You say Mumbai, I say Bombay

Two new exhibitions re-examine the relationship between the city and its people.

If Mumbai assumed human form, would it take a bow or furrow its brow in concern? Two artistic tributes to the city opened last week: one, a book of photographs that also assumed the form of an exhibition, another a curated art show.

While the first is more conclusively positive in spirit, the second attempts statement-making. Just as the former omits the city's transition from Bombay to Mumbai, the other bemoans some of what accompanied that transformation.

Betsy Karel's Mumbai is yesterday's Bombay. A New York-based photographer, she was drawn to the city before she had even visited, through images gleaned from writings of the Indian diaspora. And so the body of work that makes up Bombay Jadoo consists of carefully selected visual equivalents of those novels. On page 81 is an image of a couple on the beach at dusk.

The man, trousers rolled up, is drawing circles in the sand with his feet; the woman, coy in the face of the intrusion, clutches at her sari and his hand at once. The image resembles a passage from Ardashir Vakil's Beach Boy, excerpted at the end of the book. "And in the evening the sea brings people home... the lovers along the beaches... Men who might roll up their trousers to dip their feet in a wave... Women wrapped in saris, not afraid to jump in and wet their heavy clothes..."

Published by Steidl "" one of the more distinctive voices in art and photography publishing "" and priced at Rs 1,680, Karel's work only sometimes hints at the exotic. There is a bit of the voyeur at work in capturing exacting images that chronicle the ordinariness of life in Mumbai, of private moments in public places.

There's a shot of the back of an absorbed young girl drying her hair after what one assumes was a dip in the Banganga tank. The temptation will be to say "that's Hanging Garden" or "could that be Chor Bazaar", but don't fall into the trap of immediately trying to identify the physical setting. Instead, absorb the element of fantasy created, ironically, by unadorned realism.

Where Karel doesn't question, Mumbai Metronome clearly does. "We're applauding the spirit of the city but also questioning its systemic flaws," says Tarana Khubchandani, gallerist Gallery Art & Soul, speaking of the exhibition's drafting following the flooding of 2005.

Where Mumbai Metronome scores in intent, it could have benefitted from some curatorial finesse. The physical flow of displayed work is slightly stilted and one feels like other media like video and audio installation would have added range. Although audiences hoped for some of the artists to speak, they preferred not to.

Among the 14 participants of Mumbai Metronome, currently running at Gallery Art & Soul, are most of the contemporary artists who made up a previous show titled Bombay Boys. Most of them have left hometowns for Bombay because it offered greater opportunity.

They were deliberately approached by Khubchandani for their "migrant approach" to the city, detached yet completely devoted. Some of their works denote a tinge of amusement at the hold the city has on them.

"I have never had the inclination to leave even though I don't like the direction it is taking," says Sanjeev Khandekar, who uses emoticons as references to capitalism to jeer at rows of skulls that symbolise those that have been left out.

Where the context and concerns addressed by Mumbai Metronome are of solemn quality "" issues of parochialism, of displacement, of administrative corruption "" there is occasionally comic relief. Tushar Joag draws with brio the tale of Unicell Man, a pseudo-body that will clear the city of its evils, with "postbox man" as accomplice.

Mansi Bhat's contribution is a sequence of photographs that depict a passive-aggressive 18" animated sculture of herself as super heroine overseeing the city. "She roams about the city in an authoritative and questioning manner, but when you actually look at her with the outdoor wide lens, she is this one-a-half foot lilliput. How will the people around react to her authority? Who will protect whom?" says Bhat.

There are some that are more literal in their references. Like the tetrapods (that break surf along the length of Marine Drive) on Sunil Padwal's canvases, or Bose Krishnamachari's portrait of a dabbawala, which he sees as the city's quintessential image of resilience: "Open each dabba and you open the belly of every person in the city."

Interestingly, neither Karel nor the artists in Metronome use images directly picked up from the cityscape; the closest some of the artworks come to the physical landscape is to lampoon the idea of a physical transition into Shanghai.

"Much as I love the Victorian architecture, some of the parks, the banyan trees, the physical has been changing so fast that I'm not interested in capturing the changes," says Karel. She takes comfort in capturing the invariables "" its people.

At the end of the day, neither tribute is intended to be monumental in stature. They're gentle nudges towards re-examining the relationship each of us has with the cities we live in and love. Like Karel says, "Bombay Jadoo is my own personal Bombay, but I do hope bits of it resonate with different viewers."