Gupta used to run basic literacy classes for the women of Shahbad Dairy, Kumari recalled.
Her friends, who describe her as an “illegally imprisoned artist”, had organised the exhibition in Shahbad Dairy to raise awareness about her incarceration.
Pinky Kumari, a friend of Gupta's from Shahbad Dairy, pointing to a photograph of her.
Gupta used to visit the village frequently and formed a lasting relationship with its Adivasi residents.
Delhi’s artist community has also not spoken up in her support, as Sengupta, the artist quoted earlier in this piece, has repeatedly pointed out.
“There is my friend, my sister,” said Pinky Kumari, her face lighting up with a smile. She was pointing to a photograph on display at an art exhibition in Shahbad Dairy, a low-income neighbourhood in North Delhi, on September 6.
The photograph showed Srishti Gupta, a 28-year-old artist, addressing a group of women, who were listening attentively. Gupta used to run basic literacy classes for the women of Shahbad Dairy, Kumari recalled.
A few steps away from this exhibit, scraps carrying children’s messages for Gupta adorned a sheet of sky-blue chart paper that hung from a string. “Miss you Srishti didi,” many of the messages read, using the Hindi word for elder sister as a mark of respect. Some of the children told Scroll that Gupta besides teaching them art also helped them revise their school lessons.
The residents of the neighbourhood have not met with Gupta since April 11, when she was detained by Uttar Pradesh Police for allegedly inciting violence during a workers’ protest in Noida, an industrial city in the National Capital Region. Her friends, who describe her as an “illegally imprisoned artist”, had organised the exhibition in Shahbad Dairy to raise awareness about her incarceration.
In April, thousands of industrial workers hit the streets in Noida to demand an increase in their wages, which had not been revised for many of them since 2014. In solidarity with them, Gupta had joined the protests alongside fellow activists associated with the Left-leaning Progressive Artists’ League. She was among the first few protesters to be arrested and has now spent more than five months in prison.
On September 1, the Allahabad High Court came down heavily on the authorities investigating cases related to the protests. The court pulled up the district magistrate of Gautam Buddha Nagar, of which Noida is a part, and the Uttar Pradesh Police for “concocting” stories about Akriti Chaudhary, another young artist who was picked up with Gupta.
However, Gupta and the other activists remain behind bars because the Uttar Pradesh Police has filed several cases against them in connection with the workers’ protest. Gupta has as many as 11 against her. She has yet to secure bail in two of them.
Pinky Kumari, a friend of Gupta's from Shahbad Dairy, pointing to a photograph of her. Credit: Priyali Dhingra/Scroll
Caring and creating
Gupta was born and raised in Amethi, a small town in Uttar Pradesh’s Awadh region. In 2016, the year she finished school, she moved to Delhi to study fine art at Delhi University’s College of Art.
Her course was primarily focused on printmaking and offered few opportunities to explore spaces beyond the college campus, said Vinod Karki, her batchmate and a fellow member of the Progressive Artists’ League. He described the process of creating art by printing as a physically intense and engaging process which requires artists to stay with their machines for long durations of time.
“Often, we did not even find the time to eat properly,” Karki explained. “Srishti would insist that all of us have lunch together. If somebody was unable to join, she brought them food and made sure they ate.”
In their four years at college, he was repeatedly struck by how much Gupta cared about other people. She was not very interested in politics at the time, Karki recalled. That, however, changed after she went to Visva-Bharati, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921, for a master’s degree in fine arts.
Gupta reached Kala Bhavana, the university’s fine arts department, in 2020 and spent about four years in the world that Tagore had built in Bengal’s Santiniketan. Karki, who stayed in touch with her during those years, said that their phone conversations at the time reflected her newfound Leftist outlook.
“She talked a lot about Palestine,” he remembered. “How does capitalism work? Why are politicians the way they are? These were the questions that we discussed at length.”
Vinod Karki, Gupta's friend from college, arranging her drawings at the exhibition in Shahbad Dairy. Credit: Priyali Dhingra/Scroll
As Gupta’s worldview expanded in Santiniketan, so did her relationship with art. Alongside her studies, she wrote poetry and picked up local handicrafts.
The exhibition in Shahbad Dairy, too, was strewn with objects from Santiniketan. There were reams of handmade paper as well as rope, both of which Gupta learned how to make from the Santhals, an Adivasi community, who live in and around Santiniketan.
Visva-Bharati alumnus Maksud Ali Mondal, 33, met Gupta during her time at the university. He had already graduated by then and was working out of a studio in Boner Pukur Danga, a Santhal village near Santiniketan.
Gupta used to visit the village frequently and formed a lasting relationship with its Adivasi residents. Mondal made it a point to tell Scroll that her relationship with the community was not an extractive one.
“She did not romanticise their landscape,” he said over the phone from Amsterdam. “Her approach was very sensitive. To this day, I get calls from those villagers asking me if Srishti is doing alright and when she will be released from prison.”
Gupta was so invested in the village that upon completing her master’s in 2022, she decided to follow in Mondal’s footsteps and stay there for a couple of years more. He even saw her learn how to sow paddy from the farmers in the village. That was her way of becoming one with the community, he contended. “She saw art as a way of connecting with people,” he added.
Mondal was, therefore, not surprised by Gupta’s turn to activism after she returned to Delhi in 2023. He saw her presence at the workers’ protest in Noida as not very different from her efforts to learn paddy farming from the Santhals of Boner Pukur Danga.
A crime of empathy?
In Delhi, Gupta was drawn to an alternative strand of Left politics that is not restricted to contesting elections but focuses on grassroots activism in the working-class settlements that dot the city’s industrial suburbs.
An initiative that resonated deeply with Gupta was running community libraries for women and children in neighbourhoods such as Karawal Nagar and Shahbad Dairy. That is how she began volunteering in Shahbad Dairy and eventually moved there.
Gupta (centre) used to teach children in Shahbad Dairy. Credit: Progressive Artists' League
Besides community work, Gupta regularly went to protests in and around the city, such as the pickets her fellow activists organised outside brand outlets that they saw as complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Her participation in the Noida workers’ protest, her friends say, must be seen in this context.
But Uttar Pradesh Police’s chargesheets in the cases against Gupta paint a different picture. “Her main responsibility was to make posters and paintings for protests and incite workers,” reads one of these chargesheets, which describes her as a “key conspirator”.
The police have linked Gupta to a host of Leftist organisations such as the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India, Mazdoor Bigul and Naujawan Bharat Sabha. They have also concluded that her “ideology” is “Maoism” because she possessed “books related to revolution”. One of these books is supposedly linked to the Communist Party of India (Maoist), a banned, far-Left organisation.
However, the police investigation against Gupta has itself become a subject of controversy. Her fellow activists have put out videos on social media which suggest that the police tried to plant evidence in her house after she had been arrested. The police have denied this accusation and claim that they went to her house in compliance with a court order.
“Her [Srishti’s] crime is empathy,” said Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a Delhi-based artist who has known Gupta for years and visited her in jail recently. “She was concerned about the lives of working-class people and their children. That is what has been criminalised.”
Mondal, the artist who first met Gupta in Santiniketan, concurred. Politics for her, he asserted, was not about political parties and their agendas, but primarily about being an ethical artist. As someone who came from a small-town, middle-class family that had nothing to do with art, she wanted to make a living as an artist without compromising on her beliefs.
“She used to ask me how I survive without a job because she had never seen someone do that while making art,” Mondal recalled. “I would tell her about funding and grants. She had questions about taking money from capitalists who fund ecological artists and, at the same time, deforest acres and acres of land.”
Art and activism
Before Gupta was arrested, her family did not know that such questions shaped her practice as an artist or about her engagement with Left activism. One of her relatives, who spoke to Scroll on the condition of anonymity fearing retribution from the police, said that they only supported her in pursuing art professionally because they appreciated her talent.
Gupta’s teachers from Visva-Bharati, too, declined interview requests citing university rules about talking to the press. Delhi’s artist community has also not spoken up in her support, as Sengupta, the artist quoted earlier in this piece, has repeatedly pointed out.
For friends and fellow activists, though, Gupta was more than an artist. “She did not confine herself to art,” stated Karki, her batchmate from college, adding that she was deeply involved in the day-to-day life of the communities she worked with.
One of Gupta's drawings displayed at the Shahbad Dairy exhibition was a recreation of the viral image from the pandemic that showed a woman lugging a suitcase with her child sleeping on it. Credit: Priyali Dhingra/Scroll
In the initial months after returning to Delhi, Gupta used to spend most of her time in the Progressive Artists’ League studio located in the south-eastern part of the city. But once she immersed herself in the community library project in Shahbad Dairy, she decided to move into a room there.
“Before I met her, I used to think that art meant drawing,” said Naureen Sabba, a 26-year-old student-activist who Gupta lived with in Shahbad Dairy for eight months. “She broke my notions about artists. She told me about artists who stayed with marginalised people and voiced their concerns through their art.”
Gupta touched the lives of the neighbourhood’s other residents as well. In addition to teaching women and children, she helped with clearing garbage and organising health camps. Gupta’s friend, Pinky Kumari, remembered how she had accompanied her to the hospital after her son’s foot got burnt in an accident.
“She even found us a blood donor,” Kumari recollected. “I miss her a lot.”
