This painter keeps Pune’s wadas alive – one portrait at a time

Pande is a chronicler of vanishing wadas and their role in Pune’s history.

A conversation with him covers an arc of architectural details that he notices, such as the devali with banana flower motif by the entrance which are a signature theme in Maharashtrian architecture; and the rows of windows that give glimpses of Parsi wadas.

Pande recalls the contrasting emotions he feels when he stands before a wada.

“These grand houses were inspirational at one time not so long ago. Now, in some wadas, the small rooms are rented out to workers and migrant labour cheaply as the original elite owners no longer want to live in places where the plumbing, road network and construction details are in a bad state,” says Pande.

His paintings will be documents of architectural treasures that are steadily disappearing under the pressure of redevelopment. Pande does not think of himself as an architectural artist. “I paint the wadas like portraits. I remove them from their surroundings and bring them alive as different personalities,” he says.

Pande had a sheltered and pampered life in Nanded where he painted and was so bad at academics that he failed polytechnic in the first year and barely scraped past Class 12.

He could paint and his family decided to enroll him into an arts college for graduation. Pande’s genre was human figures he saw around him. During post-graduation in Pune, he detoured into abstract art but, once academics was behind him, was back to making portraits of ordinary people.

The life stories and philosophies of cobblers, auto-rickshaw drivers, street vendors, chai tapri owners and craftsmen came alive in his portraits of them. Pande was interested in people that often went unnoticed.
It was while looking for inexpensive art material in Pune;s wholesale markets around Kasba that he stood mesmerised before a wada. The dying grandeur struck him first. The artist’s eye, next, picked up the cracks in the edifice symbolically and literally.

Pande began exploring Pune’s historic neighbourhoods and realised that the old wadas carried stories much like the people he painted. Each structure possessed a distinct personality – some bore the confidence of former prosperity while others showed signs of neglect and exhaustion. In many wadas, there were traces of families who had lived there for generations before moving away.

He started documenting the wadas in mid-2023 and has a collection of 30 paintings. He has photographs of 100 more wadas that he will work on. Historically, wadas represented social ecosystems where generations of people in a locality congregated for festivals, meals and conversations. The communities developed relationships that lasted decades.

Pande is aware that he cannot hold back the social life that wadas nourished, but he is doing the next best thing. Pande’s works pose an unsettling question of what remains of a place once its memory is demolished.