Art promoter Akumal Ramachander passes away in Bengaluru

Akumal Ramachander, a septuagenarian multifaceted personality, who shot to fame in 1985 when he discovered and promoted American abstract expressionist painter Harold Shapinsky, taking the western art world by storm, passed away in Bengaluru on Thursday. 

Akumal Ramachander, a septuagenarian multifaceted personality, who shot to fame in 1985 when he discovered and promoted American abstract expressionist painter Harold Shapinsky, taking the western art world by storm, passed away in Bengaluru on Thursday. 

He was suffering from age-related ailments. His body was donated to a hospital, as per his wish by his family and friends. Former bureaucrat Chiranjiv Singh termed his death a “great loss to the intellectual scene of Bengaluru”, adding that he was so multifaceted that it was tough to describe him. 

Working as an assistant professor of English at University of Agricultural Sciences in the city in the 1980s, Akumal Ramachander had varied interests. Exposed to Polish films through a film festival in 1979, he began writing on the same. He visited Poland in 1980 and ever since then has been a cultural bridge between Poland and India.

In 1984, he visited the United States of America to lecture on Polish cinema, when he met an American student David Shapinsky, at a party to which he was taken by Kannada writer A.K. Ramanujan, then teaching in Chicago. This chance meeting led him to discover David’s father Harold Shapinsky, whom he tirelessly promoted across Europe and the U.S. The New Yorker ran a 20 page story on the Indian teacher “discovering” an American artist, pushing both to instant fame in 1985. 

Indian author Salman Rushdie even narrated a documentary made on the subject for Channel 4, the same year, titled “The Painter and The Pest”, in which he observes that this was a rare instance where the East had discovered something the West had not acknowledged yet. 

“I have been discovering people for quite some time,” he told India Today in June 1985, and termed his discovery of Shapinsky “the biggest art coup of the 20th century”. After quitting his job, Akumal Ramchander became a full time art promoter. He was also credited with discovering another artist David Carr. “Discovering young artists was his abiding passion and he continued that till his last days,” Mr. Singh said. 

Senior journalist and author Sugata Srinivasaraju, a close friend of Akumal Ramachander, said he was a big name in Poland and the western art world, but not taken seriously in his hometown. The British Museum has 45 prints of Polish artists that he donated. “He was a very generous man, but often quarrelsome. He had friends across the world. He was also a poet who wrote in Hindi, and sang Hindi film songs exceptionally well late into the night. We were planning to celebrate his 75th birthday, but he always refused to accept that he was 75,” he said.