Vivek Menezes
It is Mumbai in the hugely impactful paintings throughout Sudhir Patwardhan’s landmark solo exhibition Cities: Built, Broken that has been slowly touring the world, starting in London last October and scheduled to wind up in Kochi this September. Nonetheless, it was Panjim and Goa that kept coming back to mind when I viewed this stunning, searing, wide-ranging suite of works on its opening day at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Kala Ghoda on March 25th. My expectations were high – I believe (and have previously written) that Patwardhan is India’s greatest living painter – and I still found myself transfixed, especially by the monumental show-stopper Built and Broken (2024) from which the exhibition gets its name. In an email exchange, the eminent architecture professor/poet/translator Mustansir Dalvi told me it depicts “contemporary Mumbai in swirls of form, derived from the city's uncontrollable urges to build/demolish/build and fix what isn't broken [and] a metaphor for the dismantling of urban memory and a lost collegiality.” But it is not just one city, because this throbbing, encompassing, intensely wrought masterpiece reveals holocaust at the heart of what is passing for urban “development” in many other places as well, and I immediately perceived it as a veritable Guernica of our times.
In the book published by Vadehra Art Gallery to accompany this exhibition, Gayatri Sinha has an insightful analysis of where the 76-year-old Pune-born physician/painter (for decades Patwardhan practiced radiology in Thane) has reached in his highly consequential relationship with megalopolis Mumbai: “In the last four decades and more, he has chronicled the agency of capitalism transforming Mumbai, and the present series of works mark a climactic peak to this growing dystopic vision. It is instructive here to view the successive stages in Patwardhan’s own journey, as he seeks to mirror the city’s progress. The scale of paintings in large horizontal canvases that he chose to work with, particularly from 1980 to 2000, mimics the expanse of the horizon [but] by the time we come to the present set of works, there is a colossal displacement of ideological intent; the meticulous detailing of previous decades and youthful enthusiasm has been replaced by a cynical distrust.”
That is putting it mildly, because the artist is clearly past the stage of mere suspicions about what has been happening to Mumbai – and of course it is much worse in Panjim and Goa – and his paintings seethe with unambiguous anger, contempt and sorrow, while also making the connection between local catastrophes to national and global crises. Delhi and UP can be seen here, and Gaza too, with especial power in the deceptively nostalgic Irani Café and the War Elsewhere (2024) where the eye tries to resist but cannot fail to acknowledge an Edvard Munch-esque anguish permeating the scene. In his excellent interview with Shilpa Gupta that is the best part of the exhibition book, Patwardhan acknowledges “the rapid transformation of the city made me want to engage with it again. In the last year, however, works like those related to Gaza emerged. What was happening there came as a shock. The immense building activity that was happening here, in Mumbai, contrasted sharply with the destruction happening elsewhere. Locally, the bulldozer raj also became a counterpoint to all this construction. These two themes began interacting with each other in my work.”
Actually, I was doubly lucky on my visit, because I also managed to attend the opening if A Show of Hands, a group exhibition at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in the CMSVS Museum curated by Ranjit Hoskote in tribute to Gieve Patel (1940-2023), the other supremely thoughtful physician/painter of Bombay (he was also a son-in-law of Goa) who ranks amongst the greatest Indian artists. There were other stars there – Atul and Anju Dodiya, the luminous Neelima Sheikh – but when Patwardhan spoke his sense of loss was viscerally felt, as though he was missing part of himself. And in fact, in his Frontline obituary for his friend, he does write rather revealingly that “We saw things similarly and we painted similar subjects. Both of us had found a muse in the city of Bombay and both of us tried in our own way to give a place to the downtrodden and social outcasts in our art. This humanism was always a part of our joint endeavour. When our perspectives did diverge, there was always opportunity for conversation and discussion that made us both accept differences and overlaps. Friendship and creativity can go hand in hand when your bond is such that there is no need in it to please the other person. There is enough trust that you can speak your mind freely and fearlessly. To do that takes a lot of courage on both sides.”
In the final analysis, it is that courage – the unbowed dignity of soul and spirit – which sets Patwardhan apart at in our unrelentingly vulgar age of the oligarchs. There may be an inherent contradiction in standing up for the little guy in paintings that sell for fortunes to the super-rich, but that is the nature of the art world, and it is entirely to this great artist’s credit that he always goes the extra mile to make his works as accessible as possible, and never pulls any punches in upholding the truth in the direct view of those who benefit the most from denying it. In writing this column, I reached out to Hoskote to ask what he thought about my take on “the Guernica of our times”, and here is his reply: In 'Built and Broken', as elsewhere in this new body of work - which is compelling in its bleak grandeur - Sudhir Patwardhan achieves a remarkable convergence of impulses. He brings together the lyric impulse - with its emphasis on intimacy and vulnerability, the individual voice - and the epic impulse - which asserts turbulence on a vast scale, the fate of the collective. Before our astonished eyes, Patwardhan reclaims the genre of the history painting. Only, in this account, we ourselves are the broken anti-heroes cast adrift on everyday currents, and our time is the reluctant stage of the tragedy."