The city was unrestrained, impatient. The invasive blares of car horns pierced the smog, punctuating the potential quiet of the twilight hour, reminding us of the unmindful urgency of its dwellers who each had places to go, things to do, quite unlike the more desolate setting of the poem by the 12th-century saint, Gorakhnath, ‘Shunya gadh shahar, shahar ghar basti’ (In the empty fort, a city, in the city, a settlement). As we sit on the red-brick steps adjoining the new wing of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the erstwhile Jaipur House, located close enough to the historic Purana Qila, artist Sudarshan Shetty recites each doha, occasionally pausing to emphasise intricate subtleties. “If the city is empty, the fort is empty then where is the question of someone being awake or asleep?” he explains, going over the second line of the poem’s first convoluted dyad: ‘Who sleeps, who wakes?’ “Gorakhnath enters a hugely speculative space that includes this osmotic understanding of things,” Shetty continues, not breathlessly, but with the meditated zeal of one who had swallowed the poem whole, internalising not just its essence, but also the boundlessness of its imaginative existence. “When you look at the form of the doha, very often the first line will establish an image while the second will establish a seemingly diverse image, which may have no connection, but it comes together; it’s mutually inclusive; in fact it’s a way of approaching the idea of the binary as inclusive,” he says as we warm ourselves sipping single malt from a plastic bottle and smoke cigarettes, conscious of the handiwork taking place next door; nails being hammered into wood, walls being whitewashed, sites being provisionally created to shelter work ideated by him over a three-year span.

Shetty appears anomalously calm for an artist anticipating the opening of a show at the country’s most prestigious exhibition space. When he was offered the NGMA premises to mount his work, the Indian art world expected him to use both the old and new wings, given the enormous scale of his sculptures and installations produced over at least 20 years. Why didn’t he oblige, I ask. Why choose just the new wing when he could have had both? “I’ve been thinking about this show for about three years, so it was a natural thing; this is a big space, an important space, and I’m not ready for a mid-career retrospective. I don’t feel mid-career,” he confesses. “I kind of hate looking at my older works. People call me to repair things and that’s like the worst. It’s really tedious and painful.” Despite the anxiety he feels over revisiting his previous work, Shetty is compelled to engage with the continuum of thought connecting past to present exemplified through his concerns with the subjects of time, absence, fragility, archaeology, and the deliberate monumentalising of the meaningless.

And poetry. Shetty’s relationship with the written word was always abundantly obvious through his conception of the title for his solo exhibition; from ‘Consanguinity’ , his break-out show in 2003 in Delhi that established him as a formidable presence on the Indian contemporary art scene, to the critically acclaimed ‘this too shall pass’ that inaugurated the Mumbai-based Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum’s curatorial programme (headed by its director, Dr Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, who invited select JJ School of Arts’ alumni to artistically negotiate with its in-house collection to create new narratives, new visual methodologies for interrogating local histories). In 2013, Shetty created five hand-carved reliefs depicting two elephants in a jungle, which he displayed alongside purchased terracotta objects to articulate the ambiguity of language as evidenced through the act of translation and the contestable category of the excavated object. Entitled ‘Path to Water’, each relief bore an interpretation of a single line by 12th-century Sufi mystic and musician, Amir Khusro —‘Bahut kathin hai dagar panghat ki ’ (The path to the well is rough). Each translation “falls short of what it could mean, it’s open-ended”, he once said in an interview.

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