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.”

Trespassers and Translators

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.”

Amitesh Shrivastava childhood

Born and raised in Khairagarh, a small town in Chhattisgarh, Shrivastava left his childhood home nearly two decades ago to first live in Vadodara, where he studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in MS University, and then to Mumbai, where he has built his practice. “I’ve lived in urban centres for the last 16-17 years, but that doesn’t mean my experiences are purely urban in nature,” he says, “Memories and thoughts related to the tribal environment around Khairagarh keep cropping up. I can’t separate the two. They ‘trespass’ into each other, so to speak,” he says.
This is precisely how the artist has also rendered the series of 14 humorous — and deeply moving — ink on paper drawings that depict the adventures of a librarian who adopts a couple of giant anteaters as pets. Included in the exhibition, these works are different from the paintings also in terms of how they present a narrative in different frames, or individual drawings. For Shrivastava, this was a requirement of the medium.

The story has its origins in the artist’s childhood, when his father, a teacher at the local fine arts college, would drop him off at the library for a few hours everyday. “As I would sit there, going through the book, I would hear the librarian discuss the big termite problem that he was facing. He would be fretting over how to save his precious books, some of which were no longer in print,” he says. The memory of those days resurfaced when Shrivastava was watching a documentary on giant anteaters recently. “I began to think that it would have solved the librarian’s problems if only he could have adopted a pair of these animals,” he says, “And so I just made a story out of it, setting these exotic animals in a time and place that were so familiar to me.”