Recollections of a Lost Tribe

Philip D’mello paints the Koopari community which once used to live Virar, Mumbai. The artist reconstructs this community through certain cultural codes. Shubhalakshmi Shukla takes a look at these works.

What could be the impact of recollecting the Koopari community      (amongst Christians) where the city of Mumbai moves without much severity about the caste distinctions in the present? According to the artist Philip D’mello this community lived in the Kattarwadi region in Virar, near Mumbai. He paints their housing-settlements which do not exist anymore in the present. The memoirs of these past three decades last within his mind till the day.

Most of the paintings are landscapes with figures. There is a sense of pre-significance of languid gestural movement in the handling of the brush treatment with colours (while painting the figures as well as the lived surroundings). The momentous growths of volume in spaces conceived represent details and memoirs which build on its own.

Most of the paintings constitute artist’s presence in his own signature, except one which carries ‘a title’ in place of his signature. The title reads Bana Baay, which in Marathi language means ‘the elder most girl in the family’.

What is interesting to observe is that treatment of the attire and the gestural significance moves beyond its derelict presence and evolves into a much larger context of the present day working class community. This approach creates people so dignified in their mannerism while they build a surrounding for themselves and for those who enter newly.

A possibility of love, some what like Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda!

The Night in Isla Negra- Pablo Neruda

Ancient night and the unruly salt
beat at the walls of my house.
The shadow is all one, the sky
throbs now along with the ocean,
and sky and shadow erupt
in the crash of their vast conflict.
All night long they struggle;
nobody knows the name
of the harsh light that keeps slowly opening
like a languid fruit.
So on the coast comes to light,
out of seething shadow, the harsh dawn,
gnawed at by the moving salt,
swept clean by the mass of night,
bloodstained in its sea-washed crater.”