Known for his penchant for choosing offbeat titles and stimulating subjects, many people from his own fraternity and the media have labelled him as sensationalist, commercialist, repetitive, and so on.

But unless one meets the artist and spends some time with him, one will never know the intensity of his emotions to create social awareness.

“There may be many rules and laws prohibiting female infanticide. But one look at the skewed male and female ratio reveals the grave situation. People from north go bride hunting to the south as the number of girl children has dipped alarmingly in their States. And yet, female infanticide continues!” says the 36-year-old artist in his studio at Andheri in Mumbai.

This inspired his exhibition titled Tentuaa daba do (Kill her). Using mixed art, he showcases gory images of the female child being cut from the mother’s womb with the umbilical cord still tied around her; several fibre-glass sculpted newborn babies sliding dead from a small hut (metaphor for the womb) on the umbilical cord and several cradles with a dead girl child.

For his latest show ‘Pet Shops’, he was dressed in a sleeveless maternity gown inviting everyone to watch him deliver the babies (The press invitation had a wickedly smiling Upadhyay attired in the maternity gown). In this exhibition, he displays about two-ft tall babies caged in glittering brass cages. Explaining the show he says, “It is actually about an age where the buyer also is the seller. We think we are programming our society and ruling the world but in actuality we are caging ourselves in more ways. The painted fibre-glass children in the cages are us.”

Unlike the fibre-glass babies of Tentuaa… the Pet Shop babies are not only bigger but also colourful. The body of each baby is painted in different colours such as black, blue, pink, red, yellow, green…with different motifs of Moghul, miniature, contemporary, and geometrical art on the belly, chest, buttocks, forehead, arms — a metaphor to highlight that each human is unique.

Hailing from a small village called Partapur in Rajasthan, Upadhyay was exposed to social evils such as female infanticide, lack of girl-child education, dowry harassment, corruption, and so on. These form the main theme of his work.

He says, “I can’t insist upon a change or force people to come and watch my show. Neither am I the government or a lawmaker to change the society but it would be nice if seeing my work people can get out of their ‘play safe’ attitude. And try to make life better for everyone.”

Upadhyay uses paints, mirrors, videos, installation art to convey his emotions. But for many years, he has been creatively using fibre-glass babies in different poses, gestures and colours.

“All babies are innocent, gullible but at the same time crafty. They know how to survive but need the support of grownups. They need to be reined in to help them grow as individuals but not chained, caged in or oppressed as is being done in society and that is what my babies say,” explains Upadhyay.

But, doesn’t it become repetitive?

“I use babies to say diverse things. Over the years though the proportion of the babies has remained the same, my babies have grown up. Through them I showcase the changing, economically-stronger and a confident Indian society. I use babies to narrate a story, a feeling.”

In the Clone Vithala, Maya, Mutants and others in this series, Upadhyay questions the ideas of cloning and mutations. “What if the experiments failed and we ended up having children with two heads and four arms. What if the future generation was only of such mutants? Where will the present generation stand in their eyes?”

Upadhyay came to Mumbai in 1996, after completing his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda with a dream to make it big in the metro. “I had hoped that someday, before I become old, I would be able to sell my work for Rs 1 lakh. But suddenly within a couple of years things changed!” he says with a huge grin.

Today each muse in his Pet Shop series is being sold for Rs 25 lakh.

His friends suggested buying a bigger house or property; he scoffed at the idea. “What would I do with so many properties?" he says.

So he decided to make his village Partapur and other villages around it, a better place to live in. Not by building roads or hospitals — “That is the job of the government”, but through his art. He is teaching the villagers about the world outside and making them understand the necessity of gender equality and education. Upadhyay also runs an NGO, Sanstha, where he helps the children of his village get education and also lobbies with the government to provide them good midday meals.

He has also founded an artists’ initiative called ‘Sandharbh’. This is a non-profit organisation which encourages artists from around the world to come to villages, live among the inhabitants and interact with them.

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