Mumbai’s Most Vivid Visual Urban Ethnography
Mumbai-based Nayanaa Kanodia is the pioneer of the genre of Naïve Art in India, which refers to an untrained aesthetic that makes it natural, unaffected, innocent, and therefore, instantly charming.
Characterised by imagery imbued with child-like wonder, Nayanaa Kanodia’s art is a long, ongoing commentary on the city of Mumbai, where she moved to from New Delhi, upon her marriage in 1970 (and which she saw transform from Bombay to Mumbai, not just in nomenclature but also in other ways).
Since her first solo exhibition in 1986 at the Cymroza Art Gallery in Bombay, Kanodia has painted prolifically, and on a variety of themes, all of which circle back to her muse in some form or the other. That muse is the city of Mumbai with its people, right from those eking out a living on its unforgiving streets to those residing in ivory towers with all the riches and comforts that money can buy.
Kanodia’s evolving commentary on Mumbai is one of the most comprehensive contemporary urban ethnographies on India’s most vivid metropolitan city. Over a period of four decades, she has chronicled it extensively, through themes such as ‘Bombay Buildings’, ‘Vendors’, ‘Vehicles’, and ‘Weddings’, among others. While her earlier paintings focussed on the city outside, gradually her gaze shifted inwards, where she started capturing mundane moments from the lives of the rich. The latter series of paintings have had more esoteric titles such as ‘The Quintessential Woman–A Celebration’, ‘Tryst With Destiny’, ‘The Great Outdoors’ and ‘The Journey of Life’, among others. These feature the well-appointed living rooms of the elite, complete with expensive paintings on the walls, as also their pastimes such as exotic vacations and travels, fine dining and more.
Sensitivity and humour are two characteristics that are an integral part of Kanodia’s art. While she portrays sensitivity in depicting the toiling masses on the street, she presents the concealed fragments of class and gender roles in the lives of the rich through subtle humour that her subjects too have found worthy of a laugh. The subtility with which she makes sarcastic comments on the lives of the well-heeled surprises the onlooker for being thinly veiled yet so effective. She shares confidently that her paintings have never offended any sensibility.
A chronicler of Mumbai cannot escape painting the ‘stars’ that live there, and therefore, Bollywood celebrities and cricket icons, such as Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Shahrukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar have all appeared in portraits—funny or otherwise—in Kanodia’s work.
In between all these, she has also turned her focus on an issue that she personally feels strongly for, which is caring for the environment.
In hindsight that the year 2026 affords, one can clearly see how diligently Kanodia has captured her beloved city, with details that evoke the inspiration from India’s miniature tradition.
The upcoming show, presented by Dhoomimal Gallery and curated by Archana Khare-Ghose, is Kanodia’s first in New Delhi in two decades. It encapsulates her life-long practice through a mixed bag of works recent and past. While the bulk features her recent works, done in the past four-five years, a selection from her earlier series presents a wholesome picture of the artist’s practice that has evolved as rapidly as the city that she paints on.
Given the fact that she is an untrained artist—though she was mentored in her initial years by veteran artist Anjolie Ela Menon—it is remarkable that she has succeeded in making a name for her herself in the highly competitive world of Indian art. The show Staged Realities is proof of her unwavering commitment to the genre of Naïve art within whose vocabulary she has managed to create a distinctive style that does not need any introduction now.
