An exhibition in Mumbai maps the city's journey from colonial port to megapolis

 IT WAS SOMETIME last year, when the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) reached out to historian Gyan Prakash to look at a vast collection of art works and im­ages it had acquired on the city of Mumbai. “Ritu Vajpeyi-Mohan [senior vice president at DAG] contacted me say­ing she just wanted some advice on what to do with these images,” Prakash says. “They sent me a PDF of these images. And even when looking at it, we weren’t sure what exactly we should do with it. Maybe an exhibition, or a catalogue perhaps?”

This initial conversation would grow into Bombay Framed: People, Memory, Metropolis, currently on show at the DAG in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel, which through a wide variety of art works and archival material centred on the city, tries to tell the story of the metropolis itself. These works, stretching through centu­ries and cutting across wide swathes of styles and forms—from watercolours made during the early period of the Brit­ish Raj when the city is little more than a natural landscape to later paintings where Indian artists are encountering and depicting a vast metropolis constant­ly on the move, archival material like maps and postcards, portraits, linocuts, photographs, film posters, and even a book (edited by Prakash and written by academics, historians and journalists which examines various facets of Mum­bai’s history)—tries to capture a city and its people’s evolution. “You can rearrange this whole thing differently and classify it as landscape paintings, photographs, and so on,” Prakash says. “But we thought of tying it to the city, since all of them are really focused on the city. So the idea crystallised around looking at these as a visual archive of the city.”

We are seated in a small chamber, at one end of the viewing gallery within DAG, about an hour before Prakash is to conduct a walkthrough. The exhibits have taken up the entire space across the gallery, and even spilled into the walls of this enclosure. It is only the first morning of the exhibition, but already, a steady number is trickling in, some of who stand nearby hoping to engage Prakash in conversation.

Prakash is an ideal candidate to be involved in such an exhibition. The Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, Prakash has always been fascinated with Mumbai. This interest would lead to, after nearly a decade’s worth of research, the 2010 book Mumbai Fables, a well-regarded nonfiction work on the city. “Before I started working on Bombay [for Mumbai Fables], Bombay only existed in certain images that I had,” he says. “I grew up in Bihar. And, one used to hear things like Marine Drive or Juhu, the images of these iconic sort of spaces. So when I first started working on Bombay, I became interested in the kind of history of these images. Where do these images come from and why were these images produced?” he says.

Although Prakash knows the city and its history intimately, while working on this exhibition, he came to realise just how important the role of images is in understanding the city. “When you look at this exhibit, you can see the power of these images and how artists appre­hended the city through images, and how images, in a way, triggered in their minds, certain thoughts. So image becomes a mode of thinking for them. It’s not just a pretty picture, but it becomes a mode of critique,” he says. Referring to 19th cen­tury descriptions of the city by those who visited it, in particular a Marathi work Mumbaiche Varnan, where its author Go­vind Narayan Madgaonkar describes the city, Prakash points out, in full-throated exclamations, “What buildings? What streets? What people?” The historian says, “When people came to Bombay, let’s say, in the 19th century, and started seeing this site, the site itself was so striking to them…. So the image [of the city] itself had great importance for people in apprehending and understanding the city.”

THE WORKS ON display span a wide range of artists, both well-known and those whose work has begun to gain in prominence, from MV Dhurandhar, SH Raza, Henri Cartier- Bresson and Baburao Sadwelkar to Nalini Malani, Pestonji Bomanji and Chittapros­ad Bhattacharya. A lot of the works stand by themselves, telling stories that are distinctive and unique to the artist and the subject being represented, but put together this way, it becomes a larger and more complex story about the city and its many different communities and people.

Prakash points to an image, a chro­molithograph tinted with watercolour on paper, by an artist named Isidore Lau­rent Deroy. Made in 1860, presumably painting the scene from what is today the affluent locality of Malabar Hill, it depicts the area in South Mumbai where the shore meets the sea, but instead of Marine Drive and the tall buildings we are so used to today, there is in its place, a picturesque but unrecognisable loca­tion, with a scattering of individuals rest­ing and picnicking amid palm fronds and trees, and boats bobbing about at a distance in the sea. The only concrete structure, perhaps a church, lies far away, amid some hills that rise in the dis­tance. The painting is dated 1860, which means the merging of the seven islands into the single landmass of Bombay was completed only a few years before.

Right opposite this image, there is an oil painting by an unidentified artist on the next wall that depicts almost the exact same location, and the perspective is such that it feels as though the creator of this work was standing at almost the same spot on Malabar Hill. But a gulf of nearly 100 years separates these two works. And the transformation that is visible on the canvas, from the palm fronds and hills of 1860 into a ring of buildings twinkling with lights on the Marine Drive of 1950 (the date of the second work), appears not just visual, but also in the artists’ feeling towards the subject. Instead of the flat generic depic­tion of a landscape by what was a Raj-era artist in 1860, we now have Marine Drive by night in all its inky blue beauty.

Another set of interesting works on display is those by Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, the Kolkata-born artist who was associated with the Commu­nist Party of India (CPI) and well-known for his works depicting the Bengal Famine. Bhattacharya, who later settled in Mumbai, was widely viewed as a com­munist artist, but, as Prakash points out, there has been a growing appreciation of his work in recent years. “He used to do these linocut sketches for the Commu­nist Party’s paper People’s War, and later on, [the journal] Crossroads. So he was seen as a documentarian rather than an artist. From the party’s point of view he was just illustrating their political points, but when you see his work, you can tell he was expressing something distinctive,” Prakash says. One can see this distinctiveness in his interest in and representation of the labour force in the city, such as the work titled Labour Camp, where a large camp of labourers is set against a foreboding sky filled with factory chimneys, or the one titled A Fish Seller in Bombay, where a Koli woman is depicted over a day’s catch of fish.

To Prakash, what all these works show is that the city isn’t just something that is represented on canvas. Mumbai became a medium for them too. “It became,” he says, “a way of thinking, of looking, and critiquing.”