It is one of the most satisfying feelings for writers to see the works that they hold dear taking a life of their own in a different medium, attracting a whole new set of admirers. Prabha Varma’s magnum Shyama Madhavam is one such work that has won him laurels from all around. After a stage adaptation, the work has now taken the form of mural art.
On Sunday, a mural art exhibition, with more than 40 paintings based on Shyama Madhavam, opened at the Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan art gallery.
Three artists — Baburaj Elankur, P.V. Narayanan Kutty Malappuram, Vinod Pookkolathur — spent the better part of the past one and a half years in bringing alive on canvas the verse novel that humanises Lord Krishna.
Within its framework
“Mural painting has its own traditional ways of representation and a strict framework within which we have to work. The idea for this series came up during a group exhibition that we were having in Malappuram. Shyama Madhavam had by then achieved a name as a major work in the language. It also had all the qualities that make it possible to be represented in the traditional framework of mural painting. Each of us chose specific parts from Shyama Madhavam which appealed to us and worked on them independently,” says Mr. Baburaj.
Re-imagining Krishna
Inaugurating the exhibition, filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan said that Shyama Madhavam is a work that has re-imagined Krishna.
“The image of Krishna that most of us carry in our minds is of someone involved in love, fun, and frolic. But this work treats him not as an avatar, but as a human, who is pained at the thought whether he is the cause of the Mahabharatha war or whether he was being just, even towards Radha. This work attains an almost spiritual state,” he said.
He commended the artists for managing to capture the spirit of the poetry and representing it on canvas, even within the limitations of mural art.
“If these murals were done before the book was published, they could have been used as accompanying images with the poetry,” he said.
The exhibition will be on at the Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan art gallery till October 17.