Atul Dodiya

Sabari is a character in the Hindu epic Ramayana. Dodiya first started thinking about Sabari in 1997, when he saw a triptych by Shantiniketan painter Nandalal Bose on Sabari in her youth, middle age and old age. Intrigued by her story before she appears in the Ramayana, Dodiya chooses to depict the young Sabari.   He learnt that for Sabari’s wedding feast, her parents had killed numerous birds, and shocked by the bloodshed, she renounced marriage and these birds reappear throughout the series. 

"Sabari was a story that my mother would tell me when I was a boy. The story remained in my distant memory...All along the Sabari I had seen was old and bent. The spinal column became the first alter image-it became the contrast in the Sabari story. In 1999 I had done a watercolour Woman with Chakki which was a subconscious quotation of Bose's Sabari in her Old Age, this time I decided that Sabari in my works would be someone special, she would be a creation of character, but she would also be lyrical. You could call it an extended meditation of Bose's Sabari in her youth." (Bodhibuzz, February 2006).