He may be an award-winning artist for the world but in Delhi’s Chhatarpur Pahari, he is simply murtikaar ji. Navigate the dusty chaos of the urban hamlet just past the Qutub Minar, and a narrow street — galli number D-13 — takes you to KS Radhakrishnan’s studio. The five-storeyed edifice looks like it doesn’t belong there. Only an illusion though. Walking through the large, green metal door feels akin to entering a medieval-era fortress; its large structure rendered larger by the shallow concrete growth around it. The Delhi locality, non-descript to most, is at the heart of his practice. One of his new sculptures, Chhatarpur Pahari, is named after it. It features a life-size woman holding, in her hands, a cluster of hutments inhabited by his ‘little people’. Radhakrishnan says it celebrates the neighbourhood that nurtured the artist in him.With barely a decade-long career behind him, 35 years ago, Radhakrishnan bought the land for his studio with all that he had — a sum of Rs 1,50,000 at Rs 1,000 per square yard. “I wanted a place where I could make noise and this is all I could afford,” he says, “I told my wife (artist Mimi Radhakrishnan), I will not build a home, I will build a studio. She said, ‘If you build a studio, you will have many homes. If you build a home, you may never have a studio.’ When we finally bought the land, it was empty for miles with only a couple of houses here and there. We had no water, no electricity for days. Sometimes, we even had to hook a line for power supply. On other days, I would just stick to working with wax that wouldn’t require electricity.” KS Radhakrishnan in the street that leads to his studio in Chhatarpur Pahari (Gajendra Yadav)Radhakrishnan laid the foundation of his studio by planting two chhatim trees (Alstonia scholaris) on either side of the green door. “I wanted to bring a bit of Santiniketan here,” and he did — in the trees, in the open brick architecture, in the arches and the large-paned windows that let in a generous amount of natural light. “People say I adopted Santiniketan. I think it adopted me,” says the artist whose fluent Bangla is almost deceptive of his Malayali origins. He spent nearly a decade of his life in the red-soiled suburban Bengal town pursuing, first, his Bachelor’s and, then, Master’s in Sculpting from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, under the mentorship of masters Ramkinkar Baij and Sarbari Roy Chowdhury. In 2024, he founded Tokaroun, an art museum, there.If Santiniketan shaped his artistic sensibilities, Chhatarpur Pahari shaped his art. His iconic duo, Musui and Maiya, were born here. While modelled after a Santhal boy he encountered in Santiniketan, Musui took shape in Delhi as did his imaginary alter-ego, Maiya. The ‘little people’ that populate his sculptures are much like the migrants that inhabit the “human boxes” in the area. “Musui,” the artist says, “stands for the human condition — simplicity, innocence, sometimes foolishness.”Art historian R Siva Kumar, who had curated Radhakrishnan’s 2023 retrospective at NGMA, Delhi, had aptly noted how Musui, over the years, had come to represent more than just an individual. He was a “metaphor of mind’s lightness, of its ability to assume a multiplicity of persona or identities”, one that mocked our notions of “immutable identity.” The Chhatarpur Pahari sculptureAlso Read | From ‘women’s work’ to contemporary art: The rise of textile feminismIn Chhatarpur Pahari, Radhakrishnan becomes its people and its people become Radhakrishnan. “My ‘human boxes’ came from watching these small enclosures rising around me. The little people in them are anonymous, without features, wanting an identity,” says the 70-year-old artist, “I was not an outsider looking at migrants. I was one of them. I saw how a colony was born. No one person builds it. It is collective. Home after home, it becomes a community.” It is this collective spirit that embodies the sculpture, which was exhibited this year’s India Art Fair.Never one to be steered by trends, Radhakrishnan’s only calling has been his heart. He followed it when he chose sculpture over painting all those years ago even though, at the time, the medium was not considered rewarding monetarily. The same emotion determines his representation of “migrants” in gravity-defying postures, contrary to their traditional portrayal of being bogged down by the shackles of life — an idea he first explored in the late ’90s for an exhibition marking 50 years of Independence. “Instead of ‘Freedom Struggle’, I called it Free to Struggle. We (migrants) are free — but free to struggle.” In his sculptures, the migrants’ existence is shaped not by the weight of their burdens but a lightness of being. Song of the Road (1997), for instance, shows Musui in a carefree state of mind, even during the labour-intensive task of hand-pulling a rickshaw. Radhakrishnan revisited the paradoxical idea in another exhibition, titled Freehold in 2006 and it has been central to his practice since. “When you see this air-bound movement, you download your heaviness. We all carry stress. I want the sculptures to release that,” he says.Story continues below this adToday, Radhakrishnan is an artist of international repute who, self-admittedly, can afford a studio in the poshest parts of the Capital (he has an office-cum-gallery space in CR Park where, once finished, his sculptures are displayed for potential buyers). But he chooses to keep it tucked away in Delhi’s gritty backyard. The chhatims are as tall as his studio. The once-deserted pahari is bustling. But for Radhakrishnan, like the air-borne Musui, time remains frozen, even in movement.