Thursday 28 Mar 2024

Picturing the past

Gautam Benegal, writer and artist, showcases and defines his engagement with the city of ‘Bombay’ and its spaces through an exhibition of his work at Carpe Diem

Fernando Monte da Silva/The Goan | FEBRUARY 09, 2013, 08:46 AM IST

“Bombay is a city in constant flux that reinvents itself tosurvive. With each of these reinventions, new spaces spring up at the cost oftheir predecessors. As such, the people who filled up those spaces and were apart of our everyday experience fade away too,” says Gautam Benegal. Hisreference is to his perception of the city that serves as his home rapidlylosing out to ‘development’: something that he has gone on to capture oncanvas.

His collection of art is on a world less known to today’sgeneration. But for those that grew up in Bombay (not Mumbai, but thequintessential Bombay) in the 1990’s or even early 2000s, this amalgamation ofbrushstrokes is an absolute visual and aesthetic treat. Benegal has doubtlesslycaptured the memorable and timeless spaces of Bombay. Just as, or perhaps moreimportantly, he has captured and the people who make up those spaces. Hislatest collection of work is titled ‘Continuum – The Enduring Spaces ofBombay’.

Elucidating on what he has attempted to encompass in hiswork, Benegal says, “I painted this series with the aim of reflecting all thekinds of people that make up a part of the ‘Bombay experience’. They are, alongwith their professions, characteristic pneumonic markers. Think about it for asecond. In a way, after 30 years of occupying the same seat on the same streetcorner, would the paanwalla who has become a landmark for newer things aroundhim, not become a kind of heritage site of sorts?”

Part of his work that is on display at Carpe Diem inMajorda, was that which was earlier featured in Bombay’s Cool Chef Café withthe theme, ‘Irani Cafes – the vanishing old world charm of Bombay’. Hisaffinity is immensely strong with these little disappearing eateries, and hisdisdain towards the urbanisation that steals away his haunts of old is evidentwhen he says, “These iconic places oozed charisma. They had no ‘plastic’ facetsto them. In the place of the 5 rupee ‘kheema pao’, what do we have, other thanthe 20 rupee ‘unhappy meal’?”

And so, right from the bookseller at the signal and the girlwho sells flowers, to the women who danced once upon a time in the dance barsof Bombay, the mucchad paanwala ouside Royal Challenge bar and restaurant tothe lovers who sit in the rain on the promenade, Gautam Benegal will capturethem all. Because as he says, “Timeless moments and spaces like these, make upmy Bombay, the city I have made my own along with millions of otherimmigrants.”

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