Tale of Two Cities
Goaded by a sense of urgency to record, represent and archive the moments of confrontation and witnessing the daily realities of a milling city, artist Sudhir Patwardhan approaches his drawing surface with a chronicler’s severity, passion and detachment. He finds the cities of Mumbai and Thane in the bodies of ordinary people that he comes into contact with while traveling in the Mumbai locals and the bodies become metaphors for him to express his views on a harshly stratified society. He has been chronicling the lives of these people in his sketches for a long time and while working, he never thought of exhibiting them in a gallery. Drawing people and places was an intimate meditative process for him. Almost after three decades, the artist has decided to bring them out for public viewing.
This book is a catalogue and documentation for the show of Sudhir Patwardhan’s drawings at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai. Ranjit Hoskote, who has been pursuing the studio practice of the artist for a long time, has come out with a very insightful introduction and a very detailed conversation in order to elucidate the aesthetics and philosophy of these works. In the introduction Ranjit Hoskote says: “Suffering and resilience, dispassionate observation and empathetic engagement, imbalance and sanity: these are the polarities around which he develops his theatre of the human predicament. Patwardhan’s realism never lapses into illustrative description; it regards and presents reality as an ongoing negotiation between the self and the world.”
Patwardhan uses his drawings for expressing not only the dispossessed bodies but also for expressing his concerns on sexuality. He, according to Hoskote, considers ‘sexuality as a fluid rather than a stable identity.’ Though some of the drawings are done as preparatory sketches for full-fledged paintings, most of them are spontaneously done, showing the strength of lines, which the author qualifies as, etching-like, smooth and emollient.
The interview between Patwardhan and Hoskote engages the reader not only with the factual detailing, but also they provide a context to understand the works sociologically, aesthetically and historically. Hoskote makes insightful comments on these drawings, which in fact function both as historical registration and critical intervention. Patwardhan’s answers, though short and crisp locate the points that the author raises, within the structure of these drawings. Patwardhan talks about his influences and inspirations from various sources in detail.
A discussion on religion and caste is pivotal in this interview and that makes this book doubly relevant vis-à-vis the art practice of Sudhir Patwardhan. “Would you not say that your choice of Left politics as a young man, you need to look carefully at the laboring body and the proletarian realities, and your commitment to the process of becoming ‘declassed’- that all these were part of a rebellion against your membership, by birth, of an elite caste-group?” asks Ranjit. Patwardhan answers: “A huge international conference of Chitpavan Brahmins was recently held in Pune. It would never occur to me to go for such a thing. I would like to keep my distance from that identity. Let us say ‘still like to keep my distance’, mainly because I don’t identify with the problems this kind of grouping sets out to solve. Problem specific to the group. But I am more accepting of the accident of my birth now! It’s funny. You know the top leadership of the undivided Communist party was all Brahmin! And they always downplayed the role of caste as compared to class. But for Dalit intellectuals and political activists, caste was more real than class.
“You are right, in my youth I was rebelling against my belonging to an elite caste-group. At a psychological level, the rebellioin was against family and caste. But intellectually, it was formulated in Marxist class terms. Another of those ‘latent disquietudes’ that we spoke of earlier! In India, you can never really separate class from caste.”
Patwardhan’s drawings elaborate this space of ambiguous mixture of class and caste. These drawings tell the story of a city’s proletarians’ journey through three decades. His body, claimed and unclaimed becomes the artist’s tool to tell this story. And Ranjit Hoskote has captured the essence of it through his vigorous questions. |
