The Conch on the Lawn Is by the Man Who Made Kerala’s Public Sculpture

On the lawns at Veli Tourist Village there is a large stone conch shell. Children climb on it. Families photograph each other in front of it. It functions, for most visitors, as park furniture with a bit more ambition than a bench.

It is a 1986 work by Kanayi Kunhiraman, and it is not park furniture. It is by the sculptor who, more than anyone else, decided what public sculpture in Kerala looks like.

A career of putting art where people already are

Kunhiraman was born on 25 July 1937 at Kuttamath in Kasaragod district. He headed the sculpture department at the College of Fine Arts in Thiruvananthapuram from 1976 and served as its principal, chaired the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi — in 1978 and again in 2001 — and later chaired the national Lalit Kala Akademi.

What matters more than the offices is where he put the work. Not in galleries. In a dam garden at Malampuzha, on a public beach at Shankumugham, in a commercial complex in Kochi, on the lawn of a municipal boating park at Veli. His major pieces are in places people go for other reasons, which is a deliberate position about what sculpture is for, and it is the reason a Keralite who has never been inside an art gallery can nevertheless recognise his work.

The Yakshi and the fight

The work that made his name is the Yakshi at the Malampuzha dam garden in Palakkad, completed in 1969: a nude female figure, 5.5 metres of concrete, drawn from the yakshi of Malayalam folklore — a figure who is beautiful, seductive and, in most versions of the story, lethal.

It drew organised protest for its sensuality and has never entirely stopped drawing it. That is worth knowing before you look at the Conch, because it tells you the Veli piece was made by someone with a track record of putting large, unignorable work in public places and absorbing the argument afterwards.

The Sagarakanyaka, four kilometres away

His other Thiruvananthapuram landmark is close enough to see on the same afternoon. The Sagarakanyaka — the mermaid — lies on the sand at Shankumugham Beach, completed in 1990: a reclining figure 23 metres long in concrete, easily the most photographed object on that beach and, for a great many people, the definition of what Shankumugham is.

Twenty-three metres is not a statue in the ordinary sense. It is closer to landscape — a thing you walk the length of rather than stand in front of. Set the Sagarakanyaka against the Conch at Veli and you have the same instinct at two scales: work sized to a place rather than to a plinth.

About that award

Kunhiraman is usually introduced as the first sculptor to receive Kerala’s Raja Ravi Varma Award, which is true and slightly less impressive than it sounds — the government instituted the award in 2005 and he received it that year, so being the first sculptor to hold it is partly a matter of timing.

The rest of the list is the substance: the Thikkurissy Award in 2006, the T. K. Ramakrishnan Award in 2011, the M. S. Nanjunda Rao National Award in 2018, the Kerala Sree in 2022. But the real measure is not the citations. It is that four decades after the Conch went in, the emblem of a municipal boating park in a state capital is a serious work by a serious artist, and almost nobody visiting notices.

Looking at it properly

Give it two minutes on the way past. Walk round the back of it — the form reads completely differently from the landward side than from the lagoon side, which is the point of making a shell rather than a figure.

And notice what has happened to it. The surface is worn where generations of children have climbed. That is not damage in any sense Kunhiraman would have objected to. A sculptor who spent a career installing work in dam gardens and on beaches was not aiming for a barrier and a label.