Column | Sudhir Patwardhan: how dreams are demolished

Sudhir Patwardhan's art reflects on urban development, history, and social issues, highlighting the exclusionary nature of modern cities.

Giant arcs of metal and concrete dominate the landscape. Skyscrapers with sea views have balcony seats to the excavation of Mumbai’s soul. As three figures from the Holocaust gaze silently into the city’s bowels where a grave of bodies lies forgotten and surrounded by demolished homes, a red wave on a highway leads cars to a gate on the upper right corner of the painting: the doorway to Auschwitz. ‘Work liberates’, the Nazis had emblazoned on the concentration camp gate.

At least a million people were exterminated here, many forced to labour until they were murdered. Artist Sudhir Patwardhan wants you to think about the purpose of ‘development’. He says it’s also a statement on the “absurdity of a nation which was created because of the suffering its people had undergone during World War II, and now they have become the perpetrators of another kind of Holocaust against another community… we repeat history in so many ways.” He is talking about the war on Gaza.

For 50 years, Patwardhan’s art has centred Mumbai’s working class. For three of these decades, he had a day job as a radiologist (he started painting in medical school), until his art finally started providing a livelihood. Now 76, he looks more bespectacled radiologist than artist. He says his new work reflects “some negativity” about the city he has been “attached to for a long time”.

The Thane-based artist’s post-pandemic works highlight the exclusionary nature of development. For the labouring classes at least, the idea of city as urban utopia has crash-landed. “Somewhere in the future, maybe the city will be a better place, a different place, but it’s bound to be that only for a certain class of people,” says Patwardhan, whose travelling exhibition Cities: Built, Broken showed in New Delhi and Mumbai recently, and will pause next in Kolkata and Kochi.

“In the last couple of years, one has become exposed to what is happening all around the world, where cities can be wiped out,” Patwardhan says. “The whole idea of ‘cities’ itself seems purely about real estate. Donald Trump, for example, sees Gaza as real estate.” He’s referring to the U.S. President’s desire to turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera’ of the Middle East. “The absurdity of today’s life is overpowering,” he adds.

Patwardhan’s figures have always looked pensive, now they are weary, defeated, disconnected. If his famous 1977 Irani Cafe depicted a robust gent in a crisp kurta sitting at a marble-topped table, in his new painting of an Irani cafe, the central figure is skeletal and raggedly dressed, mirroring the turmoil in the land he migrated to and the one from where his ancestors came. ‘Is shahar mein har shaks pareshaan sa kyun hai?’ (‘Why does everybody in this city look worried’), a visitor to his Mumbai show quoted this line from an Urdu ghazal by Shahryar, Patwardhan tells me, with a laugh.

The artist and his wife Shanta Kallianpurkar show up together every day at the Mumbai gallery, greeting old friends and visitors who throng the exhibition. Down the road, a retrospective of Patwardhan’s best friend Gieve Patel, who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2023, is showing.