Arpana Caur at work at Birla Academy. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Black is the colour that Arpana Caur has chosen as the background of most of her canvases currently being exhibited at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture. There are others where the backgrounds are red, dove grey, light yellow and pink, too.

But irrespective of whether she literally paints the backgrounds black or not, Arpana, using figures with elongated limbs and soulful eyes and applying paint as thin as the epidermis, brings a message of peace and harmony in these dark times when we have learnt not to bat an eyelid at bloodshed and violence, whatever its degree.

Arpana, in town for the opening on Saturday, says these paintings are a ?metaphor of the human spirit that takes a plunge?. As in her earlier canvases, Arpana?s paintings are to an extent like blow-ups of miniature paintings, though the space around is uncluttered and without any of the exquisite detailing that one associates with that style of painting.

The two main motifs she uses here are those of Guru Nanak and Sohni, the love interest of Mahival immortalised in the folk lore of Punjab, but who, Arpana said, was not just a mythic figure but existed in the flesh. Sohni wades through the turbulent waters of a river to meet her man. She is felled by an arrow. An electric plug seems to be the link between the lovers. ?Love connects to god,? says Arpana. ?The arrow that kills her can also be transformed into the love arrow. Cupid exists in the Rajasthani paintings, too,? says the artist, who in 1986 held an exhibition for the first time in Calcutta after the 1984 riots. This work, she says, was displayed at Bradford Museum in the UK along with European representations of Romeo and Juliet.

Her Nayika steps out of architecture and as in Kutch or Mewar paintings, she is ?poised between interior and exterior? like us urban people?. Sita drawing a circle around herself becomes a symbol of regeneration. A woman weaves water dousing the flames of hatred.

Nanak goes under the waters of the Bein river and emerges enlightened, spreading his message of secularism and taking a Hindu and a Muslim as his disciples. Arpana, by the way, is illustrating a book on Nanak being written by Khushwant Singh?s daughter.

Time is a recurring theme in Arpana?s works ? the Western idea of measurable time juxtaposed with the Indian concept of time eternal. She uses the Warli spiral to link the disparate elements. She uses motifs such as scissors and the compass to highlight her ideas of time. While all this may sound very profound, when represented through images, it can get a bit cloying, a trifle too sentimental perhaps. As pictures they are, however, very pretty.