Every Picture Tells A Story: Water Colour Landscapes & Abstract Paintings By Thane Jail Inmates Find Takers At Gallery

In August last year, the Thane Central Jail - which once housed the famous hobbyist painter Salman Khan - saw a few of its inmates sitting in the music room with paintbrushes and canvases to learn how to make art from a fellow undertrial.

For two weeks, as artist Chintan Upadhyay - who is currently behind bars for his alleged role in the murder of his estranged wife Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani - tried to introduce his untrained, impatient audience to things like expressionism, abstract paintings and colour therapy, what started out as a class of 20 ended as a room of nine. When Upadhyay asked them to use "positive" colours like blue, some invariably veered towards dark ones like brown. When he asked a few to make changes to their artwork, some acted possessive. A few ran away, intimidated. A few others didn't show up because their court appearances clashed with workshop timings. Yet, Upadhyay persisted.

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The result was 18 artworks out of which a few chosen ones are now sharing space with similar artworks by inmates from Byculla jail and Nashik jail at Breach Candy's Cymroza Art Gallery. At the ongoing two-day Art from Behind Bars (AfBB) exhibition, an annual event sponsored by Dagar Pathway Trust--a community service project for children that is working towards promoting artistic talent among jail inmates across Maharashtra-this is Thane jail's debut.

Inaugurated by inspector-general police (prisons) Rajvardhan Sinha, the exhibition-which also boasts paintings by children on the theme of coral reef conservation presented by two city-based tenth graders-the exhibition boasts highlights such as a panel titled 'Process of Decay'. This graffiti art piece resulted when Upadhyay skilfully assembled ten canvases done by the inmates. In the run up to it, Upadhyay conducted many exercises such as one in which he made each of the nine inmates draw anything they liked with a pencil, pass on the sheet to another inmate to continue the exercise in colour pencil and later, the paper kept moving as they switched to crayons and ultimately acrylic on paper.

"The idea was that the finished product is not yours, a letting go of your ego," says child psycholist Kavita Shivdasani, who envisioned the exhibition in 2007 after taking a bunch of kids for a visit to Arthur Road Jail and bumping into John, an inmate who used to draw on the floor of his dingy cell, answered her Hindi questions in English and came across as a "carefree, cool hero living life his way despite the physical confines". Struck by the idea of giving such art a platform, she approached Udhav Kamble, then inspector general of prisons who permitted her access to other jails in Maharashtra.

Representational Image

This was how she had discovered Rahul, a signboard artist whose water-colour landscapes dotted the walls of his cell in Pune's Yerawada central jail and Lalita, an MA in Fine Arts who was picking up a paintbrush after 20 years in Nagpur jail. Eight years on, Lalita is now an arts teacher in MP after her release.

While Shivdasani's goal is "to keep these inmates in overcrowded jails gainfully occupied and finish the workshop feeling good", she makes sure that the background of the undertrials is never probed. However, she does come across art patrons who are sceptical about buying artwork "made by jailbirds". In fact, during the first AfBB event, a man had booked Rs 60,000 worth of John's charcoals in advance but soon cancelled saying that he read somewhere about John's criminal background and that he "will not have this hanging in our home." Discounting such instances, every AfBB event sees at least half of the canvases being sold. The proceeds are divided thus: 10 per cent to the jail and 90 per cent to the inmates.

Typically, the prison's recreation room is cleared out for the workshop but this time, artist Amisha Mehta's workshop in Byculla jail happened in a passage outside the barracks where inmates from the women's jail even cheered the 20 participants. Project volunteer Nishant Shah sums up: "In those squalid conditions and with limited resources, if you are able to create something, that's art."