At a time when much of contemporary Indian art is veering towards spectacle or symbolism to drive home the crisis of ‘development’, Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings offer something more poignant and powerful: a sustained act of bearing witness. At his exhibition, Cities: Built, Broken, at TRI Art & Culture, the artist’s beloved Mumbai is portrayed as a city being constructed and destroyed in the same breath. In fact, the very act of ‘building’ (the building of the Mumbai Metro system, for instance) becomes a form of erasure — of memory, of community and, increasingly, of ecological balance.
While the beating heart of the exhibition is Mumbai, Patwardhan’s works also evoke bombed cities and emptied streets, drawing quiet parallels between Gaza and Ghatkopar, the wailing wall and a mother’s grief in Mumbai. War, in Patwardhan’s work, is not only waged with weapons. It is also enacted through zoning maps, roadworks and, in New India, by running a bulldozer over lives. What looks like civic growth may, in fact, be a kind of siege. These paintings are bound by a central question: who gets to remain when a city is ‘developed’ and ‘beautified’, and who is removed without a trace?
Urban architecture, especially in cities like Mumbai, is meant to dazzle. But Patwardhan’s gaze is on those obscured behind this gloss — labourers hidden away from sight by a corrugated sheet, a man lying supine under a bridge (is he drunk, exhausted or dead?), a man killed in a back-alley brawl, a woman staring quietly out of the local train. In nearly every canvas, concrete jostles with people for space. Many of these people are faceless or have blurry features that are hard to make out; yet Patwardhan’s empathy for them is evident in almost every frame, especially in Just People (picture, left). The most striking piece, perhaps, is Buildings Once (picture, right) — while being reminiscent of the rubble left behind by the State’s retributive use of the bulldozer, this kaleidoscopic and dizzying juxtaposition of broken shapes could also well be the worm’s-eye-view of a poorly-planned cityscape that has no space for the living.