Latika Katt spoke of herself, not without justifiable pride, as the only woman in India who had her own furnace and kiln.
On January 7, 2025, Latika sent me a message saying, “firing moulds tonight.” The accompanying pictures showed the open-air kiln cast in the blazing light, as lengthy shadows formed around the red glare of the inferno. Latika was visibly engaged -- she handled every stage of the casting process. That she would work with up to 175 kilograms of molten bronze speaks of her zealous approach and feisty spirit. Even as she grew older, size and immensity of conception were not an impediment. In recent years, she had executed “Snowscape,” a work which was nearly 11 feet high, in black and white marble, carved in six sections.
In a flurry of exchanges earlier this month, she wrote of showing in Jaipur in April, and of her newest work on the Varanasi ghats, a subject of seemingly endless fascination for Katt. Her death would have cut her off, mid gesture as it were, even as her works for the upcoming India Art Fair were completed.
Katt’s ungendered practice as a sculptor drew from the elements around her. In the taming and fashioning of metal, it recalled the work of Piloo Pochkhanawala, who blazed a trail with the sheer audacity and size of her sea-facing works in Bombay. Katt’s work, however, was much more contextual: the burning ghats of Banaras, the rituals of death, and the implicit presence of the Ganga were subjects that she continually returned to. One of her finest works in this strain was “Dasaswamedh Ghat on Makar Sankranti,” for which she was awarded at the Beijing Biennale in 2010. Cast in a single piece of bronze, it revealed numerous bathers preparing to take a dip in the Ganga.
At the other end of the scale was plant and animal life in various stages of germination, growth and decay, rendered in marble and bronze to mimic the inchoate processes of nature. In a striking combination of elements, as disparate as marble and aluminium, Katt conveyed the palpable oozing sap of plants. In her vivid theatre of observation, nature was untamed and self-generative, and it was the artist’s role to vivify that process through ingenuity and experimentation.
For Katt, this pattern of death and rebirth thus balanced the life cycles that she would witness, and then reproduce in materials that were durable and lasting. Born in Varanasi and educated at the Doon School, Katt was one of five girls in a batch of 500 boys. She learnt her lessons in gender equality early in life. Katt later trained at the Banaras Hindu University, where she fought for her place in the sculpture department. She acknowledged the influence of Dhanraj Bhagat, K.S. Kulkarni and Balbir Singh Katt on her work. Balbir Katt had trained in Santiniketan under Ramkinkar Baij, and enhanced the idea of monumentality and drawing from classical sources even further than his mentor. Like Rodin, whom she greatly admired, Katt chose to live in relative artistic isolation in Varanasi, her garden and the city providing her with the inspiration that she sought. Like a naturalist observing organic growth, her fascination with the insect world and its transformation of the earth’s surface, roots, tubes and trees shaped the more contemplative, even joyous, parts of her work.
Another important theme in her oeuvre emerged from her close observation of sites of death rituals. In papier mache, stone, bronze and cow dung, she returned to death as a subject and to Varanasi as the space for its contemplation. Caught in a crisis for funds in the early part of her career, she created “Sati” and “Arthi” with bamboo and cow dung. More recently, in a note to me, she wrote, “very small bronze Burning ghat. Inspired by a temporary ghat made just very near my studio. Bodies were being burnt there 24 hours for many months.” The colour of the bronze aflame with the processes of cremation, along with its pitted and textured surface, and the interplay of light and shade gave this work a stunning immediacy.
By placing her works on the Varanasi landscape directly on the walls, Katt lent them a painterly cast. Later on, she seemingly framed and rendered these works in sandstone, bronze and papier mache, depicting the city in a Google-Map-like view, or as an archaeological site.
Katt’s most enduring work, however, may well be her sculpture of Jawaharlal Nehru at Jawahar Bhavan. Monumental and naturalistic, and based on a photograph by Homai Vyarawalla, it remains a life-affirming work and evidence of her enormous skills in naturalistic portraiture. In Katt’s passing, we have lost an artist who worked with complete absorption in her work and an inviolable independence of spirit.