Mohan Samant
Highlights
August, 2001
 



August, 2001
Death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam

This painting has been chosen by Mohan Samant as one of his most important works. It reflects his unique technique of handling images and textures and his sense of being part of 5,000 years of art history.

Death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam will be shown this month at NGMA, Mumbai in their annual show. For more details see the EVENTS page.

Death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam #8901
Death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam (Gallery 4)

In 1995 Death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam was exhibited in a group show at a New York gallery, Contemporary Arts of India, and was selected by the monthly magazine Where to appear on the Gallery page of their October, 1995 issue. In keeping with Samant's historical sense this painting was printed along with works of art from several different periods and countries. An African helmet mask, a Satsuma vase from the Edo period, a painting by Picasso and a teapot created by refugees from China were juxtaposed with Death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam to create a collage representative of the New York art world at one moment in time.

  






The story of the death of Jatayu and Sita Harnam has several versions.There are many paintings and sculptures on this subject from antiquity to the present. The one portrayed here dates from the 18th century.

 

  
One of the many versions of the Jatayu's death.

The depiction of Jatayu's death has a much deeper meaning than it appears on the surface because of his inherent divinity. This cannot be simply illustratively painted. His appearance on the epic scene of Ramayana has a direct relationship with Shrimat Ravana's intense search for Moksha. For that even Sita's abduction was not a simple rape. She remained untouched in Lankha, guarded by the strongest guardians. Shrimat Ravana ruled Sri Lankha which was the most prosperous, well managed kingdom whose inhabitants were happy and contented. It was the wealthiest kingdom whose currency ran into pure gold. Ravana was a devotee of Lord Siva whose blessing made him almost immortal.

By sending a decoy, the demon Marichi, in the form of a beautiful deer wandering in Dandakarayna (forest), Shrimat Ravana captured Sita in order to entice Lord Rama to come to him so that he could fight and be killed by him. By receiving death at the hand of Lord Rama, he would then achieve his graceful moksha. Sita wanted to make a dress from the skin of the deer and ordered Laxmana (her brother-in-law, brother of her husband Rama) to hunt the deer for its skin to adorn herself. Reluctantly Laxmana went after the deer leaving her unguarded. At that moment Shrimat Ravana captured her. While carrying her away he was confronted by another divinity Jatayu. After a long combat Jatayu was killed by the trickery of Ravana.

 The entire episode could be one million years in length because of the divinity of these people. That puts me somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the entire history of art trying to find a place of my own. My painting was conceived as a much larger historical episode in Ramayana and not a mere few moments of action in the abduction of Sita by Lord Ravana. Rama was born as a divinity but remained very human to the end. My painting is telling the entire episode of Ramayana and not just the death of Jayatu.  

The Wire Drawings

After seeing my exhibition recently, a smart young artist questioned the use of my wire drawings as being manipulative and aesthetically unnecessary. I gave this young artist a pencil and asked him to draw on the rough wall outside the gallery so that he would understand how the wire drawings work on a heavily textured canvas. He realized that he couldn't draw a fine line on the rough wall.

 

 

 

 

 

I am not a chef requiring a certain consistency in making the dough and the cream palatable to everybody.

During my final art school year I was trying my hand in the style of Basholi and Jain miniature paintings. I acquired the ability to create very fine line drawings. They were not Roualt drawings, or Picasso or any European drawings but came out of studying Indian miniatures. The flat surface of a canvas was invented around 1515 according to contemporary critics of that time. However painting has a history of around 25,000 to 30,000 years and the paintings were created on non flat surfaces such as rocks, wood, ivory, metal and many different textures, natural or manmade. It has been my practice for many years to do wire drawings of hands, feet, toes, animals, birds just as any artist will practice drawing on the paper. And it was normal for me to take any of these wire drawings and attach them to the textured canvas superimposed on the underlying paintings instead of doing the impossible task of drawing by pencil or brush on the textured surface. It was inevitable that I should use the wire to create the drawings. So it is like any other paint material to me. The real gimmick is repeating oneself in the name of personality, style or consistency and not recognizing the dead end of one's creativity.

Out of art school I expanded myself into everchanging mediums. At my first one man show in 1952 in the new Jehangir Art Gallery right after receiving the Bombay Art Society's gold medal I had 28 paintings with approximately 14 different styles all my own and I practiced them all throughout my fifty years of painting. Because of this multiplicity of mediums I could depict the entire story of Sita's adbuction in the Dandakaranya which initially up to half of its completion was not the subject matter. It was after seeing several wire drawings and heads and nose lying on my drawing table that I thought I might use them in this particular way and that was how Ravana was born and so was Jatayu and so is my aesthetic evaluation.

In my painting there is a complete story of Ravana's eternal search for moksha.

Each artist has to come back to the mortal fight with his creative power which always tries to bring him to a stylistic dead end.

 

This painting came to India in 1997 and was exhibited at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture. In a review by Ranjit Hoskote in The Art Magazine of India, Vol. 2 Issue 1, 1947-1997: 50 Years of Indian Painting, Mr. Hoskote wrote:

..... Samant must have seemed a strange and powerful animal indeed, to his rather more conservative and conventionally School-of-Paris colleagues in the Progressive Artists' Group, which he joined in the early 1950's. With his disdain for quietus and his expressions of raw, warm vitality, Samant collapses the boundary between High Art and low art: in his pictorial narratives the legends of antiquity acquire a new spin and charge.


In his Death of Jatayu and Sita Haranam, for example, the forest community goes about its ordinary life calmly, even as, in the air above, Ravana bears Sita away and slashes at the brave, aged Jatayu's wings - as though the forest dwellers were waiting to read the news in the papers the following day. As in the Rajput miniatures, a range of events, past and future, occur simultaneously within the same frame; and, as in a Brueghel painting, life goes on regardless of the epic, cataclysmic, traumatic events that have revolutionised history. .....