"The experience of walking in an Indian city is rich, complex, and challenging...

All boundaries are blurred here: between private and public, sacred and profane, man and animal."

“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.

The experience of walking in an Indian city is rich, complex, and challenging, all at once. Nowhere else can this be seen and felt more keenly than in the slow, chaotic throb of the streets. The typical Indian street, with its sheer density of people, cars, food, merchandise and rubbish, is mind-boggling. All boundaries are blurred here: between private and public, sacred and profane, man and animal. People buy, sell, eat, sleep, cook, bathe, urinate and defecate on the street. One must literally weave and dodge their way in order to survive the jungle-like obstacle courses of our streets. Earlier, this world seemed familiar and normal (as it does to most of us). It held no fascination for me and was, as it were, invisible. 

After being away for almost seven years, when I came back to India, I started seeing our streets in a new light. Suddenly, things became visible, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing. I began to notice the stark contrasts and profusions everywhere: the pile of rubbish near a pyramid of fruits, the public urinal near a street shrine, and the person whose hand I nearly stepped on while navigating the streets. The lack of space and order in the streets generates a claustrophobia that is overwhelming. 

Yet, despite all the odds, human beings, animals, and even trees and plants continue to thrive, and the city continues to expand. In and around the ruins of old, derelict buildings, new structures spring up with remarkable alacrity, gleaming new cars share roads with outdated models, and the youth easily outnumber the old.

The new constantly rubs against the old – be it buildings, cars, people, traditions and even aesthetics. This lends the city a rich, ambivalent beauty that is uniquely its own. Over a period of four years, I have walked many streets, lanes and by-lanes, and have built a large archive of several thousand photographs and sketches of people, animals, buildings, trees, traffic, fruit and vegetable markets, and rubbish heaps. 

In the beginning, I was merely taking pictures and sketching details that caught my eye but, eventually, large drawings began to emerge out of my photographs and sketches. The dense and complex imagery, and the vastness of scale were breathtaking; it is this very sense of wonder that I have tried to explore in my large, black-and-white paintings. On the one hand, these paintings are a detailed, complex and unending list of an environment teeming with multiple images and readings. On the other, they are starkly flat: an impenetrable and unforgettable surface of disturbing jumbled images. It’s as if all the humanity and grunge of the city is right in the viewer’s face. 

My work with the city and its streets has led me to discover and explore the psychological and emotional experience of living in these Edenic surroundings.

As Solnit says in Wanderlust, walking leads you to “find what you don’t know you are looking for.”