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Colonial Layers at 47A Khotachiwadi: Shadows of Empire
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Tucked inside Khotachi Wadi, one of Mumbai's few surviving heritage villages with Portuguese-British roots, 47A is currently showing Shadows of Empire, a two-person exhibition featuring Kolkata-based artist Jit Chowdhury and Mumbai-based photographer and painter Kaushal Parikh. The show opened on March 21st and runs until April 19th.
The two artists come from entirely different backgrounds and work in entirely different mediums, which is precisely what makes the pairing interesting. Both have turned their attention to Khotachi Wadi itself: its bungalows, its people, its layered colonial history, and the particular atmosphere of a place that has managed to persist within one of the world's most dense and fast-moving cities.
Jit Chowdhury arrives as an outsider. The Kolkata-based visual storyteller works with shola-pith and indigo collages made from Bengal's natural mangroves, materials that carry their own cultural and regional history before they even enter the frame of Mumbai's heritage. His works approach Khotachi Wadi through the textures of its imperial remnants, weaving the material of Bengal's landscape into portraits of everyday life in a Portuguese-inflected corner of the city. The distance between his materials and his subject is part of the work: it is an outsider's gaze that does not pretend to belong but finds its own way in.
Kaushal Parikh is the opposite: a Mumbai native, an ex-banker who turned to photography and painting, and someone who brings a sharp-eyed familiarity to the same subject. His camera and his mixed-media paintings work through intimacy rather than distance, finding the hidden lives inside the wadi's fading bungalows. Parikh's work is not nostalgic. Humor, controversy, and color appear alongside the colonial bones of the architecture, and the result is a body of work that looks at heritage without romanticizing it.
Together, the two artists offer something that neither could achieve alone: the outsider's fresh gaze and the insider's intimate knowledge of the same place at the same time, under the same roof. The show's title, Shadows of Empire, frames the colonial imprint not as something to mourn or celebrate but as a layer that has merged into the contemporary fabric of the city, visible if you know where to look.
The venue itself is inseparable from the work. 47A Khotachiwadi is a 19th-century Portuguese-style house whose ground floor operates as a gallery, positioned at the intersection of craft, art, and design. Showing work about the wadi inside a building that is part of the wadi gives Shadows of Empire a site-specificity that extends the exhibition beyond its walls.
Shadows of Empire is on view until 19th April 2026 at 47A Khotachiwadi, Girgaum, Mumbai. Open 11am to 7pm, all days except Mondays.
Exhibition: Shadows of Empire
Venue: 47A Khotachiwadi, Girgaum, Mumbai
Dates: Ongoing until 19th April 2026
Timings: 11am to 7pm, all days except Mondays
Entry: Open to all
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