In 2012, writer and illustrator Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva (Harper Collins) offered us the artist’s unique take on the Mahabharata. “I am intrigued by the alertness and editorial flair a sutradhaar needs while engaging with a live audience,” says the author of graphic novels like Kari (2008, Harper Collins) and the soon-to-be-released Sauptik . “One needs to blend erudition with entertainment and have one’s finger on the pulse of an audience. Since it isn’t top-down delivery, sutradhaar s must really know their stuff to engage with contrarians and seekers.”
Patil’s Adi Parva found its sutradhaar in Ganga, the river goddess, unsentimental mother and witness to history. “She straddles the worlds, involved and detached at once, telling stories to ease the journeys of those in her audience,” explains the artist. She is a far cry from the unflinching hero in Sauptik ’s Ashwatthama. “He is a warrior who could never be the best, a roiling and insecure man who spent his life yearning for his father’s approval, and ended up being the assassin of his childhood friends’ sleeping children,” Patil adds. “He has a wound that will not heal, and his journey is of tending to that wound.”
Patil has found the device of the sutradhaar to be an ideal way of bringing the stories closer to the present. “The sutradhaar ’s setting could be modern-day Varanasi, for all we know,” she says. “The queries, jokes, disagreements and scepticism that the sutradhaar encounters echo the sentiments of contemporary audiences when faced with traditional lore.”
With such a mammoth subject as the Mahabharata, Patil’s research included consuming everything from Roberto Calasso, Devdutt Pattanaik, to Iravati Karve and even Bibek Debroy’s ten-volume translation of the epic. She found the avatar of her story to be, in essence, an ecology. “It is about the alliance between the avatar and the earth goddess, Bhoo, along with other entities who are in synchronicity with nature,” she says, “Thousands of tiny pieces started falling into place after that, like the way so many characters in the epics are so firmly tied with the elements.”
In addition to research and material, Patil was faced with an abundance of information. “My own work process is ‘ via negativa ’, through continuous elimination of what does not belong in the tapestry,” she explains her method. “The choice of sutradhaar is a natural filter to the specific stories that make the editorial cut.”
And there’s another analogy to make matters simple: “One sieves through impossible volumes of sand from a riverbed in the hope of finding that one potential gem. And after having chanced upon a keeper, you begin the tireless time in the lapidary,” she says. “You keep polishing facets of raw rock until you reveal the fire at its heart. That is possibly the best way to explain it. There is only a hazy blueprint and a lot of my editorial decisions happen on the gut level.”
When it came to the artwork for Sauptik , Patil says, “While I was working, there would be images encountered somewhere along the way that spoke to my bones. If you look at my works carefully enough, you will meet them all.”
The graphic artist admires several artists and aspires to more or less be in their lineage. “(Nicholas) Roerich-esque mountains, playful Kalighat-style Hanuman, war scenes whose composition echoes sculptures from Angkor Wat, and many colours and forms from Tantric imagery,” she says. “None of these were done gratuitously. I have lived with this material for years and allowed it to guide me.”
Sauptik also contains the traditional representations of Gajalakshmi, or the mourning Shiva with Sati’s corpse on his shoulder. Each image reworked to reflect Patil’s own unique aesthetic: her search for painters who relish the use of light, the kaleidoscope of images inside her head.
“All lore can be read on many levels. For instance, people often ignore the Bhoo aspect in favour of sociological, historical, feminist, often-polarising readings,” Patil says, adding that she’s uninterested in pulling individual characters out of their contextual location in the tale. “I have worked very hard with the artwork and choice of tales to keep flitting between purush and prakriti , the deeply personal and sprawlingly multi-versal.”
All this, she says, leads back to the mythological concept of darshan . “That is how the gaze of wisdom must aspire to be — attentive to detail and to the big picture; able to slide between one’s own eyes and the eyes of the ‘other’. Most people get caught up with one or the other.”
The authors are students at SCM Sophia.
Sauptikwill release at the end of September. Visit amrutapatil.blogspot.in for more details.
