Monsoon at Assi Ghat

Artist: Manu Parekh
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 48 × 60 inches
Year: 2019
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Surging with color, emotion, and spiritual energy, this powerful oil on canvas by Manu Parekh immerses viewers in the elemental drama of Varanasi’s Assi Ghat during the monsoon. The painting channels a vivid interplay between the natural world and sacred space, as storm-laden skies clash with glowing shrines and silhouetted trees, producing a scene at once turbulent and transcendent. Parekh’s brushwork is dynamic and instinctive, allowing form and feeling to coalesce in an evocative portrayal of a city both earthly and divine.

Known for his long-standing engagement with Banaras as a site of metaphysical resonance, Parekh here captures not a literal view but an emotional landscape, where the environment becomes a vessel for devotion, memory, and transformation. The sweeping arcs of dark trees frame the composition like guardians of the sacred, bending under the weight of monsoon winds while pointing skyward, symbols of both endurance and surrender. Below, radiant shrines seem to glow from within, their warmth resisting the encroaching blues and grays of storm and sky.

Color becomes a primary force in this work. The palette, rich with fiery oranges, electric blues, somber purples, and deep greens, evokes not just the visual spectacle of the monsoon but its emotional and spiritual impact. Parekh masterfully manipulates these hues to convey a sense of the sublime: nature not as backdrop, but as an active participant in the city’s eternal rituals. The canvas pulses with the rhythm of Varanasi itself, its chants, ceremonies, and timeless communion between the earthly and the divine.

Texture and gesture also play crucial roles. Thick applications of oil paint and expressive, often abrupt, brushstrokes suggest immediacy and passion, aligning with the artist’s inner response to the city's spiritual and sensory intensity. The compositional tension between grounded architecture and the fluid, tempestuous sky reflects the dualities that define Parekh’s practice, chaos and order, form and abstraction, matter and spirit. Manu Parekh’s visual language is deeply rooted in the symbolism of place, and in this work, Assi Ghat becomes not just a physical site but a metaphor for the convergence of devotion, elemental power, and inner awakening. The painting invites contemplation not merely of landscape, but of the sacred pulse that animates it. It is an offering, an invocation, where art becomes both witness and vessel of divine presence.