JOIN USYou would have seen many drawings of Delhi’s ruins, but we doubt you’d have come across anything like Yajanika Arora’s works. This 35-year-old’s pencil sketches bring monuments alive like ghosts - every pillar, each stone, the minutest carvings, lights and shadows start playing before your eyes. It is as if the vanity of a bygone era suddenly starts to breathe and you start talking to the dead.
She recently displayed her works at the India Habitat Centre in an exhibition titled ‘Shaher-e-dilli’ and attracted as many history enthusiasts as art lovers.
A former student of the prestigious Faculty of Visual Arts, Banaras Hindu University, sketching was always Yajanika’s forte. She says in school she used to be scolded often for ignoring studies, but always got an A+ in the art class. During her BHU days, she would often sit on the ghats of Banaras for hours, sketching the stairs (her favourite), the river and boats.
Masters in Desktop Motion Graphics took her closer to technology and farther from the pencil, but, as fate would have it, an unfortunate incident brought her back to her first love.
“I was running my own TV production studio, a husband and two kids. I had no history of health issues and frankly, no time to fall ill. And then it happened, paralytic attacks. I was diagnosed with meningitis, put through a brain surgery and then heavy steroids. I recovered from the disease but went into severe depression. For three years – 2010 to 13, I was stuck to the bed and the house. That is when my husband advised me to start sketching again.”
Yajanika always enjoyed history. She says she never drew people but only places and buildings. She has read all the books by William Dalrymple and used to take her kids to monuments for picnics every weekend. “Monuments attract me. Each of them has a personality and they communicate with me. Crazy as it may sound but each corner calls out to me to sketch it out.”
“Before I fell ill, on each excursion to a monument, I would take photographs. During my convalescence period, these were the same photographs, stored on my mobile, I-pad and laptop which came to my rescue. I fished out each of them and started replicating them on paper. Once I started, there was no stopping.”
Out came portraits of ruins in the Lodhi Gardens, Mehrauli Archaeological Park, Hauz Khas complex and Nizamuddin. Haunting gateways, surrounding parks, arches, windows and her favourite stairs – all made way to her canvas. The same – a set of 30 impossible sketches - are a part of ‘Shaher-e-dilli’ now.
Yajanika says, “All of us have a gift of talent bestowed on us by God. Some discover it, some don’t, and others are pushed to rediscover it by fate as it happened with me. I find it difficult to say now if the meningitis was completely bad, but now that I have rediscovered sketching, I‘ll never let go of it again.”