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The Crafting of Reality
Amrita Gupta Singh traces the genesis of Sudhir Patwardhan’s drawings which were recently exhibited in an exclusive drawings solo at the Guild Gallery Mumbai. The life in Mumbai enters in Patwardhan’s drawings in multiple registers, says the author.
Where and how does it begin? Are beginnings aporetic, diabolical and abyssal? To put that first alphabet, that first dot, that first line, the first trace on the blankness of paper brings in a constellation of notions, of advent, authoring, birth and cause, inventing and origin. Can we master and control this beginning, is this beginning tractable or does it fall apart after the first marks and traces? Can we bring the paper into life and motion, or do we tear it into shreds in frustration and fear? A drawing is also a beginning, the first mark-makings that give form to an image, an idea or an experience, whether abstract or representational. Viewing the noted artist Sudhir Patwardhan’s (b. 1949) drawings from the last three decades, engaged me with this philosophical notion of ‘beginnings’. How do I also ‘begin’ to write a review of this retrospective of drawings, executed from the 1970’s to 2006, ‘beginning’ from the artist’s formative phase? Can I articulate my experience of such a moving and monumental tribute to the spirit of humanity, into words? Such a sensitive rendering of the labouring body, its lines of resilience, and its expressions of strength makes me want to trace with my fingers, the contours and innards of these drawings, smell the graphite/ink and rub it into my own skin….won’t this feeling be distanced via my review? ….I don’t know, but let me try to make a ‘beginning’…
Presented by the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, titled ‘The Crafting of Reality’, accompanied by a book written by Ranjit Hoskote, and exhibited for the first time, Patwardhan’s drawings explicates his engagement with Leftist philosophy and rendering the human body, with its sweat and labour, in its varied typologies, located within the anachronisms of the city of Bombay. Patwardhan drew as a child, but it was only at the age of 18, in the first year of his MBBS, that he decided that he wanted to be an artist. Via art books, philosophical readings, an active engagement with both eastern and western art histories, a refusal to locate himself in his high-caste identity, to experience the life of the proletariat, and aesthetically and materially dealing with the ‘problem of being human’, drew him into the world of art. Predominantly figurative, Patwardhan locates his gaze on people in local trains, suburban construction sites, on teeming city streets, on the pangs of an underprivileged, marginalized urban populace struggling to ‘belong’ to the city via their contribution of labour. In the manner of the Socialist Realists, Patwardhan elevates the life of the common man/woman, imbuing everyday activity with a sense of heroic dignity and fortitude.
The squat muscular body, the skeletal body, the elongated body, the emaciated body, all emerges in these drawings, interspersed with urban sprawls, industrialized units, undulating landscapes and other interiors. While many of his drawings were preparatory sketches for his paintings, in this retrospective, a majority stand as independent entities. These drawings inhabit the in-between space of objectivity and expressionism, a certain tautness, a certain tension, also a certain aggression is felt, this is where my question of how does Patwardhan ‘begin’ his work is contextualized. Being a medical practitioner meant dealing with the illnesses and problems of people across classes, to get too involved in another’s pain, to be like an emotional sponge is detrimental in many ways, certain defence mechanisms bring in the constituent of distance. While Patwardhan sensitively renders individual persons, absorbing the frown, grimace, smile, or empathetic gesture, forming an intimate relationship with his subject, there is still a certain detachment. Is this how he grapples with the social distance of class, and the predicament of being human-(e), in the representation of the ‘Other’ body or the reality of ‘Otherness’? Is this where he ‘begins’ to find linkages between the scientific structures of the body and its emotive correspondences. Is this where rationality and spirituality (not in a religious sense), conjoin?
In the 1970’s, Patwardhan’s drawings were largely informed by his experience of everyday travel on Bombay’s local trains. Sweating bodies, crowded platforms and compartments, the anxiety to catch a particular train, street/train performers, hawkers, beggars, clerks, officers, Brahmins and Dalits all travel on these trains. They jostle, fight, sleep on each other’s shoulders, argue, banter, share stories, sing and smile together. Parwardhan articulates all these experiences in his drawings from this period, differentiating each individual with the versatility of the line or shadow, and the vocal void. The darkness of the Emergency, the silencing of the individual voice in a republican democracy, is mirrored in the drawings of this period. In the 1980’s, there is a subtle shift in his drawings, as most were executed within the privacy of his studio, rather than everyday recordings of the previous decade. Hence, one finds him ruminating on the body set in a particular socio-cultural context. Heads encased in space helmets, self-portraits, imaginary portraits, copies from miniatures, classical Indian art and old masters, renditions of everyday life in domestic settings, female studies and surrealistic landscapes mark this period. In the 1990’s , Patwardhan explores the notion of the Hermaphrodite, couples engaged in sensual activity, or discordant couples in violent power games, anonymous crowds in city spaces, the sick and ageing body or mobs turning the public space into a battlefield. With the liberalization of the economy in the 1990’s, the divisiveness of globalization, the porous-ness of national borders and transnational encounters, the rise of right-wing politics and ethnic wars all left various violent marks on the urban landscape, and cities like Bombay are witness of these painful splits and slippages. All these enter in Patwardhan’s drawings in multiple registers, in his renderings of both personal and public domains. As he says “For me, drawing actually starts with this impulse to depict the visual world…it is aggressive and cathartic, but also allows for the exploration of areas that are not possible to talk of in painting. Some utterances ring true as unguarded slips, not as well-crafted statements!”
After this review in which I had to employ distance, I ‘begin’ again…to trace the drawings with my fingers….
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