Growing up in Thane’s Chendani Koliwada, artist Parag Tandel’s earliest memories are of playing in the adjoining mangrove forests or swimming around the fishermen’s boats along the coast. After graduating from Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, he pursued his further studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, where he was mentored and encouraged to ask questions and develop his creative thinking. “I actually started thinking here,” he laughs, “slowly dismantling the Indian and colonial system of thinking, and finally seeing my Koli community as an art form.”

“I’ve seen the cultural richness across my community and family, and the network of kinship between the community and coastal ecosystems, and wanted to document and preserve this—especially after our villages were declared as slums in 2017. I felt it was important to counter the conditioning that had been imbibed in us. Every historical text we read is marred by the perception of a particular writer; so I thought I could, instead, archive my history into these sculptures,” he says, pointing across the exhibit at his show at art gallery Tarq, Fort. “I started documenting the Portuguese and their colonies, and how they converted us to Christianity. They felt we were very, very unsophisticated, when, in fact, we were living very happy content lives.”