When [Sudhir] Patwardhan came to Bombay in 1973, he was shocked to see so many people on the streets, many of them living in horrific conditions. In 1974, he married his college sweetheart from Fergusson College and the AFMC, the gifted Shanta Kallianpurkar, who was studying dance. By 1975, he began to practice radiology in Thane after having worked at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital and at the KEM (King Edward Memorial) Hospital in Bombay, continuing to paint in his free time. Patwardhan would walk endlessly in Bombay, familiarising himself with the city’s denizens and bylanes. He experienced the contradictory emotions that all urban dwellers face: a sense of alienation from his surroundings, but also a sense of solidarity with the teeming crowds.
Patwardhan’s Marxist conscientisation had made him acutely aware of class asymmetries. He felt the other’s pain in his own body, the acute sensation of his muscles tensing and knotting up. ‘Green Torso’ (1975) – expressionist in its rendering of toxic green skin with an underlayer of dried blood – is one such example of a psychosomatic bonding. We cannot be sure if this is a portrayal of a worker’s body or the artist’s own body changing colour to accommodate the everyday stresses and wounds of others.
