The Way Home: Subodh Gupta's Art Loops In Memory, Longing, And Regret

अब मैं एक छोटे-से घर

और बहुत बड़ी दुिनया में रहता हूं

कभी मैं एक बहुत बड़े घर

और छोटी-सी दुिनया में रहता था

कम दीवारों से

बड़ा फ़र्क पड़ता है

दीवारें न हों

तो दुिनया से भी बड़ा हो जाता है घर

—कुंवर नारायण

(Now I live in a small house

and a vast world.

Once, I lived in a very big house

and a small world.

Fewer walls

make a huge difference.

If there are no walls,

the house becomes larger than the world itself.)

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

There is a door in a corner of the room. A concrete steel door that won’t open. Light peeps out from behind it. A mere door can be so many things at once—welcome, temptation, hesitation, fear, security, privacy and abandonment. You stand there and remember the doors you have closed and opened in life.

This one door you’d like to open. That’s where the artist Subodh Gupta takes us. To that point where we confront our lives, ourselves, our past and our future.

He calls it ‘Door’. He made it in 2007.

In his exhibition, ‘The Way Home’, which opened at the Bihar Museum in Patna earlier this month, the artist has looped in memory with longing and there’s regret, there’s the sense of loss and there is that audacity of hope because nothing is fully lost. You could begin at the door.

Or anywhere else.

There is no singular pathway, no method to this curation. It is intended to be like a labyrinth. Once you enter, you emerge again somewhat changed.

In the other room, on a wall, there are larger-than-life-size steel mirrors that begin to disrupt the image of you. There is that jarring sound. White noise, a static-like sound that cancels out the immediate. Wrapped in this audio blanket, you step into the memory landscape.

The image of the self blurs and you go into another time zone as another version, a dissolved one.

Perhaps that’s the Time Machine we have always wanted.

There is a refuge in that word called “home”, a single word that can contain everything.

Gupta wants us to find the way home. He wants to do the same.

On the way, you see fragmented and familiar images from the past. Forged in steel. No temporality here. Bright and tenacious, the objects tell you your history. Individual histories that then become collective memories.

There is a frozen table. An interpretation of the Last Supper. Plates with leftover bones, a bottle, empty chairs and the frost covering it all, make you feel as if you are in a cemetery in front of this graveyard of a scene of a final meal. It is a shrine because it is on an elevated stage.

In the scriptures, while breaking bread, Jesus said, “Take, eat; this is My body.” For Gupta, perhaps this last supper is then in the memory of us betraying ourselves and this is a reminder that a resurrection could happen. There is a possibility then. For redemption and for salvation. He calls it ‘I See Supper’. It was made in 2016.

On display are 20 sculptures and a selection of paintings created between 1999 and 2024 curated by the director of Bihar Museum, Anjani Singh, who has known Gupta for a long time. And in his selection, there is a symmetry, a narrative, which is what makes it chaotic and personal and very disruptive. It is led purely by emotion. The red and white chequered gamcha placed on flour dough in a large vessel cast in cement, is evidence of that. You know what it is. You have seen it so many times in your home state. The object then begins to assume life. You see the kneading of the dough, the making of roti, you remember the taste, the aftertaste. He has named it, ‘Thik Paas Me’ (Right Near Me).

In between these shrines of memory that are replicas of that fleeting reality that once made up home for us, there is a lot of life, a lot of world and a lot of home.

Nostalgia comes to those who feel unbelonged. It is an affliction. It is also a purpose, says Gupta. Born in 1964 in Khagaul in Bihar, Gupta is the youngest of four children. He says he was a quiet child who observed a lot and as he grew up and started to learn painting at the College of Arts and Crafts in Patna, he wanted to get out of Bihar and explore the world. That he did. Over the years, with stainless steel utensils as his language. He made everything with pots and pans. He let steel’s obstinacy into his own language and then became one of the known contemporary artists in India and abroad.

Everything in his work is about making home so permanent that there is no scope to forget. He is almost insistent about making ordinary bartans (utensils) become something else. A Kafkaesque situation. Totally phantasmagorical and illusory and surreal. It is also terrifying and disturbing because there is a trajectory of loss. Like when Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka wakes up one morning and turns into an insect. Alienation is the theme there and here.

We left home.

“We carry home inside us,” says Gupta.

In these works, there’s an urgency born of corrosion, driving him to cast memories of ordinary objects in steel—a material once a middle-class aspiration, lasting decades without rust, reflecting only light. The ordinary, with its quiet potential, becomes extraordinary. He’s preserving what slips away by the hour—trees, cars, motorbikes, buckets, tiffins… not extinct yet, but edging toward an inevitable end. This is an emergency of loss, a war against time. Everyday things hold poetry beyond language. Steel utensils fused into a bouquet, a guchchha, rising from a bucket—no words can fully contain the feeling of home.

The steel utensils that he stitches together sometimes, Gupta melts them and mounds them to resemble a familiar object or image but changes its scale to distort proportions so they belong to a place called memory.

For Gupta, this new exhibition, the one he says is his most emotional, is a map for the lost people who have held the idea of home in the hope that they will once return. He is a migrant. Like you. Like many from Bihar.

Here, he becomes a cartographer. The door, the mirrors, the faith and hope in the magic of teleportation are all manifestations of this audacity that only those who have faced a multitude of losses can have.

He calls it homecoming.

The steel stories of Gupta are for those displaced and misplaced. They tell us that our middle-class stories aren’t erased. Our homes are sites of history, too.

They call it stainless steel. Nothing stains them. There is something holy about that.

When Gupta refers to this home, he is talking about a place that gave him a language, a bearing, a way to see the world outside, a way to address the longing within. He is elsewhere. Never in this mythical home.

In a room, there is a skull that is made up of steel utensils, his signature style, a language that came to him on an afternoon when the sun cast its light on the steel utensils in his Delhi home many years ago. It was in the 1980s that steel utensils started to be used and in the old family albums, you can see old kitchens full of soot emanate a special kind of light, a reflected one, that catapulted you from the obscure to the resolute. The steel was to last for decades. Utilitarian and ubiquitous. Kitchens were full of them. Most kitchens.

The head is fallen sideways on the floor. A kind of despair arises when looking at it. A kind of awe and a strange faith emerge from the many items that have come together to form the head. He calls it, ‘Very Hungry God’. The head is a container of everything one imagines and experiences. This object of objects is an elegy. The luminosity of it overpowers death. There are echoes of the distant past. You are looking at the past and the future at once. The present dissolves. Time holds its onwards march.

Is God exhausted with swallowing all these homes?

Home, today, is the most pertinent question, the most political term. Ultra-nationalism has enforced borders between people and places. Wars across the world have made people homeless.

***

The home that’s left behind is infinite. Palestinian exiles have kept the keys to their houses for years since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in the hope that they will return one day. That hope is hammered by bullets each day now. They call it the Nakba key. In Arabic, Nakba means catastrophe.

Gupta’s works are also a timeline of many transformations. Economic, social and political.

There might not be a key for that door. But that there is a door is enough.

You utter “home” and that’s a political statement, an emotion that can threaten and disrupt universal ideologies.