Street artist transforms Mumbai with images of Bollywood classics

It is a damp evening in Mumbai and Ranjit Dahiya, a street artist, is restless. The monsoon rains have arrived. That means for the next couple of months he will not be able to paint any of his Bollywood-themed murals.

They have become much-loved fixtures in the city. His work – huge, brightly coloured paintings that adorn walls – pays tribute to classic movies and stars. It includes an image of a young Amitabh Bachchan, stretched out with his arms behind his head, which covers the wall of a two- storey building.

Nearby there is an equally eye-catching mural of Rajesh Khanna, widely considered Bollywood’s first superstar.

We are on the terrace of Dahiya’s studio in Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai that has become popular among expats and Bollywood stars.

We are surrounded by cats –23 of them in total. All of them are street cats that he took in, he says. I also spot a tortoise lazily wandering by.

“I love animals,” says the 37-year-old artist. His biggest passion, however, is painting his bold murals.

“I want to celebrate this city as a Bollywood city,” he says.

Having grown up in a small village in Sonipat, in Haryana, watching Bollywood films and being mesmerised by them, it was something of a disappointment when he moved to Mumbai in 2008. With pollution, overcrowding and drab, unkempt buildings dominating the landscape, it struck him that he did not get a sense of being in the home city of Indian cinema.

“You couldn’t see any signs of Bollywood for the common man before,” he says. “I thought, why not make the city a little bit more Bollywood?”

His day job as a user-interface designer for a website left him with a yearning to paint, and he needed an outlet for his creative side. So, in 2012, he started the Bollywood Art Project to transform the drab walls of buildings in the city with street art inspired by Hindi film. The timing could not have been better, as 2013 marked 100 years of Bollywood.

Most of his works can be found around Bandra, but he has also painted a mural in New Delhi and one in Chennai. He has completed 15 in all.

His biggest and most imposing work to date is a 40-metre mural of Dadasaheb Phalke, which was unveiled by Bachchan in 2014 and is clearly visible from the main motorway.

“I’m working on getting more buildings to paint after the rainy season,” he says. This can be tricky, because he has to convince residents who occasionally try to demand payment. He does not make any money from the murals, instead earning a living from graphic and brand design.

“Sometime it’s difficult to survive,” he says. “People think that because it’s street art, it should be for free.”

Dahiya had humble beginnings. His father was a government worker and his mother a housewife, and as a child he helped tend to his family’s cattle.

He became a whitewasher after leaving school at the age of 16.

“Then I got a job painting adverts on billboards around the district and on the highway, for products such as Coca-Cola, as well as social messages on issues such as family planning,” he says.

He did this for three years. It was a gruelling and thankless job, he says, requiring him to climb to dizzying heights and paint in the glare of the sun.

“I was struggling with what I should do with my life,” he says.

One day he ran into an old school friend who thought that Dahiya was wasting his talents and advised him to enrol in a fine-arts course – an option Dahiya knew little about and had never considered. He followed the advice, and in 1998, went to the University of Chandigarh where he completed a four-year degree in fine arts.

After this he joined the National Institute of Design and studied for a masters in graphic design.

After he showed recent photos of himself in the newspaper, working on a Bollywood mural, to his mother, who still lives in the village, she said to him: “What is this? You’re still climbing up a ladder painting after all the studying you did?”

His plan now is to paint as many murals be can. He has a list of 125 actors and characters he wants to paint, including queen of dance Helen Jairag Richardson, and Raj Kapoor. Shah Rukh Khan may have to wait a while for a mural, however, as Dahiya is keen to maintain his focus on the greats of old-school Bollywood for now.

He also has ambitions to reach even greater heights, in every sense: “I want to break my own record and paint even bigger buildings – the biggest building I can paint,” he says.

artslife@thenational.ae