Sudhir Patwardhan’s grim and portentous paintings represent (as opposed to document) an ever-expanding Mumbai/Bombay that swallows up open spaces, nature, even the sky, and its pullulating underclasses. His works represent the viciousness and toxicity of urban life and the profound melancholy, isolation, and violence engendered by it. To quote Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables, Patwardhan’s “local lifeworlds” are “thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations and memories”. However, Patwardhan’s vision extends to all Indian metro cities.
Over the years, Patwardhan’s earlier cacophonous paintings with their firmly contoured jostling figures, buildings, railway stations, intrusive flyovers, and the endless favela in solid, dark shades have given way to quieter, flimsier greys and phantom-like human beings. He evokes a more personal space now. His initial faith in the power of the leftist ideology to ameliorate the lot of humankind has mutated into a sadder humanism as Patwardhan, who worked as a radiologist from 1975 to 2005, positions himself as an observer.
I had first interviewed Patwardhan in 1995, when he had an exhibition at Gallery Chemould in Kolkata. More recently, I met him at Santiniketan, where an exhibition of his important drawings was held as part of the Bengal Biennale in November 2024, and then at his solo exhibition at TRI Art & Culture (co-presented by Vadhera Art Gallery) in Kolkata in June. Both times, his wife, Shanta, a physician and Kathak dancer, accompanied him.
During chats and through email exchanges, Patwardhan revealed what spurs him as an artist.
Tell us something about your upbringing and your first art lessons.
A usual middle-class household. Father a good craftsman—carpenter, odd-jobs man. I think I got some of the technical skill from him. Mother fond of reading, especially Hindi literature. She had a poetic temperament. I liked drawing and painting in school. Took it up seriously in medical college. Took the advice of some Pune artists.
When and how were you introduced to leftist ideas and existentialist philosophy? What authors and books did you read?
In medical college I was reading Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Dostoevsky, Marx, and Freud. Also the Frankfurt School thinkers: Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse. There were a few friends with whom one could discuss these things.
Self-Portrait with Brush and Camera, 2016. Acrylic on canvas. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
When did you begin your training as a doctor and where?
In 1967; at Armed Forces Medical College, Pune.
Did you continue to practise drawing during your training? Has your training as a doctor influenced your art? Your drawing of a birthing seems to envisage the violence that is so noticeable in your work.
Yes, I drew and painted all along my medical studies and then throughout practice. For the love of it, and with a certain sense of purpose. Meeting patients, people in pain and discomfort, has influenced the subject matter as much as the attempt to understand inequality and poverty.
In the early days, you drew and painted in full public view. Why? How did the viewers react to the experiment?
I was interested in taking art to the masses. I thought introducing them to the process was the best way to do this. Viewers’ reactions were always mixed. Appreciative and questioning. I did this public painting only occasionally. Mostly painted in the studio.
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Your depiction of Mumbai is both realistic and abstract. It is an assimilation of several viewpoints. How did this happen? Do you regularly use photographs to build up your compositions? How do you “transcend reality and let your imagination fly”, to quote Timothy Hyman?
I do sketches of abstract structures that respond to inner needs. I take multiple photographs and manipulate them in Photoshop to correspond to the drawn, abstract structures. It is a dialogue between inner need and outer reality. Hence, realism and abstraction become one. I believe they are two sides of the same coin.
Lynching 1, 2023. Acrylic on paper. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
You were close to the progressive Maharashtrian literary circles and the little magazine movement. Did you contribute to the magazines? What interests did you share with this literary circle?
I used to contribute sketches and articles earlier, in the 1970s and early 1980s. Their Left-leaning ideas were a common factor, and their generally rebellious nature was an attraction.
Please recount your visit to Santiniketan in 1984-86 and describe the artists you met there.
I was interested in terracotta relief work, so wanted to meet Mani da [K.G. Subramanyan]. I loved his slabs related to the Bangladesh war. So, I stayed for a few weeks and worked on relief landscapes. Enjoyed talking to Mani da, R. Siva Kumar, and to the “Realist Group”: Amit Mukhopadhyay, Pulak Dutta, Suranjan Basu, etc. Siva Kumar introduced me to some deep writings on art. It was a learning experience.
The working class became a major component of your art. What role did Left ideology play in engendering this fellow feeling you have for labourers? You were close to the CPI(M) although you were not a member. How did you realise that ideology in books is more attractive than in reality?
I saw workers as representing the class that would lead to a classless society, so identified with them in the early years. It was idealistic and a little naive. I realised that on the ground, people are much more complicated and driven by contradictory impulses. People who claim to represent the ideology can’t or rarely live up to it.
Why did you choose art over activism? Or was art itself a form of activism for you? How did you take art to the masses?
I realised that I loved art more. I was not cut out to be a life-long activist. Tried my best to take art to the people who normally do not get the opportunity [to experience art]. Showed outside the gallery, took exhibitions to smaller towns, sold cheap prints of my work.
Given your idealism, how do you navigate the market-driven art world?
Difficult question. The market is so pervasive, difficult to keep out. One tries to take art to the people who can’t afford to buy art but can enjoy art.
War Zone Studio, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Tell us about the textile workers’ strike of the 1980s, how it transformed Mumbai, and shook your faith in the efficacy of the Left in bringing about change.
The long-drawn-out strike was a disaster for the mill workers. The whole character of the mill lands changed. Post-closure of the mills, the advice of thinking town planners was not considered by the government. The mill owner and politician nexus profited. The Left movement was derailed.
Now it is important to continue work in smaller areas, even if you do not have a grand narrative. As an artist I try to keep my focus on people, individuals steady.
How did Renaissance art influence the structuring of your work although they are worlds apart? Why did Fernand Léger inspire you so deeply? Can the same be said about classical music and jazz?
came to appreciate Renaissance art as I read more art history and also through discussions with fellow artists. It is, after all, the beginning of a certain way of looking at the world. Renaissance perspective and Cubism are the two predominant influences on the structuring of my works. That is where Léger comes in.
Indian miniatures are also an important influence. So, distance—either geographical or in time—does not matter.
Good art and music always stimulate the soul and allow you to experience an inner rhythm.
You paint multitudes of people. Yet every single person has different features and personalities. How did you individualise them? Why do they not look into each other’s eyes?
I love to paint people, and even in a crowd, each is an individual. The tension in a crowd scene is between the “mass” of people and the separateness of each individual. Ajanta and Chola stone sculptures are an influence. The look is a very potent device in painting and has to be used judiciously, or else it tends to dominate any viewing.
Just People, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Your later paintings, from the 1990s onwards, represent Mumbai’s steamroller “progress”, which came about at a great cost to the environment. Some of your works are collages of the cityscape viewed from several angles. I felt that a particular painting from Abanindranath Tagore’s Arabian Nights series—The Tailor and the Fishbone—reflects directly on the composition of some of your works, such as The City, from 1979. Please elaborate.
Though I love the Arabian Nights series by Abanindranath Tagore, I was not aware of any direct influence. The collage-like structure of a fragmented city derives more from Cubism.
Mumbai underwent a great change after the riots of the 1990s. Suspicion and doubt became a part of existence. Did violence (Fight I and Lynching I from 2023) creep into your work then or earlier?
One has always been conscious of the violence in society. It did acquire special importance after the riots.
How does the genocide in Gaza resonate with your recent work? War Zone Studio is a great example.
For all of us, watching the news over the past two years has been a traumatic experience. For it shows the cruelty in humans and the gross injustice perpetrated by the powerful. Also, the destruction one sees contrasts sharply with the propaganda about our development and progress.
Built and Broken, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Ever since the pandemic, Mumbai has been in the throes of development, as giant flyovers are being constructed and the Metro is being extended (Beautified Flyover of 2023). Is the high level of pollution one of the ways that nature is hitting back? The panoramic Ulhasnagar of 2001, with its toxic river, seems to suggest so.
More than nature hitting back, the current situation is a result of our own short-sighted thinking and bad planning. The toxic river in Ulhasnagar is, of course, man-made.
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Please tell us how your figuration has evolved from the iconic Irani Restaurant of 1977 to the bleak realism of your labourers, violently distorted figures, the reduction of individuals to outlines, and the riddles of your self-portraits, as in Self-Portrait with Brush and Camera. The play of art and artifice is most intriguing.
I have always seen representation as a mystery. This need to recreate what one sees through one’s own imagination is an enigma. The self-portraits focus on this enigma more directly.
Figuration develops through an interaction between emotion and observation, the need for intimacy and for distance. As Léger said: “Art is subjective, but it is a controlled subjectivity built on objective raw material. The work of art is the ambiguous state of these two values, the real and the imagined. The difficulty is to find the balance between these two poles.”
How do you depict fractured mental states, as in Irani Restaurant and The War Elsewhere?
It comes from projecting one’s larger experience onto one’s immediate environment. One’s own agony about what is going on in the world enters the figures one paints.
In Erase, you seem to be out to wipe out your own work. Why this self-destruction?
It is not self-destruction; it is questioning the relation between the artist, the painting, and the viewer. Ranjit Hoskote, speaking about the painting, puts it well: “The questioning of the ability to represent, the questioning of pictoriality itself. The viewer’s position as—estrangingly, disorientingly—the canvas on the easel, to which the artist-persona reaches out with brush, rag, and phone-camera. The I/you of artist and viewer blurred, the slash smudged” (quoted in Sudhir Patwardhan: Walking Through Soul City curated by Nancy Adajania).
Soumitra Das is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata.