Remembering Yusuf Arakkal

Long before Yusuf Arakkal's canvases found their place in galleries across the globe, his life began with loss, escape, and an unrelenting hunger to express.

- RIYA MENDALIN

Orphaned at the age of seven and sent away to a boarding school, he 'fled' from Kozhikode to Bengaluru as a teenager, not in search of fame but emancipation.

On a quiet weekday afternoon, the Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Kochi breathes with the soul of this man who saw the world not as it appeared, but as it truly felt. Yusuf, the late master of brooding canvases and silent cries, returns to Kochi—not in person, but through an overwhelming retrospective that feels more like a homecoming than an exhibition.

That journey—marked by struggle, survival, and the solitude of being unseen—etched itself permanently into his art. Yusuf's figures were rarely whole. Often bald, genderless, hunched or expressionless, they stood like echoes of those society forgets. "He always said that figure was himself," says Sara Arakkal, his wife, lifelong collaborator and curator of his legacy. "He was not bald. He was not a woman. But he saw himself in all the disregarded."

Over the next five decades, Yusuf would become one of India's most compelling modern artists, not only for his technical brilliance but for his insistence on portraying the invisible. His subjects were migrants, daily-wage workers, refugees, crying children... They spoke not in slogans but in sighs. "He gave dignity to those who have none," Sara says. "He painted their silences."