Parvani glows with layered blues, greens, and controlled splashes. The background remains clean and luminous, a deliberate contrast to Vasuki’s urban grit. This mirrors India’s cultural bias: the peacock is adored and aestheticised, celebrated for its beauty, while the serpent is avoided despite equal spiritual stature. The splashes here act not as vandalism but as a nod to contemporary visual culture, how beauty is framed, stylised, elevated. Parvani stands as a symbol of selective reverence: worshipped in myth, admired in ornament, yet juxtaposed with the lived reality of neglected street animals outside temple gates.
A vivid, contemporary reimagining of Shiva’s cosmology- where ancient symbols, sacred animals, and lush couture- coded colour palettes merge with the rawness of street textures and modern India. Each work brings together the ornamental and the primal, the spiritual and the urban, the divine and the everyday contradiction of a culture that reveres animals in myth yet neglects them in life.
Across the series appears Shiva’s powerful liberation mantra, written in full:
“ॐ त्र्यम्बकं यजामहे सुगन्धिं पुष्टिवर्धनम् उर्वारुकमिव बन्धनान् मृत्योर्मुक्षीय मामृतात्।”
(“Free us from bondage; restore us to ourselves.”)
The series returns Shiva to his essence: the wild, free, untamed consciousness- dreadlocked, dancing, unconcerned with norms, unshackled by shame, embodying OM as the pulse of liberation.
Every canvas becomes a mantra in itself: a reminder that all life is sacred.
