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Jitish Kallat “…is among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized by the crisis of globalization: he studies its pathologies of violence; he dwells on the fortuitous groups, the crowds of rioters or the assembly of people waiting for a train, that have replaced the cohesive community; he examines the life of labour, commemorates the cycle-rickshaw puller and the load-bearing porter. And he records these phenomena, not as... Jitish Kallat “…is among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized by the crisis of globalization: he studies its pathologies of violence; he dwells on the fortuitous groups, the crowds of rioters or the assembly of people waiting for a train, that have replaced the cohesive community; he examines the life of labour, commemorates the cycle-rickshaw puller and the load-bearing porter. And he records these phenomena, not as impersonal social-scientific memoranda, but through the tender, terrifying immediacy of the painted surface” (Ranjit Hoskote, Alchemy, Art Musings exhibition catalogue, 2005, not paginated). One of the images that Kallat has most frequently returned to as a vehicle of this commentary is the portrait of the city-dweller, both alone and in a crowd.

In his series of large portraits titled Carbon Milk, for instance, Kallat works with photographic images he has taken of some of the young children who sell books on the streets and at the traffic signals of his city, Mumbai. Turning them into witty paintings layered with several strata of meaning, the artist speaks of both the city’s urban chaos and its toughened citizens who must negotiate that chaos on an everyday basis just to get by. Elaborating on the genesis of this series of paintings, Kallat explains, “The root of these pictures, were some photographs I took of young children who sell international bestseller books on the traffic lights of Mumbai. The children sell these books with self-assured rigour. Often illiterate, they would offer a long sermon about the merits of the book. To me these young children almost become like mascots for the resilience of [a] tough city such as Mumbai. Above the forehead are rendered a thousand colliding stories; a complex narrative of 18 million people living on a tiny island of 468 square kilometers” (as quoted in “Reality Filter: Huang Du’s Interview with Jitish Kallat”, 365 Lives, Arario Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 26).

Speaking about the way in which the various elements of these portraits work together and also play off each other, the artist states, “I am interested in bringing together two or three contradictory elements, letting them snowball and gather meanings beyond their individual bandwidth. I like to, for instance, disrupt the content of a painting with the freight of meanings that a sculpture can bring when you combine the two. Also the grand radiance that forms the backdrop for the portraits, is deflated by the caricaturesque rendition of the urban detritus brimming out of the overgrown locks of the children. They become double portraits: a portrait of a young city dweller interspersed with the portrait of the city. The placement of these paintings on sculptural supports shaped like inverted birds legs gives the work a dark sinister twist” (Ibid.).

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