Krishna with the Pandava brothers. Painting by Giampaolo Tomassetti.
Humans, as beings with a heart, mind, and soul, have been telling stories since the beginning of time. But why exactly? Is it to find a sense of rapture that can keep us going amidst the dreariness of life? Or is it to recognize ourselves in these stories— our confusions, inadequacies, flights of emotion, and the occasional spark of meaning and purpose? Perhaps, it’s a bit of both.
However, is it the same story that’s told over and over again that survives or is it the one that flows with its raconteur? In any case, what better story to experiment with than one of the greatest epics, the Mahabharata?
The epic, written by sage Ved Vyasa, is written as a Sanskrit poem and is the longest epic poem known to human civilization. It can be described as many things— the story of a great war, of right and wrong, of power and duty, of life, death, and Moksha, of familial struggles, and more. It is all that jazz but at the very core of it, it is a drama that covers the entire human experience. It is for the householder, for the artist, for the philosopher hermit, and for the student. It is for the man, the woman, and the transgender. It is for the traditionalist and the iconoclast. It is for the one who lives today as well as the ones who lived before us and will live after us.
It is not for nothing that a verse from the epic proclaims, yadihAsti tadanyatra yannEhAsti na tat kvacit, which translates as, that which exists in the Mahabharata exists everywhere in the world, that which is not in the Mahabharata does not exist anywhere else.
And so, as endless as it is, it has been told endlessly since its inception. At the heart of it, it is the story of two clans of a family— the Pandavas and the Kauravas— both of whom claim the royal throne of Hastinapur. Unlike the other great Hindu epic, Ramayana, which is remembered annually on the festival of Diwali, the Mahabharata is recalled mostly (and perhaps, more frequently) whenever anyone refers to the Bhagavad Gita. It is in context of the Pandava prince Arjuna’s trepidation to fight the war and the counsel he receives from his charioteer Krishna, avatar of Lord Vishnu, to fight it that we often hear of the epic’s stories and characters. While most of us never fight it out like warriors (and soldiers), we do battle out our daily lives day in and day out.
It’s a complicated task, then, to reimagine and reinvent a seemingly war story to fit the contours of each of our lives. But it’s what Giampaolo Tomassetti and Amruta Patil have done. Where Tomassetti’s Mahabharata paintings invite us to speculate on the grandeur of the story, Patil’s Parva Duology graphic novels lay threadbare the humanity of it.
Dialogue between princess Amba and Bheeshma, where she chastises him for her misfortune. From Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva, the first of the duology.
For Patil, 42, who lives and works out of Goa, “good mythology is good psychology”. She sees the human being in a character because she says, “the devas and the asuras are you, the churning is yours”. She explains, for instance, that evil or dissonant energy in environment always seems to outnumber the good or consonant energy. Much like Kauravas and Pandavas.
Her characters— whether godly or human and whether male, female, or everything in between— speak their mind much like we do today. Their emotions resembles ours and their struggles ours. Her Mahabharata, then, is not a mere religious or historical event but a universal human experience. Patil, who started studying Hindu mythology in her early twenties, balks at the godly and pedantic characterizations that are common to popular retellings. Instead, she considers her work to be a journey of a true seeker. “I walk the sadhaka’s path, taking my lessons where I come across them, flitting between reverence and irreverence, unafraid to blow out the chaff of outgrown times so the essence remains clear,” she says. Her work may not be understood or appreciated by traditionalists but she points out that those who know of poetry of Akka Mahadevi and Laal Dedh, who both raged against and adored their divine beloved Shiva, will grasp her true intent and effort.
Tomassetti, 66, was born and lives in Italy, on the other hand had a different issue. Talking about the challenge of painting Krishna, he says, “how can an artist give a sense of reality to spiritual body if he never saw one in his life like me?” His Krishna is ethereal, both for the delicate color palette as well as the gentleness of his being. Tomassetti found his way to Mahabharata by way of Hare Krishna movement, which he joined after he longed for something deeper following his studies in philosophy at university.
Both, however, agree that their art has been a spiritual experience for them. Patil spent eight years entirely immersed in reading, scripting, and painting for the books, not doing anything else. For Tomassetti, it took five years to complete his twenty-three large paintings. The latter, who is also muralist and fresco artist, not only captures a stunning amount of detail in his paintings but also makes the epic come alive with élan. “It is a poem, so I tried to catch that poetry by images,” he shares. “It was a very intimate experience when I was producing it in the solitude of the studio and I did not care if it would please the Indians or the Italians or the Americans,” he adds.
Like many, he too found himself moved by the story of Karna, who was born a Pandava but nursed by the Kauravas. He likens the tragic exchange between him and his mother Kunti with that of Madonna, or Mary, with her infant, Jesus Christ. “I called that painting Piety and in general, I like those moments of love between friends and parents as moments of hope in between of a huge tragedy”, Tomassetti explains.
Karna and Kunti before the war. Painting by Giampaolo Tomassetti.
But while many may have the intent to reimagine and reinvent a tale as timeless as the Mahabharata, not many manage to do it well enough to stoke the wonder and curiosity of the audience at large. How, then, did Patil and Tomassetti manage it?
Patil says that while she was moved by Yusuf Lien ‘Bangalorewala’’s Mirabai title for Amar Chitra Katha, for her visual style she was inspired by South Indian sculptures, the color schematics of Rajasthani miniature paintings, French painters Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon, and Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Tomassetti, on the other hand, researched the television depictions of Mahabharata but ultimately used his imagination in marrying the Indian aesthetics to the Italian art of Renaissance and Baroque styles. “My mood was not to be overwhelmed by the tradition itself, neither from my main one because I would be stiff in the mud of rules which is the opposite of a possible evolution and of uncovering new languages to actually say the same things,” he says.
From Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva.
From Giampaolo Tomassetti’s Mahabharata.
But beyond the technique, what drives the artist to work with such a story?
Patil says that even though Mahabharata can be read endlessly, it has to be reinvented with deftness. “Lack of imagination and awareness, whether of self or otherwise, needs to be pegged firmly onto storytellers,” she says. Alluding to the growing influence of a Hindu nationalist segment in India, she points out that the Hindu lore has been wrongly appropriated of late, which has left little room for artists like Patil. “We have allowed them to hijack what was equally our own”, she explains, “and our response to bigotry has been to be embarrassed of everything Hindu, rather than be embarrassed for the bad storytellers”. As a storyteller herself, she uses the sutradhar as the narratorial device, where the characters of Ganga and Ashwatthama tell the tales in the two books. She was, however, cautious to not over-emphasize their perspectives and focused on them as witnesses to the events.
In line with the transcendental nature of his work, the paintings were a part of his spirituality for Tomassetti. “The ego made a step back to leave room for a collective message of truth and righteousness to emerge, he says, “still one should not forget that the artist always is a filter between inspiration and realization”. He is now working on a series of paintings from the Ramayana with the painter Paolo Libralesso.
Looking at the example of Patil and Tomassetti, it is easy to see how an artist’s style is derived from their personality and personal journeys. In becoming one with themselves, then, artists more accurately depict the rasas (or the essence) of human emotions than the rest of us. However, it is just as important for the receiver of the art, that is the rasika, to find different ways of grasping the art.
In the Indian artistic tradition of Navarasa, i.e., the nine emotions of Shringara (love/beauty), Hasya (laughter), Karuna (sorrow), Raudra (anger), Veera (heroism/courage), Bhayanaka (terror/fear), Bibhatsya (disgust), Adbutha (surprise/wonder) and Shantha (peace or tranquillity), it is the last one that is prized among others when it comes to painting. Art, many artists feel, is supposed to be joyful or immerse both the artist and the receiver in the experience of the scene. It is not a mere indulgence but always has the possibility of being an elevated and a spiritual experience.
In his book, Dance of Siva, the SriLankan writer Anand Coomaraswamy emphasized the subjectivity of both the artist and the receiver of the art, the rasika, to explain the totality of the artistic experience. Where for the artist, he extolled the “intensity of imagination” to feed the “vitality of the tradition”, the true critic according to him was one who could decide which work of art was beautiful (or rasavant) and that which weren’t. For him, to define the beauty of an artwork was to distinguish between illustration of it and the imagination behind it (if any).
It is also believed that most Hindu works, whether of philosophy, religion, art, literature, or music, are attempts at lifting the veil of maya or illusion to uncover the ultimate reality of human experience. In Patil’s context, the maya may be a certain socio-political context that many may find hard to go let of because of ingrained traditional beliefs. In Tomassetti’s, it could be the scale and aesthetics that one may never have thought to associate with these stories. Either way, while the artists may reinvent a timeless story over and over again by becoming one with themselves, it is also incumbent upon the audience to receive the timeless story over and over again by broadening their sense of rapture and recognition.