City India has a big inhabitants and is tight on area, so residing and dealing areas are sometimes small. However that doesn’t maintain them from being attention-grabbing and nearly magical in how a lot stuff is packed right into a tiny area.

Mumbai as soon as had many chawls. Within the chawl system, the constructing is normally owned by a landlord and every particular person house is a single room of about 10×12 ft. Entire households, generally multigenerational, dwell in every of those areas. The person rooms of a chawl don’t have bogs and loos inside them however have communal amenities on every ground. Chawls have been frequent throughout Mumbai when it was nonetheless a metropolis filled with textile mills, however now just a few stay.

These sketches are all demos completed in a workshop in order that they’re usually incomplete. (Or stopped on the level at which the primary educating bit is finished.) However I’m toying with taking that sketch on the correct additional. The boy peeking over the railing from the ground above was a later addition and I’d prefer to create a deeper connection between him and the scene under.

This subsequent sketch was completed the identical afternoon because the chawl demos. I used to be drained and wanted a “small and manageable” topic to sketch, and this peek down an alley between two buildings was excellent. I didn’t notice it on the time, however I remembered later, that I’ve sketched this very same view, just a little over 10 years in the past. It’s attention-grabbing to me to see how my drawing has modified however how what captures my eye hasn’t modified a lot in any respect.

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Extra posts on this sequence from India arising quickly. You’ll be able to see earlier posts within the sequence right here:
• The Research Corridor of Goals and Hopes
• Crawford Market
• Washing Linen, Fishing Marlin

Gateway to India is a 10-day workshop primarily based in India that I run with my co-instructor, Zainab Tambawala. The subsequent session is in late January 2025. Workshop particulars shall be introduced by March 2024. In case you are focused on getting on an early sign-up record, write to me at suhita@gmail.com and let me know!