A colourful, colourless Bombay

Sunhil Sippy’s new photography book documents his journey of healing from a life-changing accident as he learnt to walk and explored his home city on foot

Two things happened to commercial director Sunhil Sippy as he neared his 40s. First, was the realisation of being disconnected from his home city, Bombay—because of the nature of his work, he spent more time inside studios, leaving him little room to engage with the outdoors—which led him to return to street photography. And then, an accident, while shooting on the Yamuna Expressway outside Delhi, where he lost a part of his left foot. This was on April 27, 2012. A couple of surgeries later, including an emergency one to avoid amputation, Sippy had a new, reconstructed heel. But he had to learn to walk all over again, “like a toddler, with careful support”. “As I walked, I healed. And as I healed, I walked,” shares Sippy. “When I started walking, I became more aware of the universe around me. In a city like Bombay, you can build a wall of comfort around you, and not see anything if you want to. But, one of the most important changes that happened [after the accident] was the hunger to experience life in a different way. I wanted to know where I am,” he adds, in a telephonic interview.

Sunhil Sippy

This led to an entirely different journey, with Sippy developing an “intense and obsessive” attraction for the city. For the next seven years, he found himself returning to some of the places again, photographing them as he saw them evolve and transform.

Dharukhana 2013

His new book, The Opium of Time (Pictor Publishing), a collection of over 100 monochrome and colour analog landscapes, is a meditative exploration of that journey he made within the city on foot. His pictures travel from a one-storey jhopdi at Worli seaface, where two young women stand at the doorway, flaunting their heavily-embroidered sarees, to the madness of monsoon at Marine Drive where the hungry tide draws people by the dozen, and the resilient Edward Theatre whose whirring fans greet a silent audience. He remembers going to Kamathipura, but being nervous about shooting, simply because he thought “it wasn’t a very nice thing to do”. “Bombay allows you in, like very few cities, and you have to be judicious in how you approach its streets and people, [especially] because, she is offering herself to you all the time. I’d say that in 96 per cent of the images in the book, my subjects are conscious of my presence. There are just one or two, where I have pushed the limits.”

Worli Seaface 2013

Sippy grew up and was educated in the UK, before he moved to the US to pursue an undergraduate degree in English Literature from Georgetown University. He relocated to Mumbai in 1995 to explore a career in film and advertising. His first feature Snip! won the National Award for Best Editing in 2001; he later went on to make commercials for leading brands. “But, it was only five years ago when I realised that I found real joy in making an image. I enjoyed responding to the environment around me, rather than creating the environment around me,” he says. What Sippy loved most about photography was that it was a solitary process. “You are creating for yourself here. And that made it different from what I had been doing all along. I think there was a time when I found the collaborative process interesting, but it wasn’t me expressing my art. I was working for other people’s visions,” he says.

Edward Theatre, Dhobi Talao 2019

He, however, admits that Bombay is a hard subject to photograph. “Because it’s cacophony,” he says, adding, “Beauty is important to me. And I was hunting for it. If you go to Sewri or Bhandup, or Dharukhana [in Reay Road], there is another landscape that awaits you. Same with the chaos of Nagpada junction... It’s almost like time stands still [there.]”

The book is interspersed with poetry by indie musician Ankur Tewari, and five diary entries by Sippy, where he talks about his journey in Mumbai. “I used to be quite a sentimental Instagram poster, where I would go on these long diatribes. It was like a public journal. When I was looking at how to put this together, I started hunting through things that I had written over the years. I literally pulled things out from different periods and re-edited a lot of it,” he says of the text that makes its way into the book.

The pictures are split into five different sections, the monsoon, street, night, industrial city, and entertainment, which Sippy feels makes the book navigable. The works span from 2010 to 2020, the year when the country went into the first Coronavirus lockdown—the masked city deliberately doesn’t make its way into this collection. Most of the images are in monochrome because Sippy says that he “found it very difficult to see the city in colour”. “There are coloured images in the book too, but they are all in analog, as digital [colour photography] didn’t work for me at all. For a very long time I was entranced by this city in monochrome. It’s something to do with the light, I guess. When I travel to other parts of the world, I shoot in colour. But in Bombay, for some reason, I just can’t.”

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