Imaginary Homelands — Painting Bombay from Memory
When people ask me where I’m from, it’s easy to say Bombay. But returning to the city after years in Paris means encountering the gap between the place stored in memory and the one your senses actually find.
In this essay, I explore what it means to paint a city from inside that gap, through Rushdie’s idea of “imaginary homelands”, through the German concepts of Heimat and Umwelt, and through four new gouache paintings of Marine Drive, Bandra, and Horniman Circle.
