Mumbai: In his sparse studio in Thane—sparse because he’s not working on anything new at the moment—Sudhir Patwardhan switches on his desktop to show a few works he made during the lockdown. One of them is inspired by Piero della Francesca’s Battle between Heraclius and Chosroes and the other by a Mughal miniature. Both feature beheading and gore.
In Patwardhan’s rendition it’s the painter, and not the warrior, who is doing the beheading—stand-in for an artist destroying their work. The lockdown, the exodus of the migrants, disease, death and social isolation during the pandemic all produced moments of great anxiety in him, making him wonder about the purpose of art at such a time.
“It seemed meaningless. Ultimately any painting is good if it gives pleasure, but here was a situation which was not beautiful at all. What can art add in a justifiable way to the experience?” To illustrate his point of form and function he speaks about that classic museum object, a beautiful bejewelled dagger. “Do we see just the beauty or think about its function too?” he asks with a short laugh.
A pathologist who gave up his practice in 2005, Patwardhan has the clinician’s eye and a poet’s soul. He has probed Mumbai like few others have. His 2020 retrospective at the NGMA, days before Mumbai went into lockdown, has now been encapsulated in a book: ‘Sudhir Patwardhan—Walking Through Soul City.’ It’s a door-stopper, weighing 3.5 kilos, but also exquisitely produced, and even though priced at ₹6000, it could be affordable unlike the actual artworks that command eye-watering prices. Crucially, the plates represent three-fourths of all his works.
The centrepiece of his NGMA retrospective curated by Nancy Adajania had been the seven-panelled Mumbai Proverbs, commissioned by Anand and Anuradha Mahindra, which can be viewed by appointment at their office. Like discrete puzzles fitting together, the panels join to create a panorama of a city throbbing with crowds and industry. Patwardhan uses the metaphor of a journey to go from 18th century Gothic splendour of south Mumbai to the tinnier and teeming northern parts of a 21st century city. The fifth panel that features malls and a shiny new Mumbai was the most difficult to paint, he says. “I was painting an experience, a city, I was not familiar with.”
Disconcertingly, this panorama ends in an enormous shaft dug into the earth in the midst of the slums, that could be the foundation for one of the gleaming skyscrapers dotting the city or show, as Adajania says in her essay in the book: “The emptiness at the heart of a monumental tableau of hyper-capitalism.”
“I also see it as poor people being pushed underground into this big ditch, basically to clear them out to build a new city,” says Patwardhan. He is no longer ideological, having long been disillusioned with how Marxism played out, but he is still attuned to “how power relations operate, and how decisions are made about people’s lives without consulting them, the absence of any participatory planning.” The seven panels of Mumbai Proverbs also coveys the unease that Patwardhan has been experiencing about the city that has long been his muse. “One has lost a point from which one can sense the city as a whole. One did have a sense of a way of life when one painted the city earlier—you could incorporate people’s homes, workplaces and the marketplace and it all added up to convey a way of life.”
The fragmentation, the opacity that starts from the glass façade of the skyscrapers gives him a sense of being unmoored. But could it be that at 73 he is no longer the young man who once pounded the city pavements scouring faces and crowds with his x-ray vision, and hence the disillusionment with it?
“Age is definitely a factor. One uses the energy to just confront the city full face, in just travelling around, but also, there is the decay that hits you. In the early 2000s I began to feel about Mumbai what was earlier said about Calcutta…” A dying city. He doesn’t have to quite say the words.
In Bombay/ Mumbai it’s been death through a thousand nicks and cuts: the murder of the communist leader Krishna Desai in 1970 that preceded the disintegration of the labour unions, the textile mills strike of 1980s, the cement scam of the Antulay years, the underworld, the multiple terror attacks, the riots of 1992-’93. A few years after those riots, Patwardhan painted ‘Shaq’ which brilliantly captured the tensions that animated Bombay crowds in those tense days. “I have always painted people in a certain space. When feelings between people change, space too acquires another meaning. The way the painting is constructed changes, the position of people, gestures, looks, intensity of colour changes,” he had said in an earlier interview speaking about the painting. It presaged the normalization of how people would view one another 30 years on.
“From being a part of the crowd, being comfortable in the crowd, you begin to question that crowd,” he now says. And yet, he would like to drop his ideological baggage even more, the “layers of indoctrination,” and be more like his wife Shanta who relates to people “purely on a human level, without attributing any labels to them.”
In the face of great modern clamour to pick a side on political and social issues, the need to cultivate ambivalence especially when it comes to art has only become greater, he says. Practical concerns won’t allow him to leave Mumbai—it’s home after all– but since 2005, when he gave up practice, there’s been a receding into the confines of his house and studio. It has prompted new ways to think about his art. “What it means then to be a realist painter and how to capture the ambivalence of what happens in the studio.” Art cannot just be about lived experiences, there’s also the question of memory, especially as one grows older. “This aspect of one’s more intimate relationships rather than class acquires more importance.”
Patwardhan’s wife Shanta whom he has painted extensively, walks in with some sweets to shake up the mood of mild melancholy that has descended in the studio. As we eat the jalebis, Patwardhan speaks about his upcoming cataract operation. The gallerist Usha Mirchandani, he jokes, told him that after her operation she found out that the walls of her gallery were white instead of the pale yellow she had assumed them to be.
“Who knows, what I will see.” A new Mumbai, perhaps.