The kohbar image painted on the wall of a marriage room serves as a talisman to produce a fruitful union and protect the ceremony from the evil eye. The painting must follow a traditional iconography to be effective but in her Kohbar the artist Amrita Das only used some of its elements to produce a recognizable but abstract image of the kohbar. She said she was “only thinking of Lotus, Bamboo, and the sweet smell of Cloves”.
In the center, the Lotus plant with its many leaves represents female fertility – always the dominant image in the traditional kohbar as it is here. The light and dark intersecting green lines represent a stylized Bamboo grove, the male element. Typically the Bamboo grove is much smaller than the Lotus and often gets lost in all the traditional decorative elements of fish, birds and other auspicious images but with her Bamboo grove Amrita Das breaks completely with the accepted iconography and makes a deliberate and significant change. She depicts the Bamboo and the Lotus, the male and the female elements, as equals, the one embracing the other set in a field of red clove flowers which Amrita Das calls “ the spice of married life”. Cloves play an important role in Hindu ritual. They are offered to the gods in temples and protect babies and newly married couples from the evil eye. The four naina-jogins that are painted in the four corners of the marriage room are also present in the four corners of her Kohbar.
Amrita Das’ Kohbar began as an inchoate idea, not even conscious perhaps, when Tara Books invited the artist down to Chennai for a book making workshop some time ago. The result was the wonderful Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit, a book of paintings and prose, in which she muses on what it means to be a girl and considers her own future. The life of girls is hard from childhood on. There was always housework to do and no moment for oneself. No time to even dream. Would this ever end she thought. Would she ever have some time for herself? And even marriage, would that finally give her some freedom?
Six years after her marriage Amrita Das answers the question of marriage and freedom for women with her vision of a new kohbar in The Kohbar of Lotus, Bamboo, and Clove. She sees this new Kohbar not as a ritual formula for fertility but rather as a union here on earth of the cosmic male and female forces in the universe – the Bamboo and Lotus, two wreaths circling each other, are Shiva and Parvati as the god Ardhanarishvara, half male and half female in one body, together but separate.
The Lotus, Bamboo and Clove is the third kohbar painting that I’m aware of in the last couple of years which promotes Ardhanarishwara as the example of a marriage based on equality and respect for the female and the male. Such a marriage is one in which there is freedom. This is what Amrita Das’ revolutionary painting promises, a new traditional Kohbar for a new generation.
Amrita Das, The Kohbar of Lotus, Bamboo, and Clove, acrylic on a single sheet of Canson art paper, 4×3 feet, 2019. Signed and available.