Manjot Kaur’s Modern Mythologies
Figure 1: Hybrid Beings 3 , Manjot Kaur, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
In the dark of the night, a woman ventures out into a forest full of dangers. She is dressed in a pink robe, her head covered with a red scarf. She is looking for her lover. One can feel the ruggedness of the forest’s terrain, the lush green flora that engulfs the landscape, and the small pools of water which shimmer in the moonlight. The landscape curves and bends in on itself as if following the prowling woman. This scene (Figure 1) depicts the story of a heroine going to meet her lover—the Abhisarika Nayika, a familiar character across South Asia's vast artistic and literary corpora. But this particular interpretation of the archetype expresses much more to one who looks closely at it. In artist Manjot Kaur’s Hybrid Being 3 (2022), the Abhisarika Nayika is a “hybrid being,” her face metamorphosed with the face of the Jerdon’s courser, a critically endangered nocturnal bird endemic to Southern India. Kaur’s painting is a modern rendering of a traditional myth that employs familiar visual vocabularies to craft stories of alternative relationships between humans and non-humans, aiming to alter our vision of the future.
According to the artist, this work “invokes a philosophical, personal, romantic relationship” between the traditional myth and the endangered bird. There are layers of meanings here: the endangered bird becomes the hero, replacing the male protagonist from the Ashta-Nayika (eight heroines of the Natya Shastra), whom Abhisarika is sneaking out in the forest to meet. Yet here, Abhisarika embodies the bird, thus making her the true “hero” of this tale.
Upon seeing this painting and others from the series at The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University, where the artist, Manjot Kaur, is currently in residence, I was transported into a new world. I was reminded of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, which reiterates the need to produce new myths in an evolving world. Kaur’s work is aligned with this idea—to create new stories for a new world and to animate humans to interact with non-humans in ways we have never imagined.
The most exciting part for me as an art historian is the artist’s use of existing visual vocabulary to produce new myths. Kaur’s paintings create unique mythologies yet use the familiar visual vocabulary of South Asian miniature paintings. In doing so, she situates her work in the long genealogy of South Asian artistic tradition that emphasizes “visual elasticity” and allows for spontaneous insertions of characters, narrative tropes, and new iconographies. Like in Kaur’s work, these spontaneous insertions often historically led to structural disruptions by creating new mythologies.
Figure 2: Hybrid Being 7, Manjot Kaur, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
Figure 3: Khandita Nayika, ca. 1800-1820. Brooklyn Museum
In a personal discussion with the artist, Kaur revealed that she finds her inspiration by observing South Asian miniature paintings in museum collections, exhibition catalogs, and sometimes on the internet. For instance, the heroine of her painting Hybrid Being 7 (Figure 2) is modeled after the one from the Pahari painting Khandita Nayika, now housed at the Brooklyn Museum (Figure 3), with whom she unites the rainbow bee-eater. Even her depiction of flora and fauna is inspired by artistic conventions developed during the early modern period in South Asia. This re-appropriation of traditional imagery acts as a way to place her work in a long genealogy of South Asian painting. Interestingly, the practice of artistic composition by blending a variety of imagery is a phenomenon that has been around for a long time in South Asian art. The early modern art of South Asia is filled with such examples of album-making (muraqqa) in the Mughal period, which contained pages of both paintings and illuminated calligraphy, a practice that originated in early fifteenth-century Iran. Many examples from the Mughal period provide a precedent for creating new mythologies in the context of an established tradition. For instance, a folio from the Gulshan album, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection (Figure 4), shows a complex sequence of successive interventions—including overpainting, enlargement, and reframing of the central image—executed from the mid-16th to the early 17th century, along with an earlier figure under the current central one. The underlying figure can be stylistically attributed to circa 1550 in Kabul, which shows how the collection practices of the Mughals contributed to the making of this folio. While the folio itself is constructed with several different painted fragments, the subject of the folio “Hunters in a Forest” is depicted in a blended fashion, and the viewer is entirely unaware of the patchwork until one looks very closely (or conducts technical analysis as in the case of this folio).
Figure 4: Hunters in a Forest (recto), Calligraphy (verso), Folio from Gulshan Album; India, Mughal Empire, 16th - 17th century. From the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, LA County Museum of Art (M.78.9.11)
What sets Kaur’s work apart is that alongside her reworkings of traditional motifs, she introduces thoughtful depictions of newer ideas—the endangered birds in her Hybrid Being series, for example, are placed within carefully rendered artistic depictions of plants native to the bird's place of origin. The nuanced nature of Kaur’s imagery thus creates an impactful work that traces its lineage to an earlier tradition yet marches into a new modern conception of myth-making. Other South Asian artists have experimented with hybrid imagery by fusing female bodies with bird heads. Yet, the intention of making such images varies from artist to artist. For instance, artist Bakula Nayak uses this juxtaposition to express her experiences as a mother, woman, and human (Figure 5). In contrast, Kaur intends to blend the two beings to invite her audiences to create a fantastical narrative around their union.
Figure 5: Untitled work, Bakula Nayak, 2023 (sourced from the artist’s Instagram account.)
Figure 6: While She Births an Ecosystem, Manjot Kaur, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
This is why Kaur’s work is significant in exploring identity and interdependency between humans and non-humans. It refers to Campbell’s advice: "We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.” Another of her works, While She Births an Ecosystem (2020) (Figure 6), shows a female figure birthing nature. This is a compelling and provocative reworking of the Lajjagauri, the Hindu goddess associated with abundance, fertility, and sexuality. The female stands firm on the ground, her legs spread, with a lotus head and holding lotuses in her hands. From her vagina emerges an entire ecosystem supporting the flora and fauna that grows across the painting.
While Kaur’s painting may strike the first-time viewer as a very modern image, this form of Lajjagauri, in fact, dates to the Harappan period (in its most nascent version), with production flourishing between the 2nd and 10th century CE in various parts of the Indian subcontinent. It has been worshiped and revered as a fertility symbol up until today, often by women and girls whose offerings to Lajjagauri are a marker of their wish to be blessed with health, wealth, and progeny (as seen in Figure 7). In While She Births an Ecosystem, Kaur has drawn upon this long-held connotation and furthered the myth of the Lajjagauri. She creates a narrative in which the Lajjagauri manifests her fertility to birth a new ecology in which a symbiotic relationship exists between humans and non-humans, such as plants and animals. This “myth” is an aspirational tale for those of us living in a world with the looming threat of climate change and the destruction of ecosystems because of man-made problems. In drawing from past symbols and myths, Kaur furthers the genealogy of mythology in South Asia by creating new tales for the modern world.
Vaishnavi Patil is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. Her current research is on the origins and development of the mother goddess in South Asia, particularly her representations and the popular practices centered on her. Instagram: @travelingmatrika.