On Tyeb Mehta’s Kali

Dilip Chitre

text of lecture to be delivered under the auspices of Copal Art Ltd at the India
International Centre, New Delhi on August 9, 2008
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( text copyright Dilip Chitre, 2008)
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1.
Works of art are objects of attention that arouse curiosity, and deepen, widen, and
heighten awareness within the magic boundaries of their surrounding frame that excludes
or seems to shut out the rest of the universe while we dwell on them. As we contemplate
them, they awe us by their uniqueness and their exquisite location. If anything, they
represent Shiva---the unsurpassable oneness of the cosmic spirit----and make us realize
that we are part of them, distancing from them only out of the force of Shakti, the desire
to be one with their omnipresence.

Our desire is to merge with the Other or the object that a work of art forever is, and not to
resist it--- and it compels and drives us to interpret it, to appropriate and assimilate it in
an act of self-recognition. The Kashmir Shaivaites called it pratyabhijna.

Art gives birth to its own viewers and turns them into its lovers. It is a profoundly erotic
relationship as it is an echo of the mutual coherence and perpetual resonance of the coital
embrace of Shiva and Shakti---or Shivadvaya as the Kashmir Shaivite aestheticians knew
it.

2.

When I look at Tyeb Mehta’s painterly opus as a whole, my attention is particularly

drawn to his series of Kali and Mahishsura images where beauty grapples with the
grotesque, decontextualising and recontextualising the familiar images from Hindu
mythology and iconography, and the resulting masterpieces reaching the level of
Francisco da Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Children.

I am not suggesting that Tyeb Mehta is influenced by Goya, though if he were, it would
be a fact to celebrate. Neither am I suggesting that Mehta is reinterpreting Hindu
mythology and iconography, though if he were doing so, it only proves once again how
art transcends religious faith and replaces it with something more universal and
accessible to minds shaped by a variety of ethnocentric belief. I look at Mehta’s work
purely as an art lover. I talk about it only to verbally stress my own act of attention and
my own frame of awareness.

3.
At the outset, I must emphasize that Tyeb Mehta has more than one painting entitled Kali
and it is a series of works that also includes his Mahishasuramardini as well as, by
contextual extension, his Mahishasura. All these works bring into the frame of the canvas
destructive forces, sometimes acting against each other, and sometimes the divine
triumphing over the evil. What we see within each Kali is an all-consuming, cosmic force
represented by a fearsome and grotesque human female face----the face of The Terrible
Mother as Erich Neumann would put it.

Tyeb Mehta’s Kali and Mahishasura series contain an aspect of his work where his
artistic agenda seems to have been to explore the meeting point of the sacred, the terrible,
the violent, the grotesque and the beautiful. In terms of the Rasa theory, it could be seen
as an effort to evoke the roudra, the beebhatsa, and the adhbuta feelings, and ultimately
through a coherence of the three, the shanta rasa or the serene feeling in each single
framed composition.

I would like to take a closer look at Tyeb Mehta’s three Kalis: 1. Kali-1(1988)-150x125
cms Oil on Canvas; 2. Kali-2(1988) 170x187.5 cms Oil on Canvas; and 3. Kali-3 (1989),
150x102 cms, Oil on Canvas.

What one notices in the three images are the visual features they share. In all of them, the
figure of Kali is in a dance-like motion or a dynamic arrest in such motion. All three
images have in their background flat coloured planes of contrasting or complementary
shades, sometimes diagonally intersecting one another, sometimes tilted towards or away
from one another, but never parallel to the frame of the canvas.

All three Kalis hold on to the torn limbs of a victim resembling parts of the human
anatomy. In Kali-2 the victim on Kali’s shoulder is apparently human. All three Kalis are
painted in the same blue hue. Their mouths with a red protruding tongue are all alike.
Two of them reveal bare teeth.

The faces of the three Kalis, however, have subtly varied expressions. Kali-1 has nearly
devoured her victim and seems to be almost content as she is finishing off her meal. Kali-
2 is still grappling with her victim and is bringing out all her inner physical force. Kali-3
has finished her victim, save some ripped flesh that she holds in her right hand.

The backgrounds of the three images also vary in colour and angle of arrangement, the
diagonals dominating Kali-1 and Kali-3 and the tilted horizontal planes separating Kali-2
from them. His roller-flattened reds, blues, greens, blacks, and greys in the background
intensify the figurative element at the centre of many of Tyeb Mehta’s compositions.

When one looks closely, the centre of each painting is essentially a figurative drawing.
However, the flat coloured planes in the background function like a stage or a film set.
The figure or figures or parts of human anatomy that perform on this set are always in
suspended motion. Mehta creates dramatic or choreographed events on the canvas, so to
speak.

In Kali-1 the backdrop and the Kali are both different hues of blue. Kali’s red mouth and
protruding red tongue stand out against her blue skin tone. The deep pink of the hand of
her victim resonates with the red of her mouth; the mutilated limbs of her victim both off-
centre and off bottom-of-centre are a paler pink. A black diagonal from the bottom left
rises towards the right and a green rectangle from the bottom left touches her right foot.
There is a curved, but basically rectangular pale pink plane that occupies the backstage
from the other side.

In Kali-2, the blue grey at the top, the black at the centre, and the pale beige at the bottom
of the frame resonate variously with the deep blue Kali at the centre forestage and the
medium brown male figure on her right shoulder.

In Kali-3, the dominant backdrop is a deep red. It is mitigated by a deep green triangular
plane at the left hand bottom of the frame and a pink triangular plane at the bottom
centre. This Kali has short black tresses on either side and a black hand that seems to be
her victim’s where her own blue hand should have been. This Kali, too, is deep blue.

In all the three Kalis, a protruding belly is a distinguishing feature of the figure. It is
obvious that the painter has stressed it.

4.

In the Kali series and the related Mahishasura and Mahishasuramardini works, Tyeb
Mehta has moved away from the passionate brushwork of an earlier period to geometrical
simplicity, austerity of palette, and minimality of linear flourishes. His masterly drawing
skills remain at the core of his compositions.

His images arrive on the canvas with the authority of statements. “This is it,” he seems to
tell his viewer with a sense of finality. Or sometimes, he seems to make us feel that we
are under arrest; our eyes must move only within the framed canvas and not away from it.
It is a warning to art critics and verbalizing viewers. Also worth noting is the artist’s use
of flat coloured planes that signify his refusal to create depth by working on two-
dimensionality of perspective. He is making a transparent statement about his style of
composition. The drawing remains at the centre of his statement. The coloured planes are
forces created out side it.

Ramchandra Gandhi, in his brilliantly insightful book Svaraj, ( Vadhera Art Gallery, New
Delhi, 2002), quotes Tyeb Mehta as ‘confessing’,

“ I have always been attracted to the mother goddess...It’s a primordial image...at

Shantiniketan in Bengal I could feel the presence of Kali everywhere.”

The philosopher contributing a seminal work to art criticism and aesthetics in the form of
Svaraj proceeds to draw our attention to the fact that Tyeb Mehta’s Kali is pregnant and
we realize that there is indeed a big bulge in her belly.

Suddenly, the image acquires significance of a different order. Traditional images of Kali
in brass, folk paintings, and kitsch posters emphasize the goddess’s ferocious and
destructive mood, with her red tongue dripping with blood, with a garland of human
heads around her neck, or with a supine male figure trampled under her feet.

Those images evoke destruction and dissolution, a fit of awesome anger and insatiable
vengeance. They remind us that Kali is the Black One, Elemental Darkness personified,
the ultimate destroyer, and Shakti as the annihilator of ignorance and evil in the world.
But they do not visibly remind us that she is Ma or The Cosmic Mother and Tyeb Mehta
does just that by accentuating her protruding belly. We suddenly understand that Kali---as
Time incarnate----is protecting the future by destroying the evil present.

5.

Images belong to and comprise, a part of visual discourses that illustrate long chains of
cultural narratives with their mythological milestones. Tyeb Mehta’s Kali series is one of
the finest examples of a contemporary amplification of a traditional visual discourse. We
treat images as visual texts and as a reader of texts my attention is drawn more to some
features of the text than others. Ramchandra Gandhi has done a similar thing by engaging
visitors to an exhibition curated by him in an open dialogue on what they saw in Tyeb
Mehta’s Kali. His method was prodding, probing, provoking, and drawing out verbal
responses from viewers who would have otherwise remained silent.

6.

It is not just that the painting Kali communicates various things to various viewers. It is
also that viewers say something back to Kali. For devotees of the goddess, the painting is
just one among hundreds of thousands of representations or a symbolic presence of their
deity. Such viewers may be, and usually are, blind to art. Viewers of art bring something
of their own previous experience of art to the work of art presented to them. They also
bring with them their taste in art and their own aesthetic ideology.

At the outset, I mentioned the great Spanish painter, Francisco da Goya’s painting Saturn
Devouring One of His Own Children. I recalled it because both Goya’s Saturn and Tyeb’s
Kali are portrayed as committing an act of cannibalism and violence. Such portrayals are
rare in high art. The Greek and Roman myth that is the source of Goya’s work and the
Hindu myth at the source of Tyeb’s work apart, both the paintings may evoke revulsion
( the beebhatsa ), terror ( the roudra ), and yet are riveting ( being adbhuta ).

I wish I could show here an image of Goya’s work. The original painting is in Madrid’s
Prado museum but just to get an idea, one can find it in any book on Goya or even on the
internet. Goya painted Saturn Devouring One of His Children after seeing the devastation
brought about by the Napoleonic wars. Tyeb Mehta, as brilliantly argued by
Ramachandra Gandhi, was profoundly affected by the partition riots and genocide in
India. Goya’s work, unlike Tyeb Mehta’s, is almost monochromatic black on a flat yellow
grey save the red at the mouth of Saturn. However both Saturn and Kali have a ferocious
stance and a fierce aspect. They are visually similar as compositions that use diagonals
with great force and power across the space of the canvas.

However, Goya’s masterpiece has gruesome and horrifying properties. It is a black

painting in every sense. It does not make us humble before Saturn or Cronos. We are
distanced from the image by its relentless cynicism and loss of faith in human values.

In Tyeb Mehta’s painting, though grotesque, Kali is not repulsive. Her destructive dance
is in self defence. She is destroying the evil brought to the world by men and male
monsters. She is protecting her own pregnancy and the will to deliver a future world even
as she is consuming the present. There is a dramatic poise in Kali---a choreographed
pause. As in many other paintings of Mehta, diagonal movements, off-centre focal points,
tilted planes of flat colour---all contribute to catharsis, aesthetic rapture, release of the
shanta rasa.

I started by referring to Kashmir Shaivism because in it I find the most complete aesthetic
theory India has produced. It is natural for me to recall three of the Shivasutras that seem
appropriate to me for this occasion:

Atma Nartaka/
Rang’o Antaratma/
Prekshani Indriyani/

or

The Self is the Dancer.

The Inner Self is the Stage.
The Senses are the Audience.

7.

One cannot escape the impact of a painting by describing it in words. Verbal texts are
meant to send us back to the visual texts that provoked them in the first place. That is
how painterly discourses and verbal discourses converge and diverge. My role as a
speaker here was just that of an humble catalyst.

Thank you for patiently listening to me.

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