Only Hyderabadis will know what it means to enjoy a sip of irani chai at an Irani café. Similarly only Hyderabadis will know what a banana cart or ‘mouz bandi’ means to them. Similarly if acrylic, water colours and oil pastels alone brought life into a canvas, then only a few must have tried to experiment painting with coffee or tea decoction. These stains indeed acche hai . Taking a break from the routine sceneries that include rock scapes, market places and village life, artists are making an attempt to paint a different face of the city, sans the Charminaar, the Hussain Sagar and the mandatory Birla temple.
This time around the chai, mouz, irani cafes and works with tea and coffee stains are taking the centre stage. Also making occasional appearance is the Potharaju during Mahankali Jatara in the city.
Painting the city’s popular café culture is artist Akshay B Singh. Akshay’s view is that while talking of tourists spots and food, we forget what meets the eye most often. “That is the case of an Irani café and the culture of drinking chai. I also quite like the fact that one table can be shared by many strangers and one waiter can get three cups of tea on three different saucers with ease. The spilling of tea on the saucers is a common phenomenon. The idea to show the cup and the tables and the act of drinking tea. The ideal café scene,” says Akshay. To the artist it is a culture which only a Hyderabadi will understand and appreciate. “But eventually people who come to the city fall in love with the tea and the oneness in the crowd,” he adds.
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If Akshay is laying stress on tea, artists aren’t leaving tea behind. The over flowing tea from the cup is making it to the canvas and when tea isn’t enough, coffee stains are brought in. Young Afza Tamkanat, as a part of fine art course read about stain paintings. She also attended lectures by professors and hence was itching to work with it. She started experimenting and at the beginning was worried about the dark stain. “The sepia tone is well pronounced with stain works. I found a good alternative to water colour. It is very compatible and ‘artist friendly.’ Patience is important because the right tone of the stains come out well only when the canvas dries,” says Afza. Senior artist like Laxma Aelay asks, “can one escape the sight of banana carts in the city? Has anyone ever not bought bananas from the carts or missed the “mouz’ cries in the lanes? It can be a silly argument but if photographs can capture such minute instances paintings can tell a better story,” smiles Laxman Aelay who did a canvas on the panaroma view of the city recently.
Other artists like Sukka Karuna who don’t really relish tea are loving their time sketching clock towers peeping through the city’s concrete jungle