Artist Tyeb Mehta’s Shantiniketan series sets off a conversation about how humans represent nothingness, too. By Uma Nair
The permanent collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) has been brought down to the basement to give art lovers a glimpse of its archival importance, power and beauty,” says DG Adwaita Charan Gadanayak as he walks towards the magnificent triptych of Tyeb Mehta, the Shantiniketan series created as far back as 1985-1986.
Ramchandra Gandhi’s Svaraj
One cannot forget Ramchandra Gandhi’s Svaraj (2002). This grandson of Mahatma Gandhi had used artist Tyeb Mehta’s Shantiniketan Triptych as the focal point of the book. Philosopher and teacher of comparative religion at Vishwa Bharati, Ramchandra examined Mehta’s imagery of the rickshaw-puller, the falling man and the trussed bull by linking them with the Shantiniketan Triptych in terms of philosophy and sensibility.
He showed that this work is a three-panelled portrait of distortion and self-awareness necessitated by exclusivist self-identities — individual and collective, secular and religious, and the recovery of integrity of selfhood in inclusive self-realisation. He created a conversation about the realisation that we are things yet we represent nothingness, too.
Kala Bhavan Shantiniketan
Mehta painted the 170x445 cm painting in 1985-86, when he was an artist-in-residence at Kala Bhavana, Vishwa Bharati University. The painting represents Charak Puja, an end-of-spring ritual observed by the Santhal tribe and other marginalised communities of West Bengal. The first left is a panel showcasing a group of drummers and dancers. There’s a floating figure on the top-right corner of the painting. The central panel showcases a sacrificial site near the vertical charak pole with a seated woman and goat in close, protective embrace. There’s also the ritual sacrificer’s shadow looming over the scene. The third-right panel has a group of people pulling a rope and the audience watching the ritual. Here also, there is a figure floating at the top.
Although there are three separate panels, Mehta’s brilliance can be seen through the treatment of figures. The arms of women figures seem to be in wanton abandon but also transcend the superficial divisions of the canvas and reach out to each other. The throbbing vibration of stark colours mirrors the momentum of the drummers and dancers. In the tableaux, Mehta gives us a synergy of togetherness as if they share an unseen bond. The painting is a testament not only to the core values of an artist’s philosophy but shows how these values can be carried forward by new thoughts of blending tradition and modernity.
Santhals and Charak
In 2005, Mehta had explained in an interview his epiphany that occurred at Shantiniketan with the Spring Festival of the Santhals at Charak. “There was a Santhal woman whom I found very captivating,” reminisced Mehta. He added, “This lady in a make-believe temple stood almost naked. She poured some water near the tree trunk. I was so struck by her presence that it still remains with me. It was stunning. I came back and painted two women on a rickshaw and my work, Shantiniketan slowly happened. It was her role in the drama, something implicit in her image, which could not be explained but got etched in my memory. You see with myths one should not be in a hurry, they should settle onto the memory so that you can stop and dwell on them at length. You have to reflect without losing touch either with their image or with their intent.”
He stood apart for his interpretation — the ambiguous dichotomies between the masculine and feminine, the divine and mortal, and the human and the bestial — while also conveying a larger theme of consummation and destruction.
You draw your eyes towards the tender embrace between the mother figure and the graceful goat and the symbolism of the yogic pose by the disembodied head in the foreground of the central panel. At once, you think of the paradoxes of life and death and the culmination of the experience. Mehta transcends time in the mix of imagery and the suggestion of the beautiful goat which will be sacrificed.
Rooted in space and time
Shantiniketan stands apart and alone. It is rooted in space and time and as the great Roshan Shahani said, “They resemble the ‘peasant-cultivator-labourer’ — a prototype that has been placed in deadpan stances of beaten down melancholia.” Mehta draws attention towards the emblematic significance of his characters.
The power of this painting is poignancy and power — said and unsaid. In the emotive associations and evocations, we see the fragility of life, the uplifting aura of dance and the rhythm of the drummers. In the sinuousness of the dancing figures, we also observe struggles, despair and despondence. We must look at the feet of these figures, which are charged with a hypnotic rhythm.
Mehta captures the caprices of human behaviour. The dancing goat is a symbol of wound as well as sacrifice. Time has been stolen from the register of its destiny. The artist brings us back to the debate about how history feeds the memory.
The collection at the gallery makes you pay reverence to India’s greatest modern master, Tyeb Mehta, and recall the words of his close friend KG Subramanyan who said, “They snare you into a search. Those unindividual faces that seem benign or sad, those heave limbs that oscillate in mute gesture, those body postures that combine both elegance and awkwardness — they hold you captive of their teasing configurations. Clear, brilliant, tantalisingly visual, almost like blown up cameos in the centre of their impact, they carry a message for the heart.”