The Lost Cow

Myth and Reality
In search of the bovine

It has been an image that recurs in Indian art, legends and mythology. The Indian cow, humpbacked, eyes rimmed with kohl, often creamy white or soft brown, has come to represent the enduring nature of the Indian earth itself as ‘mother’, giver and nurturer of life, whom we also take for granted.

In European cities you sometimes come upon a painted cow in fibreglass, standing in a crowded city centre. It is part of a public art concept that started in Zurich in 1988 called Cow Parade. In India it is often a real cow that stands in the middle of a crowd eating plastic. An Indian cow parade through politically sensitive areas during a festival is often a signal for a communal riot. In Western art the most celebrated icon of a cow is by Damien Hirst, who has sliced and preserved the body of a cow in clear-sided tanks of formaldehyde. In Indian art, images of the cow abound, from painted wall hangings and woven tapestries to the sculpted life-size stone carvings at Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, where a mother cow tenderly nuzzling her newborn calf has survived the gaze of the public through ten centuries.

Many of these different facets of the cow surface in the works of Sidharth. In his most recent series of images, the artist uses the cow as a symbol of his engagement with the world. Sidharth has always had a deep attachment to the earth and its shifting palette of colours, as in an earlier series devoted to exploring the seasons with its many textured colours. In his explorations with the image of the Indian cow, he sometimes locates the cow in its pristine form against a primal landscape of greens where a central figure, a luminous spirit lies supine on a bed of grass, surrounded by what can only be described as a quilt of hidden memories that resonate in the artist’s subconscious mind.

By way of contrast the almost schematic exposure of the cow as seen in an urban setting, with the blue-grey of the buildings as background and ribbons of metalled roads dividing the canvas, reveals the cow in all its vulnerability. Its body has been laid open, its innards exposed, like the mechanical parts of a factory, while it chews upon the garbage that surrounds it. Human beings are also in a similar position, reduced to being purveyors and collectors of plastic refuse. Yet there are also reminders in the other sections of the composition that take the viewer back to a more pristine age, when both the cow and the keeper are depicted in a relationship that is one of nurture and a sense of being dependent on each other.

The sense of irrepressible joy in the nature of both the cow and its life-giving abilities is revealed in its fullest in the canvas ‘The Decorated Cow’ that Sidharth has filmed with Sarabjit Babra. The cow appears to evolve out of the darkness in an almost luminous effigy, as the artist rubs the surface of the canvas with bits of cloth. It is both iconic, like the tablets that have been left behind at Mohenjodaro, and faintly ironic, as if over-burned with ribbons and medals placed upon it by worshippers who would not see the cow as a creature by itself but only their need for it.

It is the duality with which Sidharth both engraves and cherishes his vision of the cow on the canvas or chosen material, that gives his approach a deeper significance – seeking the divine in the bovine.

Ms. Geeta Doctor