Li Gotami Govinda

Li Gotami Govinda (born Ratti Petit, 22 April 1906 – 18 August 1988) was an Indian painter, photographer, writer and composer. She was also skilled in ballet and stagecraft. She gained fame with her conversion to Mahayana Buddhism and travels in Tibet.

Biography Ratti Petit was born on 22 April 1906 in Bombay to an affluent Parsi family. Her family owned the Bomanjee Dinshaw Petit Parsee General Hospital in Cumbala Hill, Bombay. Gotami had at least one sister, Coomie Vakharia, and one brother, Maneckji Petit. She received her education in England at a school located in Harrow on the Hill and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1924. Ratti Petit traveled extensively across Europe, before returning to India in the 1930s. In India, she worked with artist Manishi Dey who introduced her to the Bengal School of Art, which significantly influenced her. Petit married art collector and critic Karl Jamshed Khandalavala in the 1930s. However, the marriage was brief. Petit also co-founded the Camera Pictorialists of Bombay in the 1930s.

Petit traveled to Rabindranath Tagore's ashram in Shantiniketan in 1934 to study under artist Nandalal Bose, and to learn Manipuri dance. According to Li Gotami's niece, Sylla Malvi, "Her parents were not happy about her going away. In fact, my grandfather even sent her brother (Maneckji Petit) to check on her." Petit spent 12 years at Shantiniketan. She also earned diplomas from the Arts and Music Schools. She met painter Abanindranath Tagore, who taught at the arts school, eight years later. Tagore was impressed by Petit's paintings and became her mentor. According to Malvi, "She absolutely worshipped Abanindranath Tagore. It was he who told her that she would excel in religious and children's paintings". Petit converted to Mahayana Buddhism, and adopted the name Li Gotami, against the wishes of her devout Zoroastrian parents. The couple lived in a house rented from the writer Walter Evans-Wentz at Kasar Devi, near Almora in northern India. Kasar Devi, in hippie circles known as "Crank's Ridge", was a bohemian colony home to artists, writers and spiritual seekers such as Earl Brewster, Alfred Sorensen and John Blofeld. Many spiritual seekers, including the Beat Poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, the LSD Gurus Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, and Tibetologist Robert Thurman came to visit Govinda at his ashram. The number of visitors became so great that the couple eventually put signs to keep unwanted visitors away. During these expeditions, they made a large number of paintings, drawings and photographs. These travels are described in Govinda's book The Way of the White Clouds. Li Gotami and Govinda set out on an expedition to Tsaparang in western Tibet in July 1948, arriving in the ancient city in September. They endured harsh conditions in the deserted city taking shelter in a crude stone hut with rough interiors and sooty walls. They ate two meals a day consisting of porridge and chappatis, cooked slowly over yak dung and brushwood fires. The temperature was so low that tea would freeze inside a cup if it was not consumed quickly. The couple stayed in the city until at least December 1948, painstakingly photographing, sketching and tracing surviving frescoes. Li Gotami's photos of Tibet in the late 1940s are one of the last significant pictorial documentations of local life before the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the subsequent destruction during the Cultural Revolution. During their 1947–1948 expeditions to Tibet, Govinda and Li Gotami met Ajo Repa Rinpoche, who, according to Govinda, initiated them into the Kagyüpa school of Tibetan Buddhism.

From 1955, Li Gotami, together with Govinda, lived on a 40-acre estate in Almora, in the north-west of India, where they maintained an ashram and studied painting, Buddhist studies and meditation. The ashram was located in the wilderness and had no access to electricity or running water. From India, in the sixties and seventies, they undertook several lecture journeys, which took them around the world.

Death Li Gotami, Govinda, and Nyanaponika Thera in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Probably taken in Germany or Switzerland. In the early 1970s, Li Gotami and Govinda were invited by American Buddhist scholars to live in the United States. The couple initially lived in Sausalito, California and later settled in Mill Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area for health reasons. The couple were cared for by Alan Watts and Elsa Gidlow's Society for Comparative Philosophy, and Suzuki Roshi's San Francisco Zen Centre.

Works Tibet in Pictures. Berkeley 1979, Vol. 1 , Vol. 2 Tibetan Fantasies: Paintings, Poems, and Music. Emeryville, Cailf. 1976,