Svaraj, A Journey with Tyeb Mehta's Shantiniketan Triptych by Ramachandra Gandhi

This first of its kind book records a double journey of inquiry: into the symbolism of Tyeb Mehta’s ‘Shantiniketan Triptych’ painted in 1985, and the deeper meaning of ‘Svaraj’ or self realisation. The journey overlaps, illuminating one another because, as Ramachandran Gandhi shows, the work is a three-paneled portrait of distortion, of self-awareness, necessitated by exclusivist self-identities, individual and collective, secular and religious, and the recovery of integrity of selfhood in inclusive self-realisation.

It is about the realisation that we are things, and nothingness too. The inquiry inevitably throws light on the flawed independence of India in 1947, self-realisation distorted by exclusivist communal self-identities and the ongoing war between secular insensitivity and religious fundamentalism.