Meet The Author
Amruta Patil and her graphic Re-Interpretation of Mythologies …
Research, reading, imagination and interpretation – these in simultaneity work its way into Amruta’s graphic texts. Possibly her graphic novels explore the narrative desire in the artist in her. It explores mediums of expression through the rich texture of colours, images and words, weaving and interlocking into each other as thought cobwebs from her to the reader and back to her again. A brief meeting with her at Café Fiction in the Rachna Bookstore at Gangtok, was enough to see that Amruta is a live wire of imagination, vivacity, colours which have the power to pierce through the dark shadows which sometimes threaten our life and positive vibrations. Shadows only brighten the light of life, shadows make us realize the vibrancy of colours. As Amruta spoke to us about her creative journey, the image of Manjushree flashing his fiery sword in the midst of travails, just came to my mind. The creative zeal is masculine and feminine. And an artist is androgenous in creation. As Amruta herself confessed: “Let me spell it out then, since we write the stories we need most: A book of cool, unsentimental mothers could NEVER have been succeeded by another book about mothers. It HAD to be succeeded by a book of tormented, sentimental sons. Birth succeeded by death. Water by Fire. Draped, resolved beauty by unclad, terrifying feral.
One half of my androgynous hermaphrodite self, locks into the other half, thus. What it has always tried to do, 'Kari' on. Self-portraits everywhere, seeking insight, seeking darshan, seeking resolution.”
The graphic novels by Amruta render a rich symbiotic relationship between image, word and the artist herself. An evocating interpretation of the tenth book of the Mahabharata, based on Shiva-Sati love-myth, Sauptik, has some pearls of wisdom to offer to the readers. The image of the flashing sword comes again, as I read through the images and words:
“Hopeless kings have been served by exemplary men. Children of sages, reveal themselves to be fools … there’s simply no saying, who will birth what.”
