WALKING: Poetry of daily life
– Suhasini Kejriwal | January, 2018
Eden II, Acrylic paint on canvas, 132 x 90 in, 2011, Detail
A city is also a shared space and lends itself naturally to engagement and collaboration with others. In that sense, walking in the city allows me to operate in several capacities at once – as flaneur, photographer, artist, witness, and even collaborator.
Walking, like thinking, has a certain pace and rhythm which is deeply personal and uniquely individual. For me, it is an aesthetic act, and it helps me to think and see. My camera or phone is usually with me when I walk, enabling my creative process to unfold at my own pace, registering and capturing “residue”, “texture”, “accidents and encounters and unexpected openings”
– Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse.
Walking allows me to immerse myself in my environment one step at a time, so that it slowly seeps into me.
Rebecca Solnit, in her famous book Wanderlust, says: “Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.”
A city is also a shared space and lends itself naturally to engagement and collaboration with others. In that sense, walking in the city allows me to operate in several capacities at once – as flaneur, photographer, artist, witness, and even collaborator.
The experience of walking in an Indian city is rich, complex, and challenging, all at once. Nowhere can this be seen and felt more keenly than in the slow, chaotic throb of its streets. The typical Indian street, with its sheer density of people, cars, food, merchandise, and rubbish, is mind-boggling. All boundaries are blurred here: those 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 one’s 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 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 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, or 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, 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.
Initially, I remained detached from, but aesthetically attuned to, the streets. But as time went by, what fascinated me was the poetry of the everyday in these picturesque, historic neighbourhoods.
For instance, my first walk in the old neighbourhood of Chor Bazar in Mumbai was like a stroll on a theatre set decked with old buildings, bizarre antiques and exquisite furniture strewn on cramped, lived roads. On narrower lanes, the live set had props like hanging tires and piles of automobile junk amidst endless antique car carcasses that enlivened these lived spaces. In Chitpur, Kolkata beautiful and crumbling buildings were laced with dainty balconies, and decrypt walls were emboldened by lurid Jatra theatre posters.
Trawling these fascinating arenas of street theatrics over the next four years helped me build my extensive collection of photos and drawings.
Instead of just responding to the surreal beauty of the streets, I became aware of my role as an artist and witness. For instance, I observed the dramatic changes that were reshaping Chor Bazar due to its extreme redevelopment. I began to notice the interactions among people and their environments, their work, their leisure, their children and the animals that lived with them, and the daily rhythm of their lives and its chaos and calm.
The richness of the experience of walking, witnessing, photographing and drawing the neighbourhoods is echoed in the layering of images to create complex composites. This visual complexity involves a slowing down in the way an image is made and processed. What is captured is not only visual detail but also the passage of time, recorded in the many layers of the composites. The visual memory of my time spent in these neighborhoods is presented not as a set of fleeting aesthetic impressions but as a deeper emotional and psychological response.
So, the beauty of this exploration has led to the expansion of my detached vision as flaneur and artist to a more empathetic role as witness and collaborator.