How Chandigarh helps by not helping
Painter-writer Gurvinayak Singh Budhwar reveals the intricacies of his practice, Chandigarh’s influence, magical realism, the politics of art and the importance of reading our history.
How would you describe yourself and your practice?
I’m married to oil on linen and oil on canvas. I’ve been pushing the medium towards its traditional roots, especially through materiality. I try not to use synthetic or mass-produced pigments and instead work with hand-ground pigments.
There’s a lot of joy for me in almost reverse-colonizing oil painting through material.
That extends into what I paint, which is largely magical realism. I’m interested in the idea that oral histories, mythologies and what we call ‘folktales’ hold the same
value as official history. They are the histories we are
born and raised with.
Outside painting, I’m a graphic designer; I write, I cook, I bake, and I do some sculpture. My bachelor’s was in engineering, which actually taught me a lot, and I’m constantly reading about history, law, biology, geology, paleontology, astrology. All of these seemingly unrelated things eventually coalesce into the paintings I make.
How does your practice and the city interact?
My practice is almost an exasperation with the straight lines of Chandigarh. My grandfather moved here in 1962. My mother is from Rajasthan, and my father’s family is from Rohtak, yet nobody in my home really speaks Punjabi or Haryanvi.
When you come to Chandigarh, all of those things get diluted. You are taught to be cosmopolitan rather than Punjabi, Haryanvi or Himachali. You are expected to simply be from Chandigarh. There is a kind of monoculture here, which means Chandigarh can feel almost culturally neutral. But growing older, I’ve realised that this has also been a gift.
Because I wasn’t particularly attached to one way of being or one cultural identity, I found it very easy to absorb everything else that came my way.
Chandigarh has helped my practice by not helping it. The city gave me the blank slate, and everything else I’ve encountered gets poured into it.
What are some advantages & disadvantages of belonging to a smaller city for an artist?
There are very few advantages to being an artist in Chandigarh, except that it is close to Delhi and has an international airport. Beyond that, the city doesn’t offer much of an ecosystem for artists.
Being from Chandigarh can sometimes work against you. We are so used to thinking of the city as bland that we don’t necessarily expect good things to come out of it.
I recently bought a work and only later found out the artist was from Chandigarh. My immediate reaction was, ‘Oh, okay.’ There’s a bias against the city because of its familiarity, perhaps. Most Chandigarh-based artists tend to be working along the lines of the city, a world you have grown up around, so it stops feeling fresh.
At the same time, I value familiarity in some ways. I live in the house my grandmother built, where I grew up with my family and animals. So it’s a very bipolar relationship. Creatively, it can feel like being a fish out of water.
The best thing about the city, for me, is that it is close to everywhere else.
You flow seamlessly between words and visuals, almost becoming your own curator. What comes easier to you: the words or the image?
The image comes first. The feeling and emotion come first.
I think through images and colours.
Growing up in Chandigarh, as a rebellion against the structure and straight lines, I would invent animals and mythical qualities for the people around me. I would see someone and imagine them as a jackal-faced person with elephant ears, wearing an African skirt.
I’ve studied French, Spanish, German, Latin, Italian and Portuguese, and when you learn languages from a young age, you start associating words with very specific images and sensations.
A lot of that also comes from trying to understand Chandigarh visually. I started asking why the city looked the way it did. Why brutalism? Why exposed brick and concrete? Why did Nehru believe young India should look like this rather than ornate? I think everything begins visually for me.
Did understanding Chandigarh’s construction change the way you saw it?
I started understanding why Chandigarh is the way it is. The more I read about its construction, the more I saw parallels between the city and my grandfather’s experience of leaving his hometown and figuring out a new life for himself.
Brutalism, to me, is essentially about displacement. It is architecture stripped down to reality.
Chandigarh did something similar. It was built around the idea of a young India starting from scratch, without the resources for ornate architecture. And yet it became known as the ‘City Beautiful’.
There’s an interesting contradiction in that identity. Reading Le Corbusier’s manifestos and Nehru’s writing about Chandigarh helped me understand the promise of the city.
As an Indian artist, how do you walk the line between
our culture and Western influence?
Reverse colonisation.
Colonialism took a lot from us, renamed our styles, put a Western framework around them and claimed them as its own. I’m interested in doing the opposite. It’s a way of reclaiming. I deliberately use Renaissance painting
because I paint for humans.
A lot of Indian art traditions were created to be seen by gods or emperors, whereas Renaissance painting was fundamentally made for human eyes. I want people to understand their own divinity through the work, so I choose that visual language deliberately.
That doesn’t mean I reject Indian traditions. I also make works intended more as spiritual offerings, using different materials and techniques.
Do you face any challenges in painting works inspired by Indian history? What are they?
Yeah, a lot of our history has been interpreted through Western frameworks and written by white people, which inevitably comes with their own ideas about religion, culture and god. Even when it is written by an Indian, you have to ask what biases they are bringing into that history.
Before I can paint from Indian history, I have to strip away the idea that everything is a religious doctrine and question how that history has been constructed.
We are dealing with histories that are tens of thousands of years old, often interpreted through frameworks that are much, much younger.
The challenge is separating the history from the lens through which it has been presented, and then trying to understand what is actually there.
You have called artists “gods”; can you tell us a
little more about that?
For me, god isn’t singular, omnipotent or infallible. I see god in a much more human way. At its simplest, god is someone who creates and holds knowledge beyond what you do.
So anyone who creates something that generates an experience, makes you feel something or gives you a new way of seeing is nothing short of a god.
There is a god in every creator, whether they are a painter, dancer, programmer or anything else. I don’t believe there is one capital-G god. I believe there are gods everywhere.
There is a god in my paintbrush, a god in you, and most likely you and I share the same soul.
Have you contributed to Chandigarh’s cultural landscape?
I don’t think I have, at least not in any significant way.
The want is definitely there, and for me that begins with communication. I’ve only really started socialising in the city over the last six months. If I meet an artist who is stuck on something, I try to help.
If I find someone looking for work, I’ve hired them to come to my studio and paid them to work on whatever they
want to explore.
My first exhibition was in Chandigarh, and I’ve had a large part of my exhibitions here, but I don’t think I’ve contributed much to the city’s cultural landscape yet.
I would love to. I just don’t think I’ve done it yet.
What does success mean to you?
Politics.
For me, success in art is creating work that can function almost like propaganda, creating ripples that otherwise wouldn’t exist. I want the work to move beyond the art world and into money, policymaking, law, culture and society.
That’s why I want my work to outlive me by hundreds of years. I don’t just want my paintings hanging in museums. I want the ideas behind them to have enough political and cultural weight to influence how things are made and changed.
I would love to eventually work with governments on policy and legal reforms that address things I’ve seen missing in my own life. And yes, if that eventually means having a road or building named after me, I wouldn’t complain.
What is one question you’ve been waiting to answer about your work?
I think it’s how I visualise my paintings.
I hear whispers in the wood, and they show me pictures. Sometimes I dream of a painting, sometimes I close my eyes and see the entire composition. The work comes to me in flashes. My practice is also very ritualistic.
During Diwali Puja, I bring my brushes and colours into the Puja room and place them alongside the silver and gold. Some of my most-used brushes have a red dhaga tied around them. I’m slightly scared of saying that I get visions of my paintings because we’re often taught to distrust that kind of experience.
But we accept it when Einstein talks about imagining something before finding the mathematics behind it.
For me, it’s similar. I see something first, often from some completely unrelated place in my mind, and then I figure
out how to make it real.
