It is evident that your art practice is deeply concerned with urban life. What are the messages you want to relate to the viewer through your work?

I grew up in a small village called Balurghat in West Bengal. From my childhood, I have enjoyed nature and a very simple life; I used to play with mud, climb trees, catch butterflies, and go to school by boat across the river. My house was surrounded by lush...

It is evident that your art practice is deeply concerned with urban life. What are the messages you want to relate to the viewer through your work?

I grew up in a small village called Balurghat in West Bengal. From my childhood, I have enjoyed nature and a very simple life; I used to play with mud, climb trees, catch butterflies, and go to school by boat across the river. My house was surrounded by lush greenery, but when I came to Kolkata for my studies, and then to Vadodara, Delhi and Hyderabad, I started missing my village, the trees, the simple life. From that time it felt like I had entered a concrete jungle, the fast life, and it was from that time that I began observing urban life from a very close perspective. Naturally, urban reality inspires me a lot. Urban experiences have been accumulating in my mind from that time on. Practically every change and every situation related to urban life stimulates me to think about reality. So, very simply, I say whatever I see and I feel from my heart, expressing it through my painting. My broadest message to the viewer is – don’t destroy Nature.

A lot of your canvases are painted with a vivid palette. Can you tell us more about the colours you choose for your paintings?

I feel that the colours I choose help bring out the characteristics of my subjects as they play out their respective roles.

Have the miniature painting and architectural traditions of India influenced your work? Are there any other sources of inspiration that have shaped your paintings?

I am a man of few words, perhaps the teeming populace in my canvases is more vocal than me. The works are not about running far from the madding crowd but about the maddening crowd itself. How negotiations, interactions, confrontations with it take place, become the subject. We have to swim through the crowd of people to fulfill our goals, reach our destinations. One can see how I have used the boat in the middle of the swarming population .These people with their own identities being undermined become part of an anonymous or unknown crowd, still retaining their own struggles. All of them moving and striving to complete the race successfully and quickly. In this race even the cars become small in comparison to the mobile human beings. There are tug of wars for ownership, the crowd divides, life and land gets scaled, not an inch here and there. It seems that mobility is not only confined to our workplaces or the busy streets but our homes are also on wheels, always on move. I have tried to open up the very private space for the public eye, exposed it to be consumed. The sole person shoulders the household responsibility, which may be more than what one can bear, but goes on carrying it. People are bottled up as samples for sale and consumption in the marriage market. Even the skies are not spared but cluttered with human presence through hanging clothes. The miniature tradition inspires me to depict the thronging crowds with their reduced presence. Thus the labouring mobile bodies move, many a times knowing each other and other times alienated, on my canvases.

How do tradition and modernity mix and balance in your work?

Since childhood I have been fond of folktales and fables. In my work, these small village stories get blown up into large scale fantasies. As part of my apprenticeships, I worked with self taught miniature artists. Traditional art attracts me. The drawings evolve from my academic training; I like to work minutely right from the detailed hair line to the bold colour stroke. The lines carry emotions and the reality of life; they curve and bend according to the changing sentiments of the work. The base of my work is traditional, and the manifestation is modern, because then my paintings become more realistic than painting.

You are trained as a painter as well as a graphic artist. Can you tell us more about your work in genres other than painting? What are you working on right now?

There is always a connection in all my works. As ideas keep changing and reinventing and replacing each other in one’s mind, my style and technique may change but the underlying sentiments and attitude are the same. There is a conscious effort to retain the spontaneity in my work as well as a type of playfulness, which prevents me from becoming stereotyped. I don’t want to stick to any particular style, language. My work is mostly experimental, so I sometimes use different styles other than painting as per the need, like paper cuttings, colour Xerox, installation, video etc. I like to work in a series.