Rohini-Karti (Shakti)

J. Sultan Ali, who had run away from home in Bombay to study at the Madras School of Art, was among the most important Indian modernists to incorporate primitivism in his work, which at a certain level must have required him to unlearn his academic training. In this monochromatic work, he celebrates the folk deity Rohini Karti, a democratised manifestation of the mainstream Hindu principle of energy, worshipped as the goddess Shakti. For village folk, it is the lesser pantheon of gods and goddesses, comprising local deities, that has had a greater hold over their lives.