Steel, wood to darkened glass facades: Reflections on Mumbai's transition to a post-industrial metro
Artist Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings of Mumbai encompass its material elements: tenements, creeks, walkways, balconies, and factories. The industrial city of textile mills and commuter crowds is central to his practice.
Patwardhan, in a 2012 essay, notes this influence: “The material structures of the city in close-up – the pillars and railings, the painted metal of buses and train bogies – in relation to the human bodies, generated active spaces full of tension”.
In Patwardhan’s early paintings, such as the 1981 Accident on May Day, our perspective is street-level. From this vantage point, things are never entirely within view: bodies and vehicles momentarily enter, but soon vanish. Our gaze is cluttered, but the city itself can be grasped and heard.
One moves via pillars we lean on, railings we clutch, taxis we whistle for, and train compartments we are squashed in. This is a city rippling through our limbs, alongside proximate others, an experience available to many.
A different perspective onto Mumbai is in Raghubir Singh’s 1994 photo book, Bombay: Gateway to India. Amit Chaudhuri writes of these photographs:
“The recurring metaphor and motif is glass, the glass of a shop window, or of a door to a plush department store or hotel: glass, which introduces an element of...
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