CHENNAI: Deepavali will soon arrive at our doorsteps, laden with colourfully noisy fireworks and ghee-dripping sweets. Life, however, isn’t as simple as opening the door and letting in these festivities, as it used to be back in the day. While an environmentally conscious nation slowly shifts away from all forms of pollution associated with the festival, a growing population, mindful of its health, either approaches the sweetmeats with caution or gulps them, only to descend into a whirlpool of guilt and remorse. The good is not just your plain old friendly good anymore; it now comes packaged along with fair sprinklings of the bad and the evil too.
Celebrating the yin and the yang of our existence is important to better understand the dualities that dwell within us and in the vast expanse of the universe we inhabit. Art has never shied away from this task and artists have portrayed evil with as much generosity as they did when they extolled the virtues prescribed as codes for a model living.
‘The Birth of Evil’, an 18th century Basohli painting, features evil that will haunt the earth for eternity. This form of painting thrived in the 17th and early 18th centuries at the foot of the Himalayas. Painted in multi hues of grey, it depicts 17 heads and 19 creatures, showing up from behind clouds of smoke symbolising the vile in all its glory.
The eternal struggle between the good and the evil has been brilliantly captured by Tyeb Mehta in his iconic painting, ‘Mahishasura’. The painting shot to fame when it broke all records to sell at $1.584 million at Christie’s. The work depicts the battle between the demon Mahishasura and the goddess Durga, who was created to fight the shape-shifting demon and ultimately kill him.
A look at our ancient architectural marvels will also reveal innumerable macabre sculptures of the goddess, trident in hand and conquering the forces of evil. Buddhism too, has its share of statues describing powerful battles between delusion and insight and good and evil.
A statue of the Buddha from 1850, for instance, shows him seated in the bhumisparsha mudra or the earth-touching gesture. When Mara, the god of illusion challenged the Buddha to destroy him, the latter touched the earth with this gesture, calling on the goddess of Earth, who killed Mara by unleashing the fury of floods.
Some of the most disturbing images of evil were the artworks of Spanish artist, Francisco de Goya from the early 19th century. A pagan god devouring the headless carcass of his own son, two old men drinking soup (one almost a skeleton) and representing greed by trying to get all he could even when dead — Goya thus used grotesque as metaphors for violence and wickedness.
His paintings did not celebrate evil but instead, satirised the decay in any civilised society using emblematic visuals. India abounds with festivals that proclaim the victory of good over evil.
Artists too have represented the two in varied perspectives, from time immemorial. As we ready ourselves for the festival of lights, let us accept that it is negativity that allows us to truly understand positivity.