Thursday 19 May 2011

Kannagi - Tamil: கண்ணகி. For the Cheltenham Competition.



From the South Indian 1st century AD epic, Silapathikaram.
A woman Kannagi marries Kovalan who falls for a courtesan and lavishes all his wealth on her and she leaves him. He goes back to Kannagi who takes him back and they go to the city of Madurai with their only assets, a pair of anklets filled with diamonds to earn back a living. The Queen’s anklets (filled with pearls) had just been stolen and they wrongly behead Kovalan who tries to sell his wife’s anklets. In rage, Kannagi goes to the king’s court and proves her husband’s innocence by breaking her remaining anklet. The king and queen die of shame but Kannagi who’s fury could still not be quenched, rips her breast out and curses the city, burning it down.
Adultery, injustice and vengeance are still enemies of mankind bringing destruction and war. 



Those were the initial experiments. I decided against flat application and did the next in photo ink and it worked well.






3 comments:

  1. I was just going through some of your older posts today and this one really caught my eye. I've never seen the silapathikaram illustrated before.Great work... :)

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  2. nice work..proud to be indian

    ReplyDelete