Natural Mumbai

KNOWN AS A concrete jungle, Mumbai hides a well-known secret. Nestled within the city’s northern suburbs is a sprawling oasis — the Aarey forest and the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP). These protected areas aren’t just wildlife sanctuaries, but are also home to rich biodiversity, lakes and indigenous human communities with unique cultural traditions. The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation’s (JNAF) A Forest in the City: Living within Sanjay Gandhi National Park/Aarey Colony shines a light on this threatened green haven of Mumbai. Collaborative in nature and designed in a multisen­sory format, the show unfolds across different disciplines, primarily drawing on a three-year research initiative by the Mumbai-based Kamla Raheja Vidya­nidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA).

The research project — led by Rohan Shivkumar, who teaches at KRVIA and his colleague, Lisa Bjorkman, a political ethnogra­pher and anthropologist engaging with urban issues — was born out of community-based surveys for infra­structure access within the forest, personal narratives of the residents, collaborative drawing projects, street theatre workshops and music collabo­rations. Speaking to Open, Shivkumar mentions that the research was part of a larger urban project called ‘Navigating the Grid’, supported by UK Research and Innovation which addresses inequality in South Asian cities. A Forest in the City transcends the art exhibition format and appears more like a forum where artists, anthropologists, archivists, and community members may well foster an ethnographic dialogue. “We wanted to break the boundary between the subject and researcher to focus on col­lective learning,” Shivkumar says, citing Sitaram Shelar of the Pani Haq Samiti as a key collaborator.

Designed by KRVIA academics Sonal Sundararajan and Rohit Kudale, the JNAF show is a result of this research. The first section of the exhibition, titled Mapping the Forest, provides a cartographic representation of the forest area, highlighting the contrast between the urban environment and the woods. The second segment, The Forest of Claims, showcases a collection of objects that illuminate how various voices envision the forest. Everyday items used by the inhabitants of Aarey and SGNP are displayed in the gallery, such as official documents, musical instruments, reli­gious icons, political banners, plants and vegetables grown in the forest and even a sample of leopard scat. “The objects echo ethnographic displays, provoking a dialogue with the museum in how we tell civilisational stories,” explains Puja Vaish, director, JNAF. The wall text here reminds us that more than an Edenic myth, the Aarey forest and SGNP is a living, breathing reality, constantly being shaped and reshaped by the imprint of those who inhabit it. The showcased pieces offer glimpses into the various facets of the forest, portraying it as a “home, a park, property, livelihood, memory, a wilderness retreat.”

One of the aerial maps of Aarey and SGNP, laid out on the floor at JNAF, delineates the lay of the land but it also provides insight into the human settlements within the forest and how its residents interact with the city of Mumbai. This infographic map, drawn by KRVIA’s research team comprising Siddhesh Godambe and Astha Sahay, outlines Adivasi ‘padas,’ or neighbour­hoods, reveals the boundaries of the Kanheri Caves in SGNP and pinpoints tribal settlements, quarries and hills. Ob­jects on display in the gallery are marked distinctively in red on the map, ena­bling visitors to distinguish them. “We wanted to highlight some of the social, environmental and economic activities of the communities. You can see how the boundary of the forest has shifted over the years,” says Shivkumar.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, KRVIA’s Ankush Chandran has mapped the forest through an immersive virtual reality film that gives viewers a 360- degree walkthrough of the forest. Admit­ting that he and his team were eager to dabble in a new technology, Shivkumar says, “In The Immersive Forest, one can fly over the whole green cover and choose vantage points from where you can experience the various geographical conditions within the region. You can take a walk along with some of the community members who show you their neighbourhoods, their agricultural lands and art practices.”

WITHIN THE FORESTS dwell various tribes. Native to Maharashtra and Gujarat, the Warli community is one of them. Renowned for their ancestral art form, the Warlis aren’t just skilled artists. They are born storytellers. At first, their art may appear simplistic. But upon closer inspection, you realise that Warli artists follow an intricate visual narrative. Using evocative geometric shapes, they conjure up art that blends myths and ancient wisdom with nature studies and the rhythms of their daily lives. This technical knowl­edge is traditionally passed down from generation to generation, says Dinesh Barap, a Warli artist whose works are on display at A Forest in the City. The first work of Barap’s that you encounter as you enter the JNAF gallery embodies the very essence of the Warli tribal art form. Titled Navapada it is a vibrant celebration of the Warli community’s daily life, particularly their reverence for nature. True to the Warli tradition, the artwork is packed with figures, animals and landscapes, rendered in white pigment against an earthy red background. “Warli paint­ings have a detailed narrative quality to them, which chronicles life in the forest as told through personally experienced anecdotes and stories. It brings memory, myth, past and present together within a frame. For example, you have the sun and moon, yesterday and today, gods and people, flora and fauna, etc — all together they give a picture of the meanings that the forest holds for the community. On the other hand, the drawing made by architects imagines the tangible elements witnessed in the forest, using academic modes of representation within the disci­pline of architecture,” says Vaish.

Barap’s painting is an invitation to see the forest not just through a survey­or’s lens, but through the eyes of those who truly know it—the Warli people. A resident of Navapada village near the Dahisar River, Barap is excited to explore his cultural heritage through his art. “This painting,” he tells Open, “celebrates the spirit of my pada (community). It speaks about our enduring connection to the forest, our mutual love and peaceful co-existence with animals, the lifeblood of the river, the joys of our ‘kamdi’ dance and gods like Waghoba (leopard deity) that we worship.”

Barap is now busy working on a larger painting which promises to explore many other folk stories that he could not include in in Navapada. “I want to paint the Tulsi Lake myth,” he says with a smile, as well as a touching tale of an elephant named Rani and her friendship with the villagers. “She was later cap­tured by the forest department and taken away. Those memories still haunt us,” he recounts. This work will be monumen­tal, almost 24 feet wide, which the artist will execute on-site during the course of the exhibition.

The first iteration of A Forest in the City was held at IF.BE, a former ice factory, in Mumbai during the Kala Ghoda Art Festival earlier this year. Multiple events were designed around the broader theme. For example, there was a lecture by cultural activist Ganesh Devy on his work with Adivasi communities, a cooking workshop where an activist from the Warli community worked with an in-house chef at IF.BE to create new dishes based on local ingredients and cooking techniques of the commu­nity, and an Adivasi film festival, curated in collaboration with the Adivasi Film Archive, Bhasha.

Music plays a pivotal role in the cul­tural life of the Warlis, who have a rich tra­dition of creating instruments such as the kahali (flute) and tarpa (trumpet), which is on view at the current JNAF show. Today, the Warli community is increasingly using music as a weapon to assert their identity and uphold their place in Indian society. The exhibition at IF.BE provided a platform to activist Prakash Bhoir, and his collective Swadesi, to unveil his audio-vid­eo single ‘Adivasi’. Meanwhile, JNAF is prepping for its share of forest-themed events (scheduled for June-July).

In A Forest in the City, collaboration and open dialogue between different institu­tions is central. Each individual brought his/her own unique perspective to the research, enriching the project as a whole. This multifaceted approach resulted in a wealth of lessons and takeaways. For Vaish, the exhibition underscores the capacity of museums to enhance educa­tion and research-based programming and make cross-disciplinary academic collaborations exciting. “A project like A Forest in the City is significant to art as it is about acts of representation and imaging. It is creating a relevant archive of our times by presenting a more informed picture, valuable to contemporary urban debates. By situating the works by the local communities within their own spe­cific geographical and cultural contexts, the exhibition opens up the categories of ‘folk’ ‘contemporary’ and ‘tribal art’ for meaningful reconsideration.”

As a trained architect and urban de­signer, Shivkumar has had many epiph­anies during his extensive research. A fundamental question he asked himself was: “What’s the role of architecture and architecture schools?” “It’s not only to create architects who are going to join the market but it is really about what the city needs and how your architectural practice can contribute to making the lives of your fellow citizens better,” he says, suggesting that a people-centric approach over aesthetic beauty might be a good place to start for future architects.

Asked to sum up A Forest in the City, Shivkumar states, “There is much we can learn from communities like Warlis who have had a symbiotic relation­ship with natural systems.” That said, he notes that there is a tendency in contemporary society to consign the in­digenous communities to “an imagined purity that lies outside the city, or as an unchanging tradition. This turns them and their practices into museum objects and ossifies them. This does not account for the complex relationship that these communities have with the city and how they have been able to create ways of claiming their identity and rights.”

(A Forest in the City is on view at Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, CSMVS Museum, Mumbai, till July 17)

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Shaikh Ayaz

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