Madhvi Parekh brings to Mumbai a slice of life from a Gujarat village

Madhvi Parekh, 84, showcases her solo exhibition 'Remembered Tales' at DAG Gallery, capturing rural India's essence through vibrant, textured paintings.

MUMBAI: Madhvi Parekh, 84, grew up in the quiet corners of Gujarat’s Sanjaya village, whose memory she continues to hold through the scent of its monsoon soil and crackle of firewood. Destined to emerge as one of the important painters in Independent India, her hands, worn with time, tell stories of her village.

Madhvi Parekh, grew up in the quiet corners of Gujarat’s Sanjaya village, whose memory she continues to hold. (Photo by Raju Shinde/HT Photo) (Raju Shinde)

Wife of another renowned painter, Manu Parekh, Madhvi is a self-taught visual storyteller who honed her craft without the tutelage of a mentor at an art school. Yet her canvases are a vibrant museum of recollections, depicting the fading rhythms of village life once lived, now lost under the weight of modernity. Through her art, which is on display at DAG Gallery in Taj Palace, Colaba, Madhvi preserves the essence of rural India – the people, traditions, festivals, places of worship and silences – all of it reminding us of what we have forgotten. Her last show, held in the city in 2023, was in collaboration with the Chanakya School of Craft. This is her solo show.

The exhibition titled ‘Remembered Tales’ invites viewers into a deeper textured narrative told through 18 paintings in varying sizes in a singular colour palette. Each canvas is a visual diary portraying everyday moments of village life. Through earthy colours dominated by greens, reds, blues and browns, her brush captures the scent of wet earth, the music of folk songs and the bustle of daily life.

“My father was a primary school teacher who was also a postmaster, homeopath and headmaster,” says Madhvi, in the midst of setting up her works at the gallery. Clad in a sari in the same mix of earthy colours as her paintings, the kohl-eyed and soft-spoken artist, with a neat mogra gajra in her hair, her lips stained with chewing areca nuts, says that the sights, sounds and smells of her village travel with her everywhere. “I have never forgotten them despite moving around India and the world. I paint it all from memory. I do not follow any scale or structure. I draw what comes to my mind in whichever shape it is,” she says. “If I feel that a human head should be in the shape of a triangle, I paint it that way.”

In each of the paintings, the noses of the human characters appear deformed. When asked about this peculiarity, she laughs loudly. “Mujhe toh naak banana aata hee nahi (I do not know how to draw a nose), mujhe joh aaya who maine banaya (I have drawn what I know).”

“My drawing has improved over the years, they are different now,” she says.

Through the Remembered Tales exhibition, Madhvi elevates herself to the status of a chronicler of memory, a keeper of culture and a voice for the villagers whose stories have probably never left the boundaries of their courtyards. Her fantastical paintings are steeped in a myriad of fables and myths she imbibed while growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in Sanjaya.

One of the most prominent paintings on display at the gallery titled, Travelling Circus In My Village, is a reimagining of her memory of the circus both in her hometown as well as in the cities – Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi – she has lived in. Though the three panels of this work are joined to create a collective entity, she uses swathes of colour to demarcate spaces within the artwork. They are not flat patches of colour but textured layers of acrylic paint. The acrobats in the frame are chalk-faced with horns in their heads brandishing knives and using a snake as a skipping rope. In the canvas, the beasts and birds are fused together in a cohesive ecosystem.

In Two Scarecrows In My Rice Field, two central figures in dark blue and crimson red – one shaped like a scarecrow and another like a tortoise – signify freedom to her. “I love birds and always watch them sit, eat, fly, rest or soar into the skies. When I paint, I feel free as a bird,” she says.

In her later years, when she left the countryside and moved to cities with her husband, she maintained a sketchbook drawing whatever she saw around her as also the life she had left behind. This sketchbook became her diary, her archive and rebellion against forgetting. It has been compiled into a hardbound book encapsulating six-decades of drawings, which was first released at the Remembered Tales exhibition in Delhi in July. The three-volume book will be available for purchase at the gallery where the exhibition is presently showing.

“My husband introduced me to Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook. I connected with the dots, lines, circles and triangles in the book. I was pregnant with my elder daughter Manisha at the time and I would sit practicing these patterns. I started creating bodies through these geometric patterns out of boredom, and then started painting,” she says, recalling her early years as a painter.

Her move to Kolkata with Manu, where he was posted at the outpost of the Weavers’ Service Centre, pulled her to the images and narratives of goddess Durga and Kali, which led to the creation of works such as Goddess, Goddess In My Village, Goddess Kali, Goddess Durga and Kaliya Daman.

Her other canvases on display are also vivid and deliberate recollections of a time gone by – village life at dawn, buffaloes returning at dusk, village fairs lit by lanterns, birds in flight or perched on treetops, scarecrows with a lifelike persona, slithering snakes with human faces and monsoons beating like drums on rooftops. Many of the paintings have a grainy quality symbolizing the texture of cow dung or mud-splattered walls of village houses.

Why the deliberate attempt to resist the erasure of rural identities? “I do not like city life. It is very impersonal. My heart lives in my village,” says the artist. She says that her paintings act both as memory and testimony, capturing customs, dress, rituals and moods that no longer exist in their pristine forms. “Villages have changed so much; urbanization has taken away from their beauty.”

She is however quick to add that her works do not represent idealized nostalgia, but her own lived experiences, and her feminine gaze sets them apart from the others. It is reflected in the intimate knowledge of the representation of women, born not from just imagination but from participation. She believes the work of an artist and the work of building a home are not separate. “I painted while managing my children and running the household. This has given an added dimension to my work over the years,” she says.

Her studio is next to her kitchen at home, where she says she “makes time for my passions alongside household chores”.

While her art is steeped in memory, she says, “Once I am done with a painting I move on. For me it is just a painting. I leave the narrative, story-telling and interpretation to the viewer. I have created the drawing interpreting it my way. Why should I tell you that? The viewer can interpret it whichever way they want.”

While she keeps to herself, she says exhibiting internationally has played an important role in shaping her understanding of the global artistic ecosystem, “but at heart, I am a simple person that does not like to fuss over my work”.

She reiterates that she paints to remember. “When I paint, the past sits with me like an old friend.” In an era of digital noise and cultural amnesia, her art is at once a fragile but fierce act of preservation.

A prominent Mumbai gallerist, who did not wish to be named said, “Madhvi Parekh is definitely a voice that was not heard for a long time. It deserves the equity it is getting now. Everyone is looking for Madhvi’s works from the late 1990s to the early 1990s which project a great exchange of ideas.”