Metaphorical Associations of the Self

During my college days I often visited the Sunderbans (the Ganges delta region) on study tours to sketch and interact with the villagers living there. These villagers were from poor families, but they always shared their food with us — one of the most touching moments of my life. Their meals consisted of cucumbers grown on their own fields, and they worked hard to earn at least one proper rice meal, the staple of the Asian community. This opened my eyes to the daily struggle these villagers were going through to meet their basic needs. It was both disturbing and humbling to see how people who could not earn a proper living were so willing to share what little they had with us. I was a helpless student then, but their smiling faces moved me to take a pledge: when I became an artist, I would work for their cause and pay back their humble offering through my creations.

My works venture into the everyday life of the urban-rural communities of Indian villagers, transforming rapidly into a neo-urban lifestyle under the influence of urban India’s accelerating change, its technology, and the political currents of contemporary India.

My art has evolved with the history of the Indian nation as it has progressed from a national developmental model into a more global and liberal democratic state — carrying with it my deep concern about rapid development set against the backdrop of the lost innocence and diminishing culture of rural communities.

I have integrated the Indian miniature tradition with expressionism — working with gloomy, melancholic and monochrome palettes — and have evolved a technique of my own, an integration of Indian and Western approaches. I have tried to integrate Western and Indian techniques in the same way our cultures themselves are being integrated today.