Artist Amitesh Shrivastava was wandering around Mumbai’s Colaba when he found himself in the vicinity of the 150-year-old Church of St. John the Evangelist, also known as the Afghan Church. Mass was about to begin. “So I just randomly walked in,” he says, adding, “I do that often. I explore the city, go wherever I want and in whichever direction.” He went in and settled himself in one of the pews, listening as the priest began to tell a story about Jesus Christ’s encounter with some bears. The sermon was in English, but when the priest was done, the translator began to narrate the whole thing again, but in Marathi. “I was fascinated by this act of translation. It gave a different perspective and different texture to the whole story. The vegetation in forest changed as the language changed; when the narration was in English, the image in my mind was of a foreign, exotic forest, but when the story switched to Marathi it became one of the forests that I had seen growing up in Chhattisgarh. It became an Indian forest,” recalls Shrivastava.
The 42-year-old artist left the church that day with his mind seething with ideas about what it’s like to be in a place in-between languages, lands and people. “People categorise things and people and places all too easily,” he says, “But given my life’s experiences, I would say that such clean and clear categorisations are not possible.”
The artist’s current solo exhibition, “Trespassers and Translators”, at Mumbai’s Project 88, engages with the ideas that the artist describes as “liquidity”, the state of being which allows people to move smoothly between different cultures, experiences and thoughts. That is what allows his expressionistic canvases to be populated, simultaneously, by a rash of scrubby vegetation, unidentified figures and wild animals — none of them conceding an easy narrative. “I don’t want people to go from this point to the next point and then the next point in the story. That’s not how experiences are, because as an artist, when you open up your senses, many things come to you at the
same time.”
