Prafulla Mohanti

Prafulla Mohanti was born in 1936 in Nanpur in India’s southern state of Orissa. The influence of this small village, his birthplace, cannot be underestimated. It has dominated his work for now more than fifty years. At a young age he was instructed by a teacher how to draw three circles on the mud floor. These represented Brahma, Vishnu and Maheswar, the Trimurti, the triple deity of supreme divinity in Hinduism in which the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction are personified. The drawing of these deities in this simplified manner became Mohanti’s occupation for the next few months. It became everything for him, his world existing in the purity of the three circles. Chanting the names as he drew before beginning again: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. Mohanti describes how the village reverberated with this holy sound.
On arriving in grey England in 1960, studying and working in a professional field he did not enjoy, the circle became a means of reminding him of home. He would decorate his walls with simple symbols: the eponymous lotus, the eyes of Lord Jagannath and, over time, with painted circles. These became talismans warding off the depression of his surroundings and replacing it with the colour, meaning and purity of the village he left behind. As much as it was a shield to his new foreign environment, the simplicity of the circle, the space within it and the space exterior to it on the canvas or paper, evolved to reflect much more in the artist’s mind. The space related as much to the vermillion bindu spot on his mother’s forehead as it did to the rising and setting sun – the transient and earthly to the eternal.
The circle in all its uncomplicatedness became a way of garlanding his village and all that he had seen and absorbed –and now meant so much in England. It was a means of crossing time and space and transcending the need to outwardly create.

Submitted by The Noble Sage Collection