The Night Was Filled With Screams And Blood

The topmost one is of course Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream.. the second one is my take, or version, of it. And I'll tell you why I did it. First of all, one learns enormously, not only about painting techniques, but also of art history, when one tries to paint the paintings of great artists.. but apart from that, there is another reason why I needed to paint this one.. do read on...

"I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous infinite scream of nature." That's what Edvard Munch wrote in his diary about his painting The Scream.

While many people, art experts, have attributed it largely to Evard Munch's struggle with not only his own insanity, but also that of his sister's, who was in fact hospitalized when Munch painted it, in 1893, I really dislike reducing a great art work like this, and a great artist, such as Munch and Van Gogh, to merely symptoms of insanity. If you have felt that inexplicable anxiety that sometimes strikes one out of nowhere, if you have ever felt the pangs of existentialism, or even the pain of a heart break... you will understand what Munch has tried to express in his The Scream.. and his own note, quoted above, explains it the best.

Now, coming to my version, of Edvard Munch's The Scream - mine is named The Night Was Filled With Screams And Blood  - yes, it's a long name and I'll explain why. When news of Nirbhaya broke - the mindless brutality of the rape, and later her death, just benumbed me. Every time I tried to visualise what she must have undergone, the only image that would swim across my mind's eye was Edvard Munch's painting The Scream. As I thought about it more, I conjured up this imagery that I have painted.

The screaming woman in my painting is Nirbhaya, yes, but she is more.. she is also all those other women who have been raped..and are being raped or brutalised or being treated badly even as I write this. She is also all of us women who live and survive in a patriarchal system that belittles us, objectifies us, treats us as inconsequential - from our religious teachings to retrograde social mores to popular depictions of us in cinema and other media. My painting is a scream of protest and a statement that says "enough".. "stop"... "change". And, yes, it is a feminist statement.

As for the bus - it's the bus in which Nirbhaya was trapped and brutalised - I've personified it by giving it a face - a rapist's face. At first, when I began ideating about it, I had thought of making it a monster face. But, it turned into this terrifying clown. And I decided it was actually more apt than the face of a monster. Nirbhaya's rapists.. and probably other rapists too.. were out to have an evening of fun.. their "fun" was what happened to Nirbhaya.

Nirbhaya's hair in my painting becoming a part of the blood streaked sky symbolizes the depressing fact that no God.. nobody.. came to her rescue. And yet, she probably prayed devoutly to some God. The four bare, gaunt trees depict antediluvian social attitudes and thinking about gender, especially the female gender. The new grass and the flowering tree on the other side depict new thought, new ways, new beginnings, change in mindset, and so on.