For Onam 2023, Mahabali comes visiting Kerala astride a hornbill in Sabari Venu’s animated art work

For Onam 2023, Mahabali comes visiting Kerala astride a hornbill in Sabari Venu’s animated art work

This time round, designer Sabari Venu has imagined a fiesty Mahabali coming to Kerala on a Great Pied Hornbill. Hair flying in the air, the mundu-clad, bearded Mahabali is clearly enjoying his ride in Sabari’s illustration, which has been shared on his Instagram account @meancurry.

Onam celebrates the annual visit of the mythological king who is believed to have ruled over Kerala before being sent to the nether world by Vamana, Lord Vishnu’s fifth incarnation.

In popular visual language, Mahabali has often been portrayed as a chubby king with a potbelly and a huge moustache. There were some recent attempts to give him a makeover by visualising him as a tall, fair, muscled royal and also popularise the image of Mahabali in Raja Ravi Varma’s painting.

Moving away from those cliched images, Sabari is continuing a tradition he began in 2019 when he put out a call to reimagine Mahabali, a ‘draw this in your style’ Mahabali.

Talking about the Mahabali astride a hornbill, Sabari admits that this year he had almost stopped the effort to come up with a more realistic picture of the benevolent King “as he did not want to it to be a forced attempt”. But then he came up with a brilliant, animated visual of Mahabali riding a hornbill, the State bird of Kerala.

In one of his earlier posts accompanying a drawing of Mahabali, he says, “The current joke of a caricature of Mahabali that we see all around us is a disgrace to what he represents to all Malayalis. An Asura Dravidian King, a just, benevolent leader, reduced to this.... Santa in a mundu.”

The results were overwhelming as drawings poured in, reimaging Mahabali in myriad ways. Sabari has featured five of his illustrations. The dark complexioned, bearded Mahabali of 2019, wearing a dhothi, ear rings, a broad neck piece and wrist bands, has a neatly-folded towel on his shoulder.