The Art of Resistance: Sudhir Patwardhan’s ‘Street Play’ reflects the diversity of defiant voices

Sudhir Patwardhan’s 1981 painting Street Play is a tour de force of political art. Made in the run-up to the massive textile mill strike that convulsed Bombay in 1982, it presents Bombay as a streetscape stitched together from different parts of the metropolis, a sequence of panels. These panels speak to us of the city’s turbulent history, one showing a textile mill with a group of dispirited workers, another presenting a Leftist theatre group’s street performance with the D N Road arcades as backdrop. The artist watches the performance from behind a pillar. An actor, kneeling with his hands outstretched like a crucified Christ, is split between the scene and its reflection in a glass storefront. A car, either passing by or conveying the mill-owner to the mill, is split by the pillar. Although this painting may seem to be realistic in terms of its figuration, it defies the conventions of realism. Its complex mise-en-scene sets up a crisscross of gazes and a bewildering interplay of spaces. There is no simple equivalence between art and ideology here. The artist-persona is more observer than participant, both attracted to and sceptical of collective action. Street Play reveals itself as an expanded psychological portraiture of resistance in its various moments, marked by doubt, conviction, solidarity, dispersal, all taking place in an atmosphere of imminent threat.

1 January 2020