Inauguration of Savi Sawarkar’s Solo Art Exhibition
1st September 2026 – 10.00am
Bal Gandharva Kala Dalan
For forty years, Savindra Sawarkar has painted what the Indian art world refused to hang.
Savindra Sawarkar — known widely as Savi — is a painter and printmaker from Nagpur, one of the most significant and most underrecognised artists working in India today. For over four decades, his canvases have done what the mainstream art establishment has largely refused to do: they have named things. Named the devadasi system for what it is. Named Manu. Named the instruments of untouchability — the broom, the earthen pitcher, the tinkling stick — and placed them in compositions of devastating surrealist force.
He is not an artist who depicts suffering from the outside. He is a Dalit artist painting the Dalit condition from within it, with the full weight of that lived experience behind every mark on the canvas. That is what makes his work different — not in subject matter alone, but in moral authority.