Mumbai and Beyond: Sudhir Patwardhan’s Five-Decade Journey Through Indian Urbanity

The title did not specify which cities, but Mumbai has been Sudhir Patwardhan’s muse since he arrived there as a young medical graduate 50 years ago in 1974. His brilliant recent show, “Cities: Built, Broken”, which closed at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi on March 4, was no exception.

It could be argued, though, that the city for Patwardhan has often been a site in which to explore his favourite subject: people. It was an interest in human beings that led him to study medicine in Pune. In fact, he almost took up psychiatry. But by then his desire to pursue art seriously had become clear, and a radiologist uncle suggested that psychiatry alongside painting might be too demanding. So Patwardhan chose radiology instead. It remained his day job until 2005.

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Patwardhan’s style is predominantly figurative but also expressionist: capturing the feeling of inhabiting the Indian city. The camaraderie of other artists was crucial to Patwardhan as he was self-taught. It seems no coincidence that his close friends have all been interested in the urban: the older Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar, the younger Atul Dodiya, and the late painter-poet Gieve Patel, who was like him a practising physician.

Other than his youthful admiration for the French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Patwardhan has spoken of Honoré Daumier (1808–79) and Fernand Léger (1881–1955) as artistic influences. Both of them were French too and drew urban life but in two different centuries. Daumier, a satirical cartoonist, also pioneered 19th century realist oils of working people, famously depicting them in the then new modes of transport like the omnibus and the railway carriage. Léger, a Cubist, was gripped by the transformations of the machine age. As he wrote in 1922: “The contemporary environment is clearly the manufactured and ‘mechanical’ object; this is slowly subjugating the breasts and curves of women, fruit, the soft landscape.”

Like Daumier, Patwardhan has spent a lifetime painting ordinary denizens of the city and, like Léger, exploring changing urban forms. His original aim—to document Mumbai’s working class—was shaped by 1970s Marxist idealism. But despite depicting groups or crowds often, his work is distinguished by an innate respect for the selfhood of the anonymous individual. In a characteristically thoughtful interview, Patwardhan once said that both as a doctor and as a painter, his work gave him the power to represent people, so he felt a certain responsibility: “It would be my idea, my statement, but it had to respect what they thought of themselves also.”

Although his disenchantment with organised Left politics began to emerge as early as the 1980s, paintings like Street Play (1981) or Accident on May Day (1981) retained a deep feeling for the collective. In iconic images like Night Bite or Town or Lower Parel, even amidst poverty and confusion, people seemed to draw sustenance from the company of other people: on streets and platforms, in buses and trains, in the city’s iconic Irani cafes or on their own terraces, whether at work or leisure, in moments of protest, violence, or death.

Critique of mass society

And yet Patwardhan’s crowd was not always united or even good for the people in it. It may have been his youthful reading of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre that imbued his work with an existentialist critique of mass society, or perhaps his distrust arose organically from experience. In works created after the Bombay riots of 1993, Shaque and Riot, people eye each other with suspicion, rancour. In Death on the Street (2006), passers-by stop to look at the dead man on a pavement outside a working-class Mumbai bar but with little feeling. In his 2007 work Marchers, a succession of mostly faceless figures walk determinedly on, their anonymous yellow bodies edged with cyan, entirely unseeing of two among them who lie on the ground, clutching their heads. Following the crowd can make us blind, unempathetic, or violent.

Over the past decade, Patwardhan’s gaze shifted indoors to a great extent, producing domestic images like Home, Inner Room, A High Bed, and Passage (all 2016), as well as many more portraits and self-portraits in the studio. In the seven-panel Mumbai Proverbs (2013-14), a corporate commission by the Mahindras, new urban indoor spaces appeared: a huge mall, the plane interior, a vast office with desk workers in identical blue shirts.

These latest works—painted between 2021 and 2024—seem to me to mark a departure. Earlier, no matter how much activity or chaos existed in the urban spaces he was depicting, Patwardhan’s images produced a sense of calm, almost of stasis. People went about their daily lives, displaying little emotion even in moments of shock. New aspects of the city rose, and people looked away from the old and dying. In Brave New World (2018), for instance, two men turn their animated faces away from a sea of shanties and towards a blue glass tower. They do not even notice the precarious human figure suspended from above the tower: one among lakhs of window cleaners employed to polish urban India’s endlessly replicating shiny surfaces.

Distilled essence

Now, in “Cities: Built, Broken”, what ails Indian urbanity is not longer merely the strange, sad juxtapositions of a decade ago. The old has mostly vanished or is in ruins. If any buildings still stand straight and tall, with orderly rows of windows, they are pushed to the periphery. What takes centre stage now are scenes of deliberate destruction, whether shown somewhat realistically (Remains, Under a Clear Blue Sky) or distilled to their formal essence (Homes Once, Houses Once, and Buildings Once). In the nightmarish Built and Broken (2024), a faceless cop presides over a scene of what the Indian news consumer has been told is “bulldozer justice”. Amid the broken walls and tilting corrugated roofs are almost invisibly tiny human bodies, some decapitated, others lain in a possible mass grave. In simpler images, even the familiar fixtures of an older city—Bus Stop (2024)—look like they have barely withstood a war. Yet, the schoolboy waiting for a bus nonchalantly pops chickpeas in his mouth, even as someone behind him digs through the rubble.

The opposite of destruction would appear to be development. But we live in the shadow of flyovers and foot overbridges. No patch of sky is unobstructed. The unity of the frame is constantly broken, with metro pillars and stairways turning the world into an asymmetrical, jagged maze. In image after image—Yellow Sky, Crossing the Road, Delivery Boy, Beautified Flyover, and Perplexed, all dated 2023—this altered city seems populated by quasi-zombies, encased in their cars or walking faceless in the maze. The sole figure in the foreground looks invariably overwhelmed. The viewer’s eye is drawn to that single face, always at an angle to its surroundings, expressing bafflement, exhaustion, sometimes horror. In Graffiti (2023), the solitary human waiting to cross a road looks utterly helpless, as if cowed not just by the scale of new urban construction but by the graffiti behind him, angry in colour and form.

Perhaps Patwardhan’s starkest ever depiction of the crowd is contained in Lynching 1 and Lynching 3, where there are no faces or even bodies. Reduced to the barest forms—the striking stick, the stomping foot, the defending arm—neither attackers nor victims are recognisable as human.

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Still, rarely, Patwardhan’s old faith in collectivities resurfaces. P137, although named drably for the grey Metro pillar at its centre, is filled with the white outlines of people crossing past each other, refusing to be held back by the yellow barricades. Their forms present a diversity of Indian physical types: men, women, young, old, turbaned Sikh, capped and bearded Muslim, student with backpack, mechanic with a wrench. A similar vision of harmonious coexistence informs the large and busy Just People, its sense of comfort aided by the presence of older architectural forms, curving or crooked rather than angular, and even a horse.

The only painting here that affords the serenity of the old is one that locates itself at the city’s ruined edge, a rusty arched bridge rising above the water like a poor man’s rainbow (Abandon, 2024). Within the city, sadly, there appears now to be no escape from the claustrophobia of our times. In War Zone Studio, clashing planes, odd reflections, and a centrifugal hole create a dizzying sensation, a feeling that the artist’s work too may be sucked into some vortex.

Meanwhile in Irani Café and the War Elsewhere, the beloved space of urban camaraderie is now guarded by a gun-toting policeman, while destruction unfolds on a TV screen: a figure raising both arms, in supplication or surrender? Only one café occupant seems to see, and sure enough, he suffers. He holds the table for support, his stricken skull-like visage suggesting a Munch-like silent scream. But it is in the apathetic, unaffected gazes all around him that Patwardhan reveals what really is breaking our cities: our move from melancholy to monstrous. In our new netherworlds, cossetted by cola advertisements, the war will always seem elsewhere. 

Trisha Gupta is a writer and critic based in Delhi. She works as an independent arts researcher, cultural commentator, curator and translator.