Collection: Charudatt Pande

Our journey always extracts a rise in one’s needs — and these do not remain basic, but range across the social, emotional and personal. This is also reflected in physical journeys, in migration and the pursuit of happiness. Hailing from a town in central Maharashtra, the move to Pune, the state’s cultural capital, and subsequent interactions with connections from all over the country helped me find my place in life. My earlier works reflected more of the stereotypes of diversity — that which we see popularly displayed in the media as part of our sub-continental multilingual nation where migration and intermingling has taken place for centuries, such as varied landscapes, religious groups, languages and smiling faces. Much of this remains to be explored as well, as highlighted in my artwork. Later, however, I dived deeper into the core of Pune, into the depiction of mundane lives and people existing together, but in different dimensions. These adventures were eye-opening, and manifested almost as a parallel world on canvas, which exists unconsciously around us. My paintings tell the story of those who remain behind the screen — stories that must not go unseen. Loneliness, despair, discrimination are all tales that need to be told. At the end of the day, I merely try to glimpse the hidden face of society and bring it forth as storytellers — nothing less and nothing more