Painting: Sanjeevani

He moves through the night sky with the momentum of something that cannot be stopped. The figure is airborne and entirely in motion, red body blazing against a deep teal sky, a yellow trail of energy streaming behind him like the wake of a comet. In one hand, a mountain. In the other, a mace. Below, the Himalayas rise in great dark forms, their peaks catching the cold light of a full moon that holds its position at the centre of the composition with the steadiness of something that has witnessed everything and remains unmoved. The clouds that gather around the flying figure are not obstacles but atmosphere, the painting's way of saying that this journey takes place at the border of the possible.

The scene is one of the most charged moments in the Ramayana: Hanuman, unable to identify the Sanjeevani herb among the countless plants of Dronagiri, lifts the entire mountain and carries it through the sky to save the fallen Lakshman. Bharat Tripathi renders this act not as mythology held at a reverent distance but as something immediate and kinetic, a body in full flight, a decision made and acted upon without hesitation. The palette is bold and unambiguous: the red of the deity, the yellow of divine energy, the deep green and blue of mountain and sky, the white of the moon. No detail is decorative. Every colour is load-bearing. This work belongs to Tripathi's Anjaneya Series, exhibited at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in September 2025, a body of paintings that approaches Hanuman not through iconographic convention but through the directness of painted feeling. In acrylic on canvas, it captures a moment of devotion expressed entirely through action.

Why This Artwork Stands Out

• The central moon anchors a composition of tremendous movement, creating a still point around which everything else, figure, mountain, cloud, peak, organises itself with instinctive clarity.
• The yellow energy trail behind the figure introduces a sense of speed and divine force that transforms a narrative moment into a visual experience of momentum.
• The Himalayan ground below gives the aerial scene genuine spatial scale, making the flight feel both mythologically vast and compositionally grounded.
• As part of the Anjaneya Series shown at Jehangir Art Gallery, this work carries exhibition provenance that situates it within a serious and sustained engagement with devotional subject matter in contemporary painting.

Handle with care. Do not handle the painted area with bare hands. Handle with gloves. Do not let the picture come into contact with moisture or high humidity. Do not expose to direct sunlight. Use a soft-bristle brush to gently clean the painting.