India, a land of stories and real life characters, has immensely impressed artists, and despite a global trend of going abstract in visual arts, especially paintings, some have followed their hearts and depicted small time stories, often neglected, on canvas. Artists Naina Kanodia and Vijender Sharma have been favourites with art lovers from foreign nations as they tell Indian stories in their works.
Following this track is another self-taught Delhi-based artist Sangeeta Singh. Though born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she was carried away by the humble lives of the poor on roads – especially the rickshaw pullers. She has painted an entire series on them titled “Shadow Journals” which she also recently exhibited at Lalit Kala Gallery. Among big shows at the gallery, her show did not cut much ice except when it saw a fleet of renowned names including Anjolie Ela Menon on the day of inauguration.
A huge work that catches the attention is that of a rickshaw puller with well-oiled hair, neat shirt, pulling a rickshaw barefoot. He is looking for a 'sawari' on a deserted road in hot weather. Flashes of women he may have driven are shown in a bunch of colourful balloons tied up with his vehicle's hood, turning the whole canvas bright and colourful. Another rickshaw puller is depicted with cutlery well placed on a luxury dinning table – suggesting his daily bread and the difference in how he earns it, as Singh means it.
A noticeable work is “Sweat Equity”, in which a rickshaw puller is highlighted in three slanted frames, wheeling the vehicle while his shirt has shrunk and stuck on his blackened body due to sweat in an extreme hot weather, oblivious of which he pulls on. Similar works but with some elements of humour include a rickshaw being driven loaded with a mountain of glossy fabric, swollen with cool breeze, over which a dog sleeps in peace.
Others include a rickshaw puller waiting for commuters against sky scrapers, a rickshaw on a purse depicted as ethnic item sold in elite bazaars titled “a bagful of stories”, a pink rickshaw on a pressure cooker suggesting two meals a day for the rickshaw puller, and a rickshaw jetting out of a liquor bottle suggesting his means of entertainment after a hard day's work.
Said Singh on why she chose rickshaws for her canvas: “Being brought up in a well-healed family and married in one, I never travelled in public transports. Though I did my post graduation in Chemistry but my sensibilities remained in creative arts. So, I took formal classes from renowned painter/photographer Rameshwar Broota. Once, to reach his home, I hired a rickshaw in the afternoon. The rickshawallah's shadow made many forms as he pulled me through that road. He was tired and sweating but seemed all ready, oblivious of his state. It created a story for me and I observed them wherever I could, to come out of with a series on their lives.”
Gargi Seth, the curator of the show, added another dimension. “The series is a powerful visual journal of the flux of the intra-national migration of the poor in India. Their lives are disrupted from the intimate communities of their ancestral villages and thrown into the ignominy of the urban grind, where they belong only in the shadows of existence, unnoticed and uncared for by all. Using the rickshaw puller as a visual metaphor for this enormous underbelly of Delhi, Singh has highlighted the powerful flux of this mass migration, and how they still remain in the extreme fringes of society.
The works can be seen at the artist's studio in Sispal Vihar, Sector 49, Gurgaon.
