Drawing Room: Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo on Gopa Trivedi’s miniature-style art
Gopa Trivedi’s works are at once beautiful and unsettling, with haunting creatures that are just as delicate as her flowers
Miniature paintings flourished under the Mughal Empire (from the 16th to the 18th century). But the style is almost impossible to find now. Art schools don’t teach it. Even experts run only short-term workshops. So, it’s unusual for a contemporary artist to seek out the style and fuse it with manuscript painting, fusing handwritten text with decorative miniature-style illustration.
Gopa Trivedi is that artist. Her work spans subjects as diverse as anthropomorphic monsters and animal husbandry. The style seems influenced by the Company School, in which Indian manuscript painters engaged with European botanical studies and rendered their own works in delicate watercolour. Trivedi uses fine squirrel-hair brushes and intricate pardakht (dot-work) to bring complex worlds to life on paper. In the unusual style, she says she’s “found the kind of intimacy I wanted a viewer to have with my work and the sensibility I wanted to convey”.
Her series, Monsters of Our Making-II, focuses on hybrid creatures. In one panel, there’s a figure with a dark, feathered body. It’s reminiscent of a crow or raven, but where its head should be is a strange, flesh-like form adorned with a delicate pink lotus flower. It’s simultaneously elegant and disturbing. In another panel, a delicately drawn centipedal form has grass-like shoots growing atop and underneath.
It’s careful, precise work. Her colour palette doesn’t veer far from restrained earth tones, muted ochres, dusty pinks and deep blacks. The work looks translucent, achieved by a layering technique that is characteristic of the manuscript tradition. And it cleverly uses historical methods to address the world of today.
I’ve known Trivedi since our days at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and have seen her practice evolve over years of friendship – the questions that haunt her, obsessions that drive her, and her quiet moments of doubt and breakthrough. I admire that she doesn’t shy away from depicting discomfort. Her creatures are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, familiar and grotesque.
The series comments on the hybridity of cultures colliding, spawning “monsters”. In today’s world, we continue to construct these monsters through incomplete truths and distorted narratives. This resonated with me deeply. Growing up in Bastar, surrounded by rich mythological traditions and storytelling practices while also being part of a royal family, has made me acknowledge hybrid cultures up close. It’s never simple or pure; it always involves transformation and sometimes even monstrosity.
I first saw Monsters of Our Making at Trivedi’s solo exhibition, Gulistan, at Delhi’s gallery Latitude 28 last year. I was fascinated. The work required me to move close to it and adjust my eyes to observe its intricacy. That enforced intimacy made the encounter with these hybrid creatures feel even more personal, more unsettling, more necessary.
The marginalisation of traditional practices such as manuscript painting in Indian art education represents a profound loss of technique, knowledge systems, philosophical frameworks and ways of seeing. But Trivedi’s work shows that preservation and innovation aren’t opposing forces – they are intertwined. Her monsters expand on what the Company School was already doing. With hundreds of painstaking hours dedicated to creating each work, she honours both history and the present moment.
Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo constructs tactile art using fabric. She preserves memory, oral histories and the customs of the Bastar people.
From HT Brunch, October 18, 2025
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