“I had a hunger to learn,” S. Anand writes, adopting the voice of Gond artist Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, in a book that is part biography, part autobiography, part pictorial memoir, part mythmaking, part extended poem, part cri de coeur. Finding My Way, the fruit of an extraordinary collaboration between artist and writer, is evidence of Venkat’s hunger, his need to at once overcome the circumstances of his birth and celebrate them in his art. At the Khoj Gallery—in Khirkee Extension, a cramped neighbourhood in south Delhi, people living cheek by jowl with livestock—Venkat, in a pair of blocky, fashionable glasses, is putting together a monument to his life.
He is standing on a makeshift ladder, ignoring the alarming sounds of bamboo snapping somewhere beneath him, applying the finishing touches…
