First published on 24th April 2024
Gogi Saroj Pal passed away on January 27, 2024, a few months before her retrospective opened its portals at the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) in Janpath. The show, Gogi Saroj Pal: Mythic Femininities, brings together paintings and sculptures spanning six decades of her artistic trajectory from the 1960s to the 2020s. In doing so, it pays tribute to an artist who will best be remembered for forging a unique visual syntax to express her singular brand of feminism.
The exhibition eschews a chronological order, with some of Gogi’s earliest creations placed at the far end of the gallery. Four of them, done during her time at art college, are in the genre of memento mori and vanitas still life paintings. After a brief stint at Banasthali Vidyapith in Rajasthan to learn painting, Gogi went on to pursue a five-year graduate diploma course at Lucknow’s Government College of Arts and Crafts. This was followed by a postgraduate diploma at the Delhi College of Art. It was here that she came in contact with live models and had the opportunity to practice nude studies. The depiction of the female nude would dominate much of her art practice.
Gogi was born in 1945 in Neoli, Uttar Pradesh, to a family of freedom fighters and writers who hailed from Himachal Pradesh. She spent a considerable amount of time in the hills, especially in the Kangra district, where she met and sketched a community of Tibetan refugees who fled to India to seek refuge in the 1950s. In her somber 1982 oil painting, “Young Monks”, ghoulish figures with shaven heads emerge from the shadows. This dark and gloomy palette can also be discerned in “Being a Woman”, painted two years later, which is part of a series that focused on what it meant to be a woman in a patriarchal society. The theme is carried forward in Gogi’s “Halley’s Comet” paintings done in 1986. They depict forlorn-looking women in the nude, carrying babies in their laps. This was an allusion to the superstition that the comet’s reappearance every 75 years caused ill health in pregnant women, especially those carrying male offspring.
Gogi broke free from tradition, with the support of her grandmother, Prem Devi, who served as a strong role model. A school teacher, Devi was one of the first women in Lahore to be a salaried employee and encouraged her granddaughter to be free-spirited and follow her own path. In her search of a visual vocabulary to express her interrogation of societal structures, Gogi turned to indigenous sources of imagery. During a visit to Bengal’s Bishnupur, she came across a medieval terracotta figure of the celestial nymph Menaka being steered by the Hindu god Kartikeya. The image of the half-horse half-woman with its sexual connotations left an indelible mark on her.
In the late 1980s, Gogi began experimenting with hybrid women in her “Kamadhenu” and “Dancing Horse” series. A 1990 oil on canvas work from the first series depicts a creature on all fours with the face of a woman and the body of a cow. It references the divine-bovine, Goddess Kamadhenu, who was produced during the churning of the oceans by the gods and the demons. While her red hair is let loose and streams in all directions, she appears like a subjugated and subdued milch cow. In an oil and acrylic on canvas painting, “Swyambarum”, a dark figure is mounted on a fair woman-horse, keeping her in check. While the painting refers to the practice of a Swyambarum in which women could choose their partners, it makes equally clear that in reality they had very little control and say over their lives. For her “Dancing Horse” paintings, Gogi took inspiration from Islamic imagery, such as the Buraq, a magical horse-like creature who served as a mount for Prophet Muhammad in his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. Besides dipping into mythological sources, the artist also alludes to the North Indian practice of training horses to dance on command, which she regarded as intrinsically opposed to the animal’s nature. Beguiled as one is at first by Gogi’s sweet-faced, attractive protagonists, it only gradually dawns on the viewer that her works are a strident critique of social mores.
Gogi’s pantheon of hybrid creatures also included the kinnari, a mythical winged creature that is a part of both Buddhist and Hindu iconography. Possessing a human torso and a bird-like lower body, it is believed to inhabit the Himalayan forests. Gogi chanced upon the mythical creatures in sculptural form in several temples and developed a suite of paintings around them. Done around the same time as her “Kamadhenu” series, she would revisit the motif years later. In 2008, after a terrible fall, Gogi had to undergo a hip replacement surgery. This left her bed-ridden for almost three years. To take her mind off the excruciating pain, she began painting her feathered females again. At first, they resembled the house sparrow with spindly legs, and later, the flying kinnaris that one can espy in her “Kinnari & Kinnari Mantras” series. Incapacitated as she was, Gogi resumed work with her usual energetic spirit, painting these intimate works in her lap, and developing multiple borders, which saw the motif of the bird-woman being replicated like a meditative mantra. Even though she herself was immobile, her imagination could take flight through these creatures.
Home and displacement are other themes that reoccur in Gogi’s paintings. With her maternal relatives living in Lahore, she witnessed first-hand the horrors and migration that accompanied Partition. She was deeply aware of what it meant to be a refugee and lose one’s homeland. “Homecoming”, her oil and acrylic on canvas pasted on Masonite board, depicts a hybrid with a woman’s face, a bird’s wings, and a bovine body flying over a dense Rousseau-like tropical forest. By giving her women wings, Gogi lends them the agency to return to the homes they had once inhabited.
Two of the most striking works in the show are done a decade apart. There is the 1992 large format painting, “Paper Boats -- Vision of Dream”, made of gouache and metallic paint on rice paper pasted on plywood, and the 2005 acrylic and digital print on canvas, “All these Flowers are for You (Earth)”. Unlike most of Gogi’s other works, the nayikas featured here are fully clothed. In “Paper Boats”, the protagonist floats paper boats in circular swirling waters: this alludes to the hopes and aspirations of women, which are often swept away in the tide of time by a patriarchal society. In “All these Flowers”, a wistful woman donning a floral garment appears to offer flowers to the viewer as a symbol of hope.
The exhibition has a separate section devoted to two series - “Nayika” and “Hathyogini”. The protagonists in the former seem coquettish, while those in the latter appear more empowered. In classical Indian drama, dance and art, the nayika or romantic heroine epitomizes Indian womanhood.Sheoften plays second fiddle to the hero and her moods are dependent on her lover’s actions. Gogi plucked this archetype from traditional sources and made it her own. Unlike many of the nayikas in miniature paintings, who are often spied with their beloved, Gogi’s heroines are always alone.
Gogi’s study of colour comes to the fore in several of these gouache paintings, where her juxtaposition of pigments creates striking arrangements. She shifted from oil to gouache because she felt that the new medium could impart a fluidity to her forms and deliver a sharpness to her colours. Akin to miniatures, the gouache works have coloured borders framing the central narrative. The 1995 painting, “Nayika”, depicts a nubile, nude female, arranging her hair and gazing at the viewer. Her whitish-grey voluptuous contours, outlined with swift black lines, form a vivid contrast to a sunny yellow background. Accentuating her attractiveness are her kohl-rimmed eyes and red alta-stained hands and soles. In another paper work rendered in gouache and metallic paint, also bearing the same title, the protagonist has one hand draped over her head, while the other hand cradles a crescent moon, whose reflection can be spotted in wavy waters. In all these works, however, the women appear to be boxed in by the frames.
Gogi’s “Hathyogini-Kali” paintings are an amalgam of characteristics of the Tantric goddess as well of hatha yoga, a form that uses physical techniques to channel energy. The artist was keenly interested in cults around maternal figures and godwomen, who led large congregations in yoga, traditionally considered a male bastion. In a work from a 1997 series, the bare-breasted, deep blue yoga practitioner contorts her body against a red backdrop, while in another work, she is depicted as lithe and on the move.
Gogi translates her hathyoginis into sculptural forms in what appear to be some of her last creations. In “Hathyogini-Kali 1”, a celadon green yogini stands atop a smiling yellow lioness, balanced on one foot in a yoga posture. Nearby, the sculpture “I Will Draw my Own Laxman Rekha”, fashioned in polyurethane colour on fibreglass, depicts a bright blue female nude with flowing tresses, twisting on tip toe. She appears a far cry from the downcast women in “Halley’s Comet,” who appear to have resigned themselves to their fate. Here is a woman, comfortable in her skin, who has cast off societal constraints and insists on dancing to her own inner tune. Much like Gogi herself.
Gogi Saroj Pal: Mythic Femininities is on at DAG, Janpath, from April 6 to May 25, 2024.
Meera Menezes is a Delhi-based art writer and independent curator.