“Sudhir Patwardhan’s vision of the city of Mumbai as spatial metaphor appears to have come full circle. The vast panoramas of the city under construction that he painted in the 1980s and 1990s, of structures rising from acres of muddy land, now return in a Kafkaesque horror of overgrown metal and concrete. The occasional figure on building sites of that time has made way for truncated bodies hemmed in by traffic on meagre pedestrian routes, even as flyovers, elevated walkways and bridges appear to oppress and congest the bodies. Viewing and photographing passing figures on the streets, Patwardhan draws out a wealth of meaning in these daily, grinding rites of passage, and the profound alienation that city spaces engender. If architecture is the measure of space then the human community must endure its class hierarchies, collapsed structures and fragmentation…Like the Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre, Patwardhan’s intent is to show that space is political even as it demonstrates a derailed modernity project. However, if the city is praxis, marking the ‘production of people by people’, then Patwardhan accords them both a locus and an enduring humanity.”
–Gayatri Sinha, excerpted from the essay titled “Sudhir Patwardhan: Under (the penumbra of) a clear blue sky”
