An Extraordinary Cohesiveness
R. Siva Kumar

An extraordinary cohesiveness, rare among his contemporaries, characterizes Sudhir Patwardhan’s oeuvre. It comes from his single minded devotion to painting the human figure or, as he would prefer, people. Looking back at his beginnings, he wrote in 1985: ‘When I started on the road to becoming an artist, there was no doubt in my mind as to what Art was about. It was about people.’[1]  He would probably say the same thing today and with the same conviction: Art is about people.

What has changed over the years is what he means by people, and what can be said about them or how they ought to be painted. Initially he painted them with expressionist passion, exaggerating and distorting their bodies to tell us about his own emotional engagement with these figures, and to make us feel what he believed their bodies were revealing to him. But he soon thought that this was an infringement, even if it was on their behalf he was robbing them of their uniqueness and turning them into universal emblems of human predicament, as others, especially artists associated with the Bombay Progressive Group, have done before him.

Being an artist who would have liked to be a revolutionary, for Sudhir people meant primarily the proletariat and others like himself who belonged to the middleclass. And in a big city like Mumbai they often shared a common societal space, rubbing shoulders on the streets, in the trains and in the neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city where they lived. Yet he knew them differently and each called for a different kind of representation. He had an existential understanding or an insider’s view of the middleclass and as a political empathizer he strove to gain an objective understanding of the proletariat by becoming what Ranjit Hoskote has called a ‘complicit observer.’

With his leftist ideological leanings Sudhir decided to focus on the proletariat in the mid-seventies. And he wanted to paint them objectively without his own emotions coming between him and what he saw. Commenting on this, he wrote, ‘My aim is to make figures that can become self-images for the people who are subjects of my work. One of the questions I have asked myself in this context is how close or distanced must I be from the figures I paint. Too close a relation may overburden the image with the artist’s private impulses.’ In other words, how to paint someone the way he would paint himself and yet paint without the burden of intimacy? How to be at once empathetic and objective?

At first he tried to paint proletarian bodies as objectively as he could, enacting everyday actions like bending down to pick up something, or changing one’s dress before commencing work, climbing on to the back of a truck, or sitting at a restaurant table waiting to be served. With their bodies almost filling up the entire canvas, and with just enough details of the setting to locate them socially he painted them large and iconic. Sometimes a sense of existential solitariness and middleclass ennui crept into them, but he decided to desist this by painting in more of the context and turning his paintings into images of urban scenes.

The resultant paintings from the turn of the decade were more like painted montages of individuals or small groups seen at middle distance organized like triptychs. Even where the scene could have been continuous like a railway coach standing on a suburban platform he sliced it up and painted each segment, separated by architectural elements, as viewed from a different angle and by implication by a different viewer. It definitely helped in picturing the city as a fragmented space, a space beyond the grasp of an individual viewer or actor and gave a polemical aggressiveness to the image. It also helped him to increase the space between him as the artist-observer and the people he represented.

But simultaneously the theatricality of these composite scenes also foregrounded the shrewd compositional manoeuvres made by the artist and thus the artist himself. Reticent and self-effacing as he is, the kind of artistic ambition and facileness it suggests was most alien to Sudhir’s temperament and should have made him uneasy. He immediately decided to step back and include more of the scene, to paint not merely the figures and their immediate setting but the entire social fabric. The outlying areas into which the city was creeping to take possession of the last vestiges of open land, and the motley crowd of workers and middleclass who lived there became his subject in the mid-eighties.

As he stepped back to see more of the terrain the figures grew small, but it also allowed him to see them more completely and with greater clarity. In these paintings he does not present us with a sharply focused polemical vision but invites us to meander through the painted neighbourhoods and discover the place and its people, and the world they create through social dispositions, gestures and movements. These paintings offer us a fuller picture of life on the urban fringes; idealized perhaps and unconsciously made salubrious as Hoskote has suggested[2] but a fuller picture nonetheless. And it grew into an even more committed engagement with neighbourhoods in the following years.

There is another aspect that characterizes Sudhir and sets him apart from many others that comes to the fore in these paintings. He was already an acknowledged artist and a representative of the Indian art of the eighties when he painted these pictures, but these paintings contain a number of acknowledgements. Not as quotes, or declarations of ideological alliances but as humble acknowledgements of apprenticeship to the masters. Some of it is in the form of appropriated motifs, some in the form of language or methods of transcribing the visible. And over the years such acknowledgements have kept growing to include not only expected references to Leger, Rivera and Cezanne but also surprising salutations to Renoir and Ghiberti.

After mid-eighties Sudhir’s engagement with the local took a new turn. Like Cezanne and the Santiniketan artists of the pre-independence years he began to map his neighbourhood with careful and loving studies of its motifs and then moved on to do a comprehensive panoramic image of it in Pokharan, thus marrying the intimate with the epic. He now recognized as mutually augmenting, what had initially appeared to him as opposites. Epic representations of places—Memory Double Page (1889), Pokharan (1991), Ulhasnagar (2001), Lower Parel (2001), Rabodi (2003), and Kanjur (2004)—became a genre within his oeuvre. With little human presence (except in Lower Parel) these pictures of emerging urban settlements, presented like clips from a silent film, etch poignant images of social erasures and reinscriptions.

During the nineties in his figure paintings Sudhir moved in the opposite direction; from the epic to the intimate, from documentary objectivity to empathy. With the ascent of economic liberalism and globalization on the one hand and rightwing nationalism on the other, in his paintings the proletarian and communitarian images began to dissolve into images of frenzied and frenetic crowds. With a mad man or woman taking emblematic centre stage in some of them, these images invoke a society stumbling into insanity. The human now manifests itself in the less valiant acts of suffering and surviving. And the middleclass man and wife wading through flood waters and workers bathing in a shallow stream begin to resemble each other as stoic survivors.

Looking at the landscapes and the figure paintings Sudhir has painted over the last twenty years sometimes we see him standing at a distance from his subject and sometimes empathetically close to it.  John Berger has described this—while discussing the works of Leger who painted a more optimistic vision of mechanized city and proletarian life—as the distinctive approaches of the epic and the lyric artists. ‘The epic artist,’ he suggests, ‘struggles to find an image for the whole of mankind. The lyric artist struggles to represent the world in the image of his own individualized experience. They both face reality, but they stand back to back.’[3]

 Sudhir has pursued the epic and the lyrical in equal measure in his art, but if one were to look for a direction in his career his more recent work would suggest that there has been a gradual movement from the epic to the lyrical. He is not anymore anxious of losing objectivity. With aging the necessity to speak of oneself has grown, also the ability to look at oneself more dispassionately; as if from a distance, as if one were another. So has the ability to see that the visible is in a certain way linked with oneself. And this has meant a convergence of themes which were once thought distinct. This at least is what the works in this exhibition tell us.

The paintings and drawings that make this exhibition fall into four thematic groups—city life, travelling, familial recollections, and sickness and death. But the works about travelling can also be seen either as a part of city life or familial recollections. Similarly those about illness and death can be seen as an extension of the familial. Thus basically the works can be seen as ruminations on life in the city and in the family. They can also be seen as two modes of knowing the world. In some pictures he occupies the centre and allows the world to lap over him like waves and leave its traces, in others he occupies the vantage point and scrutinises the world with eyes moving across it like a shaft of light.

The issue of closeness and distance that once exercised him are still present. But it does not engage him in the same way. If we gather all the paintings and drawings that deal with knowing from within and with knowing from without into two groups we would find that they are of equal importance, almost equal in number and similar in scale. The two modes of knowing the world are definitely coalescing. Perhaps with a slight advantage in favour of the existential. Two of the largest canvases in the present exhibition deal with familial memories with Sudhir as the receiver and transmitter of family stories.

The first of these is called Father’s Story. It shows the artist and his father seated on a bench on a platform. A barely visible station name board introduces an allusion to travelling although it is not physical travelling but life’s journey that is the subject of the painting. The older man is speaking, and he holds the hand of his son who is listening. They sit apart and do not look at each other but that holding and that speaking are necessary, especially for the father. And behind them is a wide open field edged with houses, and in them are figures of women and men, young and old, idle or at work. There are also tiny figures of boys at play and labourers at work at the far end of the field. It is an image of a past life brought alive through a story passed on from father to son.

The second painting is titled Transmigrations and thematically it is an extension of the first. In it the artist is seen with his young grandson looking at pictures in an old family album. The painting was occasioned by a recent visit by Sudhir and Santa to Chicago to see their son and his family. But the painting tells us little about geographical location and distance and more about temporal distance and dislocation. From the small black and white photographs the figures in the foreground are looking at springs a colourful memory metamorphosing the background into another time and place. And like a cinematic flashback it takes us back to his ancestral home, with his parents, his young nephew and his elder brother.

Sudhir is more tacit than his father and as a painter he prefers to tell his stories through images. But moving into his sixties he now knows that the desire to tell stories and to pass on one’s experience to the next generation is an innate human need rather than an individual trait. Transmitting stories is like transmitting one’s DNA; it keeps a part of us alive through a chain of memories we inscribe onto the minds of those who come after us.

The other images that have familial experience behind them are a pair of drawings of middle aged couple. Privately explored through drawings, this is a theme that has been engaging Sudhir over the last few years. These images of figures in domestic settings are not without certain tenderness but more than conjugal bliss they convey a sense of human vulnerability. The little quotidian acts they indulge in are not self-revelatory, but gestures that help them to share a space and a life with each other. He does not wish to pierce the brittle mantle of care that protects these familial moments by naming them, so he deflects our attention away from the figures and give them innocuous names like Purse and Saucer. These are the most autobiographical of his works, also the most unidealized and truthful.

The three images of sickness are also explorations of human vulnerability. As a doctor clinical observation of dysfunctional bodies has always been a part of his job. But in these paintings illness is encountered more existentially. In two of them the succumbing body is viewed from outside with a calm objectivity. They seem to ask, how does one die? By becoming visceral and turning into raw flesh or by caving in like a valley and disappearing into a gathering darkness? In the third painting illness is experienced from within. It shows the artist’s face horizontally like that of a reclining man and in extreme close up; the fragmented face looks like a parcel of eroded land, and from it stare out two large motionless eyes.

The eyes in this painting, slightly rolled back and seen one above the other rather than one beside the other, have a fixed look. Deprived of their scanning gaze that the artist uses to register the visible, the artists’ face and with it the world is frozen into stillness. In the other two paintings too the figures have their eyes turned off, almost shrunk into non-existence. For an artist for whom life is the representation of people around him, with their gestures of life and social inscribing, sickness is the beginning of the erasure of seeing and death the transformation of the viewer into the viewed.

We could also look at the works in this exhibition as images of bodies in various states of existence. Many of the drawings and paintings in it are of bodies in action or inaction and some of these are about travelling. Originally travelling involved the actual physical motion of the body. With the mechanization of transport travelling has also become periods of bodily inaction—waiting at the station for buses to arrive, sitting in your seats waiting for destinations to be reached. The inactive body is carried through the world, and the world travels by but it is not seen. The world becomes a blur and the window becomes a mirror. The inactive traveller sinks into thought and multiplies herself internally; the window reflects her and multiplies her externally for the observant eyes of fellow travellers, sometimes clearly and sometimes as a blurred element in a madly overwritten image of the world.

The pictures about travel are also about the ebbing of sociality from public life. The painting called Game is a confirmation of this. The image of the traveller gaming on his mobile worked in an expressionist post-Cezannian manner reminds us of Cezanne’s Card Players. And the allusion serves to accentuate their difference. For Cezanne a game of cards meant shared leisure and was an act of sociality, for the modern-day traveller it is an escape from the crowd and from boredom into oneself. For a painter who has in the past painted crowds with a sense of communitarian engagement and optimism perhaps this is also a reluctant admission of the withering of common purposes from our lives.

Consciously Sudhir has neither surrendered his commitments nor his optimism. A number of drawings and two paintings in this exhibition are about the city and its people. The drawings include the image of a worker removing a punctured truck tyre, of crowds on the street, at the market place, and in front of Victoria Terminus, and a large monochrome image of Pokharan. However, there is a disernable element of retrospection in these images of city life. The one on Pokharan is actually called Revisting Pokharan. In others the crowds are linked by rhythm, but they have not gathered for a common purpose. They are individuals governed by personal exigencies passing each other. And even his puncture repairer, compared to his earlier proletarian figures, appears rather weary and overworked, not heroic and charged with hope.

The proletarian hope and rehearsals and the mapping of neighbourhoods that characterized his earlier works have imperceptibly made way for a critique of dehumanizing urban growth. The two paintings called The Residual and The Emergent draw our attention to this. The first is the image of an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere tilted and sinking into the ground like a wrecked ship. It is a funeral song for a world that is making way for something unknown and ominous. The second painting of a tower of green glass rising from the middle of a shantytown is also about displacement. As in the earlier picture here too there are no people, but the shanty town with its many coloured walls, and doors and windows that look like so many eyes resemble a jostling crowd. Compared to it the endless tower is eyeless, brutally regular and monolithic. And it makes even the shantytown look human.

Looking at his other works in this show the feeling that a thin pall of melancholy and anxiety has settled on his vision gets reiterated. Sainik is one such work. It is not a military man’s portrait as the title suggests but a young man’s apprehensive and unsure face. An element of uncertainty also envelops his untitled self-representation, and the image of a man standing immobilized in darkness in knee-deep water titled Blue Man. And even in the three otherwise playful variations on a face looking out of an airplane window in which the window is transformed in turn into a hole, a blank mirror and a frame, the faces have a melancholic vacantness.

The belief in proletarian solidarity has ebbed and uncertainties have grown but Sudhir’s empathy for people has not diminished. The two images of determined girls, one tonic in red and green against a scorching landscape of warm ochre called the Country Girl and the other in red and blue against a grey expanse of burning asphalt called City Girl are gritty sisters in an arduous struggle. The artist’s empathy for them is unmistakable. With a greater sense of human vulnerability his empathy has expanded to include even the not too productively engaged. In one of the paintings a neighbourhood young man who in contrast to the working men of his earlier paintings would be seen as a lumpen, is painted with tenderness and is fondly called the Local Hero.

Over the years his focus has shifted and his sympathies have broadened. But spiritually he stands, even more than before, closer to the early modernists like Cezanne and Van Gogh and the artists of the early Renaissance. And this comes through most clearly in his approach to the art of painting. Like them he does not find comfort in inherited language and feels compelled to relearn the process of honestly transcribing the visual. Like artists standing at the beginning of a tradition, an artist who is forever learning to see and represent a changing world has to be self-doubting and modest. The grandiosity of mastery is not for him, as it is not for the primitives of a new art. Language is and will remain for him an exigency.