Old Mumbai

This artwork titled Old Mumbai is an image transfer and brass inlay art on a teakwood by Saju Kunhan (b. 1983). It is a six-panelled grid work depicting the aerial view of the Mumbai city. It is a ten-year-old topographical map of the city extending from Colaba to Thane Creek. Saju Kunhan best known for his topographical artworks shows the erstwhile city which he says has been through several developmental changes. Through this artwork he tries to show the inaccessibility of the city which remains a dream for many outside it. Saju, metaphorically addresses the point of social disparity through the golden margin he has added in the work, it points at the value aspect of the city. The section depicting people resting around the seashore contains images Saju took of the farmers from the Farmers' Protest in 2021 at Azad Maidan, Mumbai. He uses their image, in the visual sense, viewing the city which metaphorically depicts an outsider's gazing at the city with an ever-peaking cost of living. In an interview (2023), he also mentions how the technique has him recreate boundaries every so often. The process of creating a map on a cloth and transferring it on the wooden surface sometimes results in complexities, "some areas or boundaries will be missing, so I have to re-draw them sometimes", he adds.