Festival Bull

J. Sultan Ali incorporated in his practice folk forms, Hindu mythology and iconography, and the daily village life he observed while teaching at a residential school in Andhra Pradesh in the late 1940s. This work alludes to a common Indian village festival—it is more agricultural than religious—wherein farmers parade a decorated bull around the village to be worshipped. Sultan Ali gave anthropomorphic visages to the animals he painted and placed them in a richly-coloured, abstracted background, as is the case with Festival Bull.