In more contemporary times, Ranjit Hoskote’s poetry has inspired the works of artist Laxman Shreshtha. More recently, painter Sameer Mondal presented us with a series title Faded Manuscript, a suite of visually stunning works inspired by the poems of contemporary Bengal poet Jibananada Das, who broke the traditional approach to poetry enshrined by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

“He has been a favourite because of his modern approach that broke Tagore’s rhyming pattern. He brought a surreal element to poetry while still talking of nature and everyday life,” says Mondal. Sample this: Evening comes with sound of silence like falling dew drops, while birds are wiping the smell of sun from their wings. “This is provocation to me, I visualise images when I read his poems,” says Mondal. The artist has interpreted Das’s verse as a surreal coming together of human beings and nature, where a peacock wraps itself around a woman’s head or a striking male profile sports the antlers of a buck in a field.

“My translation of Das is to juxtapose urban people with nature—a space where the traditional is juxtaposed with the present,” says Mondal, furnishing an example of a film-buff watching an old black-and-white movie on a slick, flat-screen plasma television.

Another artist known to be inspired by literary references is the painter Gieve Patel. His latest solo show Eklavya and Daphne referenced two figures from the Mahabharata while the other culled from Greco-Roman mythology.

“The character of Eklavya has always haunted me and a large part of Indian readers because it seems to compound together so many heartbreaking problems our society faces: conflict of the old and young, conflict between teacher and student and, of course, the caste oppression,” says Patel.

“As a painter, I have been a bit weary of bringing literature into painting because each is an art form in itself. Besides, it can become a stumbling block when an artist thinks the literature is going to support his painting and ‘save’ the work—it should not become a crutch,” says Patel.

Shreshtha also points out that the work should not be too illustrative. “In the case of Ranjit and I, the works were elliptically related to his verse from the Cartographers Apprentice, the images evoke rather than illustrate the poems,” says the painter.