22 years, since Ezhil anna started Kaliman Viralgal, he has managed to bring magic and light to every life he touched. “We offer academic guidance to tribal children. We teach them the importance of education. We also teach girl children self-defence. We could see the children gaining self-confidence when they got trained in self-defence,” he says. The idea, for him, is to believe in our children, to inculcate rational thinking and freedom of thought and expression.

“We believe all lives are equal and we teach them that,” he says. “In their happiness, I derive mine.”

The author would like to thank Kavitha Muralidharan for all her work in the translation of this essay, and Aparna Karthikeyan for her inputs.

Postscript: Just as this essay was getting prepared for publication, on July 23, 2022, R. Ezhilarasan was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious neurological disorder in which the body's immune system attacks the nerves. The disease affects the peripheral nervous system and can lead to muscle weakness and paralysis.