Beyond The Ghats: Mumbai Exhibition Explores Varanasi's Unseen Mystical & Spiritual Landscape

Mumbai: When artists paint Varanasi, they traditionally reach for the predictable – the amber glow of evening aarti lamps, the labyrinthine ghats, or the timeless ripple of the Ganges. However, a major upcoming exhibition at Mumbai’s iconic Jehangir Art Gallery seeks to dismantle these familiar architectural tropes to explore what lies behind the physical curtain of India’s spiritual capital.

Titled Nepathya Ke Rang (The Colours Behind the Curtain), the two-person exhibition brings together nonagenarian master artist Banshidhar Pratihary and contemporary artist-administrator Aashima Mehrotra. Opening on October 20, the show proposes a visual inquiry into Varanasi’s unseen dimensions – its hidden memories, quiet energies, and metaphysical consciousness.

Exploring Varanasi beyond its visible identity

The word nepathya translates to the "backstage" – the hidden infrastructure that sustains a performance. In this showcase, both artists treat the visible city merely as a threshold, using layered abstractions, fluid forms, and symbolic colour palettes to capture the internal vibrations of a space where life and death continuously merge.

An intergenerational artistic dialogue

At the core of Nepathya Ke Rang is an intergenerational dialogue between distinct artistic lineages of Pratihary, a distinguished alumnus of Visva-Bharati’s Kala Bhavana and a direct inheritor of the legendary Nandalal Bose’s aesthetic philosophy, and Mehrotra, who is a senior officer in the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS) and an accomplished visual artist mentored by Pratihary and Veer Munshi.

Mehrotra’s practice spans abstraction, symbolism and complex mixed media. With over 13 solo and 72 group exhibitions globally, her work engages heavily with Encaustic Art – an ancient technique using heated beeswax, resins and pigments. The physical layering, melting and revealing inherent to encaustic painting serves as a direct parallel to the historical and emotional strata of Varanasi itself.

Rather than merging their styles into a single uniform voice, the exhibition aims to set up a vibrant cross-generational conversation where Pratihary's grounded mastery meets Mehrotra’s experimental, contemporary inquiry.

Exhibition inauguration and public viewing

The exhibition will be formally inaugurated on October 20 at 5 pm at the Jehangir Art Gallery by Cymroza Art Gallery's founder-director Pheroza Godrej as the chief guest, as well as Konkan Railway's CMD Santosh Kumar Jha and Bombay Art Society's president Rajendra Patil as the guests of honour. The exhibition will be open to the public from 11 am to 7 pm till October 26.

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