How Tyeb Mehta's signature ‘bulls' symbolised ‘the condition of human captivity'

Indian Express

17 hours ago

In April, Tyeb Mehta's 1956 oil on canvas Trussed Bull sold for a whopping Rs 61.8 crore. Aptly, it featured a motif that the master modernist constantly returned to, one which captured the very essence of his artistic practice.
Personal & political
Mehta came of age at a time of social and political churn. While in his early twenties, Mehta witnsessed communal riots during the Partiton which left a deep imprint on the budding artist.
'At the time of Partition, I was living on Mohammed Ali Road (in Mumbai), which was virtually a Muslim ghetto. I remember a young man being slaughtered in the street below my window. The crowd beat him to death and smashed his head with stones,' Mehta recalled in an interview to art critic Nancy Adajania for the monograph Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges (2005).
'I was sick with fever for days afterward, and the image still haunts me today. That violence gave me the clue about the emotion I want to paint. That violence has stuck in my mind,' he had said.
The bull became a symbol of human suffering in post-Independent India. 'The trussed bull…seemed representative of the national condition… the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies,' Mehta told journalist Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth in another interview for his monograph.
'Perhaps also my own feelings about my early life in a tightly knit, almost oppressive community…At the age of twenty-one, I was living in a void. I had practically no contact with the outside world. Years later in London, working in the most menial of jobs, I was still trying to break out of those shackles, to emancipate myself. Independence for me was personal as well as national,' he had said.
The bull first appeared in Mehta's works in the early 1950s, embodying the deep contrast in the animal's innate strength and the cruelty of its captivity.
As a student at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, Mehta would sketch buffaloes and cattle being brought to Kennedy Bridge in Girgaon. Later, he visited a slaughterhouse in Bandra, where he filmed three minutes of his acclaimed 1970 film Koodal.
In an interview with Dalmia in 1989, Mehta had said, 'These three minutes are the most poignant sequences in my film…The bull is a powerful animal and when its legs are tied down and thrown down, it's an assault on life itself.'
Early on, Mehta painted his bull in thick impasto strokes. After his encounter with the works of American abstractionists like Barnett Newman during his stay in the US in 1968, Mehta began to adopt diagonal lines and colour-field techniques.
In the Mahishasura series, the bull appeared as the 'half-bull, half-man' figure of the demon-king Mahishasura, who was slain by Goddess Durga.
Several of his later works depicted the bull as a fragmented falling figure. The 1999 acrylic Untitled (Bull on Rickshaw) has a falling trussed bull on a rickshaw (another one of Mehta's favourite motifs) painted against planes of colour.
'The bull mutated and transformed over the years but its simmering force continued to exercise a hold over the image,' Dalmia wrote in a catalogue essay titled 'Metamorphosis', written for an exhibition of Mehta's works she curated for the Vadehra Art Gallery in 2011.
Before passing in 2009, his final work, produced in 2005-2007, had two dismembered bulls looking downward. Painted in muted shades, the diptych was expressive of the struggles Mehta had endured through his lifetime.
'Although they are helpless and struggling to sustain, when one looks at the hind parts one notices an energy, ability to fight and endure,' Dalmia told The Indian Express.
'Mehta's life was a struggle that he both fought and triumphed over. He led a full life and was painting till the very end despite his failing health. Though his eyesight had become weak and he had only peripheral vision, he still chose to paint the bull as his last work, perhaps because it deeply expressed what he was feeling even as he was leaving the world.'