As I stepped out of the Regional Centre of Lalit Kala Akademi in Bhubaneswar on February 27, my mind overflowed with images, colour palettes, metaphors, forms, frames, and a narrative without beginning or end. It was chaotic yet profoundly still—crowded, yet silent as a cold iron rod. So many elements, such depth, yet a single, delicately woven story alive with countless characters. I had come to see the solo exhibition of veteran Indian artist Jagannath Panda, titled ‘The Long Now of Us’.
My Grandmother Knows Jagannath
Gazing into the paintings, collages, installations, and shapes, I was reminded not of distant art theories, but of my grandmother, who passed away 30 years ago. There was a striking similarity between her and Jagannath Panda: both conjure entire worlds through their own imaginative schemes. Every year during the holy month of Kartik, my grandmother would trace tentative lines, circles, and colours with rice flour on the floor, crafting realms of gods and goddesses. Her designs were never conventional or bound by standard pictorial patterns; she shaped her forms with the fearless innocence of untrained hands. Jagannath Panda does the same but with extraordinary sophistication and style. His articulation is nuanced, richly layered, and holds chaos in perfect discipline.
He draws from from Odisha’s indigenous visual language across diverse traditions: the ritualistic wall paintings of Ganjam’s Oshakothi, the intricate Pattachitra of Raghurajpur, the playing-card artistry of Ganjapa, the ancient rock arts of Maraguda. From the graceful Tribhanga, Abhanga, and Atibhanga postures of Odissi dance to the chaotic destruction wrought by mining in the Aravalli hills. He gathers a multitude of worlds in a singular fold, just as my grandmother once did.
Angashuddhi or Anga-Droha
Jagannath Panda explores the body language of Odissi dancers through myriad prisms. A dancer’s body is forever in process: the guru prepares it through Angashuddhi, purifying and refining the form to suit the demands of dance, guiding it toward perfection. Panda fractures this body language into countless shades and shapes. With masterful hands, he works like a magician, sometimes making forms fully visible, sometimes half-glimpsed, sometimes entirely obscured. Yet the exhibition felt less like Angashuddhi and more like Anga-Droha, a rebellion within the body itself. Images collide with images; the past slams into the future, while a traumatised present bears witness to the impact.
Gardening the World
Here is not merely a painter, but a gardener. He tends his world with deep blue circles and semi-circles, bright golden dots and tiny orbs, motifs of Radha-Krishna, and chariots of varying sizes. (In Odisha’s traditional painting, the chariot often symbolises the body and the cosmos—the pinda and the brahmanda.) In this garden of the world, time arrives and vanishes within the “long now of us”—a powerful, ceaseless flow of multitude. T S Eliot wrote in The Waste Land:
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Only There is shadow under this red rock…
Jagannath Panda gardens with those very broken images, coaxing them into a coherent world of his own.
‘The Long Now of Us’ was on display from February 13 to February 28 at the Regional Centre of Lalit Kala Akademi, Bhubaneswar, a rare homecoming for the internationally acclaimed artist, born in the city, whose work bridges Odisha’s deep cultural roots with contemporary philosophical inquiry.
