A labourer dresses himself behind what looks like a makeshift curtain, pulling up a pink trouser over a blue undergarment. Partially visible through strips of black, brown and orange fabric, he is captured in a moment between exposure and concealment.Part of In Another Mode, an exhibition at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery, the untitled oil pastel drawing is an example of what historian and curator R Siva Kumar calls the post-independence optimism of a young, idealistic Sudhir Patwardhan. Evident in the early years of his career, the idealism gradually gave way to cautious realism.Among the moments behind this shift was the Bombay textile strike in 1982. Patwardhan says, “For me, Marxism was kind of an ideal. It still is. But, the strike made me realise that things don’t always go the way you imagine. There can be different views within the movement. But I haven’t retracted from the ideal position because it helped me see people, when I was looking at workers.”For five decades, Patwardhan offered a window into Mumbai’s working class. As he chronicled the urbanisation in the city, juggling a full-time practice as a radiologist, he painted the oft-ignored section of society that keeps the metropolis running, with empathy and tenderness.In Another Mode, as if to balance the scales, is offering viewers a peek into his artistic mind. On display are over 250 drawings and sketches, chosen from over 4,000 works made between 1970 and 2000. Some fully formed, others notations and scribbles to be developed further, they reveal how and what Patwardhan, 77, sees in the world he paints. “Painting is different. You want to share your paintings… you make them to show them to others. I realised there was something in the drawings that was not there in the paintings. So I thought it’s fair to allow viewers to see an aspect of an artist’s process,” he says. Charcoal and acrylic on paper, pasted on canvas ( Photo: Vadehra Art Gallery)For Patwardhan, neither being a doctor nor an artist was a second choice. They were simply two ways of seeing.If being a radiologist enabled him to understand the human psyche using pre-existing knowledge, being an artist allowed him to learn from it and visually articulate the physicality of the human condition.Story continues below this ad“In radiology, you cut through various distractions to find what you are looking for. But as an artist, you are not looking for anything particular and something just hits you, stays with you for days and could potentially develop into a painting,” he says.In that way, both professions informed each other. “Medicine involves understanding people’s pathology. Because I am a figurative painter, it’s a question of wanting to understand both the social as well as the psychological,” he says.Patwardhan has been a people’s painter in the way he identifies with those who appear on his canvas, making his work at once a self portrait, a documentation of the blue-collared workers and a portrait of the city.“I wasn’t seeking them out to paint them but after coming to Bombay, all the people around me were basically working class,” he says, adding that given his own middle-class background, he saw himself more in them than those “living the high life” in Bombay. “I painted the workers not as individuals, but as representing a certain force.”Story continues below this adThe affinity for the proletariat started taking roots a few years before he landed in Bombay in 1974. At the Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC) in Pune, he would often engage in discussions on Marxism with his friends. “That got me started on the path to becoming an artist,” says Patwardhan.For all his passion for art, he remained acutely aware of his lack of formal training in the subject. So he taught himself. He did a deep dive in art history. The move to Bombay, in fact, was a step towards self education. Pencil on Paper (Photo: Vadehra Art Gallery)Bombay introduced him to the works of modernists Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee and MF Husain. “The way Akbar used colour and Tyeb used the linear figure… there was something about their commitment to being artists,” he says.Equally impactful were the intensity of artist-poet Gieve Patel, whose “searching, self-questioning approach” helped Patwardhan probe whether “what he was saying was really what he wanted to say” and the technical tips that Shankar Palshikar, then dean of JJ School of Art, would share every time he visited Patwardhan’s home in Thane.Story continues below this ad“Later, I got closer to Bhupen (Khakhar) and Nalini (Malani), because our thinking was more similar,” he says. It was from Khakhar that he picked up the habit of constantly sketching, be it in a train or in a cafe.ALSO READ | Delhi beyond its postcard image, seen through everyday lifeAs generous as Bombay was to Patwardhan as a muse, he admits feeling the need to withdraw from it periodically, like in the aftermath of the 1992 riots. He then turns his gaze inwards, on his family and friends. The familiarity with the subject introduces a softness in his drawings. A portrait of his wife Shanta in pencil, for instance, displays a delicate treatment of lines and a light hand.That is perhaps why Patwardhan admits feeling like an intruder when he paints strangers. While most people have appreciated his portraits of them, he has also been confronted by his subjects.“In the late ’80s, a labourer got aggressive and said, ‘Why are you doing this? You want to sketch poor localities, sell them and make money,’” shares Patwardhan, who has since become conscious of the default power equation — between the patient and the doctor; the subject and the artist.