City unseen: Notes on Bengaluru

By Darshana Ramdev | NT

Bengaluru: Growing up in old Bengaluru, artist Ravi Kashi recalls an urban legend - a ghost that would walk the streets at night. To keep the ghost away, people would scribble ‘Naale ba’ on their doors with chalk every evening, politely dissuading the spectre. “They believed the ghost would read the text and go away,” Kashi pauses beside a work in which ‘naale ba’ has been scrawled, all part of his most recent show of paintings, The Unruly Syntax, at Gallery Sumukha.

As children, we are perhaps more intimately connected to the spaces we inhabit, every urban legend, every little custom seems larger than life. In adulthood, much of that wonder is buried beneath the stresses of daily life, the art of observation loses out to the unfortunate habit of passing judgment. Not so with Ravi Kashi. An unusual sticker on the back of a car is enough to take him miles out of his route, just so he can take a photograph. Every day, he walks through his neighbourhood, choosing a slightly different path each time. He pauses to read the pamphlets pinned to trees and telephone poles - to him, they are not litter in an immaculate urban landscape but the totems of the city itself. “The city is a collage, full of fragments, full of chaos,” Kashi remarks. “How does it all come together as a work of art?” Kashi is no stranger to documenting the city, of peeling back, layer by dog-eared layer, the complex milieu of visual imagery that exists everywhere, in so much profusion that is lost to the un-perceiving eye. His laptop is filled with thousands of photographs, each a striking little vignette of Bengaluru, he has dozens of journals filled with notes. The idea of putting it all together in a work of art began years ago, but began to take shape only in 2019. Just as the lockdown began, Kashi hurried over to his studio and brought all his art supplies back home - the year was spent painting.

Kashi’s latest series will resonate with anyone who has lived in Bengaluru, as a part of its multi-lingual, multi-cultural milieu. He hasn’t chosen the picturesque colonial heritage, the rambling old streets of old Bengaluru, or even its famed natural beauty. Kashi’s eye is drawn to the tattered ‘PG available’ posters that line the walls, to the hand-painted posters that adorn the little shops which repair mixers, or the carts that sell ice creams. “It’s a form of visual communication, one that is disappearing fast, with the advent of the digital age,” he says.

Retaining their authenticity is a challenge, Kashi often returns to his drawing board - Photoshop, where he plays with the images, re-creating his collages several times over. “I sometimes use a projector and then trace the images. I can’t draw like a signboard painter - they have not been trained as artists and they don’t have the time either. They are not highly paid as well, so they don’t want to go into many details. They make a basic drawing, one that is easy to identify for the viewer. It’s this visual communication that I’m looking for. They also use enamel paint, which dries very quickly, so there isn’t enough time for detail. Oil paints, for instance, take a couple of days to dry, allowing you to control the gradation and so on. With enamel, that’s not possible. You need to be quick.”

These images, so easily discarded by the elite, are a part of history in themselves, fleeting in a sense but also representing the unchanging, aspirational middle class. “Buying an ice cream cone for a hundred rupees is still not something most middle class people can do. When our mixer breaks down, we can’t just throw it away, we want to get it repaired,” he says. “That’s what these images symbolise to me - the anxieties and aspirations of the middle class.”

Through all this runs a subtle undercurrent of social commentary. The Rudra Hanuman, bathed in saffron, is a common sight in the city today and is in his work, too. It’s a recurring motif in Kashi’s art, one that represents a political landscape that swings more and more to the right, towards aggressive conservatism. “Caste and identity are still important to us - we like to display it, even on our cars. For instance you have Sangolli Rayana, Kanakadasa and even Siddaramaiah, who have become important representations of caste.” The decoding of these seemingly random images, he says, can only be done by a trained eye. “People often say that images are universal, but that’s not true, is it? A foreigner will see a man with a moustache, a local who speaks Kannada will see Sangolli Rayana, the Kurba aspiration, the mingling of North and South Karnataka. Yes, an emotion can be universal - I can draw a tree and tha