In her art, Jayasri Burman shows how India’s old stories still speak to the present

Burman treats Indian epics and myths as living arguments, not finished tales. She believes old figures can still question present-day injustice. Her work asks who receives justice, whose body is controlled, and what happens when humans exploit nature. This matters because cultural memory becomes useful when it can speak to current life.

Her Draupadi paintings show the method clearly. Draupadi appears at the dice game, with the five Pandavas, and during ordeal. Burman presents her as politically intelligent and self-determining, not merely as the cause of a war. Other figures extend the same approach. Chandalika challenges caste denial, while Bonobibi answers greed threatening the forest.

The paintings therefore keep old stories open. Their bright colours refuse to make suffering the final word. Hybrids of women, animals, trees, and serpents also show that human life and nature cannot be separated without cost. Burman’s myths remain active tools for thinking about fairness, ecology, caste, and women’s agency.

Jayasri Burman is a painter born in Kolkata in 1960. She grew up in prosperity as the second daughter of Khadim’s founder, but her imagination was shaped more deeply by her mother’s and aunts’ recitations of epics. She also grew up around Durga preparations and later lived in a household of painters.

Her uncle Sakti Burman was an artist who lived between India and France, and viewers noticed a family connection. Burman’s own path included Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata, and a printmaking studio in Paris. She chose to remain inside mythic narratives rather than observe them from a distance. Her arranged first marriage lasted 17 years. She later described leaving it as feeling like a bird released from a cage. Paresh Maity became her companion.

These experiences gave her work both inherited memory and chosen independence. Her training strengthened her command of painting and printmaking. Her life helped sharpen her interest in agency, liberation, and women who act within demanding stories.

In widely known Indian epic tradition, the Ramayana and Mahabharata are large narrative traditions about duty, power, family, conflict, justice, and human choice. The article treats them as stories that remain unfinished because their moral questions still speak to the present. They are not presented as museum pieces or merely as illustrations.

Sita is a central woman of the Ramayana. Burman associates her with endurance, loyalty without submission, and a final return to the earth. Draupadi is a central woman of the Mahabharata. Burman presents her as politically intelligent and determined to demand justice, especially in the public humiliation connected with the dice game.

Burman places Sita and Draupadi in one visual field, sometimes sharing a face and a hybrid body. Their qualities do not become identical. Sita represents tested endurance, while Draupadi represents public refusal and self-determination. Together, they show different ways women can act within stories shaped by power, violence, and social expectations.

Burman worked on Draupadi for three years before presenting the results in “Born of Fire: A Tale for Our Times.” The exhibition appeared at New York’s Aicon Gallery in 2018. This long period mattered because Draupadi became more than a subject. She became a set of unanswered questions about justice, gender, power, and belonging.

The series took a monumental form. Burman created densely worked images on large sheets. Draupadi appears with the five Pandavas, at the dice game, and through ascent and ordeal. She remains an active political figure rather than a warning or a passive victim. Colour fills the scenes without disguising suffering.

The scale gives the epic room to press into the present. Burman asks viewers to reconsider fairness, her five husbands, and the fact that Draupadi’s body is left on earth rather than admitted to heaven. The series turns an ancient narrative into an unresolved contemporary demand for answers.

Modern reinterpretation changes these figures from fixed symbols into agents who address current problems. Burman does not erase their older meanings. Instead, she makes their conflicts available to the present. This matters because myth can preserve memory while also exposing injustice that still survives.

Draupadi demands public justice and refuses reduction to the cause of a war. Sita endures without simply submitting. Chhinnamasta cuts off her own head so others may be nourished. Bonobibi answers greed threatening the forest. Chandalika overturns caste denial when a monk asks her for water. Each figure turns a story into an ethical encounter.

The result is not darkness alone. Burman keeps the surfaces bright, using saturated greens, oranges, and deep reds. Hybrid bodies join women to birds, serpents, rivers, and forests. These forms insist that human and natural life are connected. The figures therefore make old stories speak about justice, ecology, caste, and agency without closing their meaning.

Burman connects to Raja Ravi Varma through the idea that epic gods and heroines should have recognisable human faces. Ravi Varma made these figures available to household viewers through popular visualisation. Burman continues that accessibility, but she changes the visual language and the emotional force.

Her figures reject academic naturalism and colonial polish. They are flat, dense, and patterned, with clear links to patachitra and Kalighat painting. Flora and fauna surround the characters and help define where they belong. Unlike idealised beauty made for printing and sale, Burman’s images carry an energy that the frame cannot contain.

This connection is therefore an adaptation, not a repetition. Burman inherits Ravi Varma’s public-facing mythic imagery while grounding it in regional pattern, saturated colour, and ecological interdependence. Her hybrids make the human and natural worlds visibly inseparable. The result keeps cultural familiarity but opens it to questions about violence, ecology, caste, and women’s agency.

Myths and visual art preserve cultural memory by carrying stories, figures, colours, and symbols into new generations. Burman’s childhood exposure to epic recitations and Durga preparations gave her a living connection to that memory. Her paintings show that preservation does not require copying the past unchanged. It requires keeping the stories available for renewed thought.

She changes meaning through composition and image. Sita and Draupadi share a field but retain different forms of agency. Women become birds or serpents, while trees fruit beside resting tigers. Bright colours and dense patterns connect the figures to Bengal’s landscape, festival idols, patachitra, and Kalighat traditions. The old visual language becomes a new argument.

This process keeps India’s idea alive without nostalgia. Burman makes epics speak to greed, ecological collapse, caste, fairness, and women’s unseen labour. The future implication is that cultural memory remains active when artists allow inherited stories to question the conditions of their own time.