Working life in Mumbai as seen by modern-day miniaturist Zainab Tambawalla

When Zainab Tambawalla heard that a hospital building with an ornate, antique gate she had admired on a heritage walk in Mumbai might be demolished, she wrote an email to the owners requesting that they preserve the extensive wrought iron grillwork. Closer to home, she was dismayed to find that the elegant wooden signage outside her father’s paint shop had been removed. “Some moments will be gone before you take out your notebook,” says Tambawalla, who self-deprecatingly describes her work as “urban sketching”.

In her first solo show, a high-spirited parade of vibrant watercolours entitled Seen Unseen, Tambawalla reveals herself as a miniaturist of the metropolis, but also a conservationist of a kind (the exhibition is on at 47-A Khotachi Wadi till 4 January). In a painting of a telephone repairman, with one of his feet elevated as he hunches over a mesh of wires, she gives us in one image the complexity of the infrastructure of telephony of yesteryear and the skill required to keep landlines working even as they slowly become a relic of the past. Her rendering of a neighbourhood knife sharpener is an ode to a skill that might eventually become a victim of our increasingly throwaway culture.

Tambawalla brings that intensity of observation and depiction to inanimate objects as well. Her series of paintings of electricity junction boxes and feeder-styled boxes are in reds so vivid that they have the glamour of that other emblem of a bygone era, the London phone booth. But, as they are in Indian cities, these junction boxes are festooned with faded adverts.

This series inverts the work of French Cubist artist Georges Braque, who used collages of newspaper cutouts to create figures of men playing the violin, for example. More than a century later, Tambawalla sees art as a contemporary collage all around us in cities. In a telling comment, she recalls that from her Mumbai home, she would sometimes look out on chawl dwellers nearby and be fascinated by the way “they composed the belongings that stayed outside their house”.

Her father owns a paint shop, her mother is a seamstress, homemaker and now has a business batching seeds for mukwas, and her grandmother was a seamstress. “I am privileged to have been born at a time when we were not privileged,” Tambawalla remarks. But her observation is not simply factual. It reflects a world-view of empathy towards fellow city-dwellers who provide the labour and skills that make our metropolises hum. “The streets of Mumbai often feel like an open studio… a flower seller setting up at dawn, a chai vendor pouring into a glass tumbler,” an exhibition caption observes. “Together, these workers form the quiet machinery of the city.”

For me, the most moving section was Tambawalla’s tribute to many of these workers around the city catching a nap while going about their day or simply succumbing to exhaustion. The artist has worked in animated film as well and that is reflected in a series of snappy captions and titles as one walks through the show. In The City that Never Sleeps, the cliché used to laud Mumbai’s urban vitality, she uses the same words with irony for a series that is a docudrama of immigrants worn out by work or by the effort of seeking work in a city reputedly paved with gold. Her view is more Steinbeckian than Stardust.

One arresting frame is of a young man, presumably unemployed, who has fallen asleep against a bus stop pillar, decorated with “help wanted” ads. The pathos and poignance of the scene is representative of our supposed “demographic dividend”, which is mostly a falsehood. Like“the city that never sleeps” the dividend turns out to be too many young people chasing too few jobs. In another, a Bengali woman is sleeping on a handcart. Tambawalla explains that her paintings in that section have only one woman because very few Indian women, even in a city, would feel comfortable sleeping in public.

A painting of a handsome casual labourer who has fallen asleep against a bleached pink shuttered metal roller gate makes him seem temporarily beaten down by the struggle of getting by, too tired to be the dockworker about to rise against the system in the 1970s Deewar. “These works stay with that thin line between exhaustion and resilience, between dreaming and simply making it through the night,” the exhibition notes explain.

Tambawalla’s work is collectively one of social commentary, but against such vivid Henri Matisse-like colours , hers is a vision that makes you think without turning gloomy. In a spectacular series on, of all things, water tankers, she is simultaneously exploring the inequalities of water supply, and the coming dystopia of water scarcity in one of the most vulnerable countries on earth, while somehow celebrating these giant beasts of burden. With her Technicolour palette, she makes the tankers seem like caparisoned elephants at a Rajasthani festival.

In another love song to Mumbai, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie quipped that Art Deco was a corruption of the Hindi word dekho. Tambawalla, who bemoans that she rarely sees people looking out of windows these days, has crafted a debut show that is a rallying cry to do just that. In Seen Unseen, she has created a kind of portable movie projector of yesteryear for us to observe a world that many of us are too preoccupied to see.

Rahul Jacob is a former travel, food and drink editor of the Financial Times, London and a Mint columnist.