ABSTRACT
This essay describes how contemporary painters working in a distinctive Mithila north Indian indigenous aesthetic and conceptual world draw on and use an ancient Hindu image, the Ardhanarisvara, a single figure combining two extremely different figures; the god Shiva – the creator and destroyer, the ascetic and the benevolent – and his wife Parvati – the goddess of love, fertility, devotion, and bonding – to produce a visualized concept and representation of an a-symmetrical but interdependent complementarity to make the case for gender equality, an ideal model for marriage, a means of comprehending the nature of capitalism, and an alternative to Western popular and positivist tendencies to regard the world in terms of bounded units and dualistic either/or dichotomies: black or white, male or female, true or false, x and y axes, right or left, good or evil, etc.
