K.S. Radhakrishnan, 67, still remembers the day he met Musui. It was during his third year at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and the young Santhal boy — with overgrown hair and a disarming smile — asked him for bread. “It was probably one of the most exceptional expressions I’d seen, and I was drawn to it. I asked him to hop onto my cycle and I took him to my studio to model for me,” recalls the figurative sculptor. “I gave him some coins and he went to a barbershop and came back with a shaved head. That was when a sculpture was born.”
Over the years, the public has seen the smiling boy with the bald head in different avatars: as a rickshaw puller, writer, imp and saint. If you visit Mananchira ground in Kozhikode, you will spot Kalapravaham, an open-air sculpture of Musui levitating from a granite base, his torso arching back and his legs in the air. In Panjim, Goa, near the Mandovi river, he is perched on a padippura, an arched gateway typical of traditional Kerala architecture, welcoming travellers to the city.
