Subodh Gupta (b.1964)

Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi, Subodh Gupta, December  2003 - January 2004

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Subodh Gupta's sentimental "Saat Samundar Paar" (Across the Seven Seas) series, created throughout the early 2000's in a variety of media (sculpture, video installation, painting) raises significant questions about the nature of Indian migration. Gupta's post-modern take on luggage and airport trolleys have since become as recognizable and iconic as his stainless steel pots and pans.

The issue of migration in India has a very personal resonance for the artist, as a Bihari native now living in New Delhi. Bihar is India's poorest state, and for decades has grappled with challenges such as corruption, backward caste politics, and a severe lack of infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of young unskilled migrants leave Bihar each year to escape chronic poverty and unemployment, caste violence and environmental disasters, constituting the largest migrant workforce in India. 

Migration is also a pan-Indian phenomenon of epic proportion. More than 20 million Indians currently reside outside of India – this phenomenon runs both ends of the spectrum, from itinerant laborers to IT maestros. Art critic S. Kalidas notes that Gupta, "... having grown up in a railway enclave as the son of a railway employee, the possibilities of seeing the act of travel as theatre must have occurred early in Gupta's mind. There is a simultaneous presentation of the real and the fictional [in his work] that not only showcases the culture of bags and baggage in India, but also comments obliquely on the inequalities of class, life of immigrant workers and the general Indian proclivity to travel with huge and heavy loads. Metaphorically, it could also be seen to allude to all the civilizational baggage we carry in our transit through life and place.

"... From the 1860s, when indentured labor was sent from [Bihar] to work the sugarcane fields of Mauritius, Guyana, Surinam, Trinidad and other British and Dutch colonies, Bihar has seen migration of male workers in such scale and for such a long time that a hugely popular folk musical theatre called the bidesia (the migrant) has developed around the experience that seems to epitomize every Bihari's fate." (S. Kalidas, et al, Subodh Gupta: Gandhi's Three Monkeys, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2008, p.218-219)