Sketching in Mumbai’s Markets

I love markets anywhere in the world, and Mumbai’s markets are no exception.

If you turn up early in the morning at Crawford market, (well not even super early, we got there at 8am) the little stores are just opening and setting up. The men at this banana stall were carefully hanging bunches of bananas on ropes after separating them from a larger bunch.

And by the time I finished this sketch of the fruitseller (below), he’d cleared up all those crates you see in the front and had an immaculate display set up to entice his customers. Only one thing troubled me: See that yellow box in the front? It has mangoes. In January. That’s just wrong.

This next one is a super-quick sketch in the fish market. If markets are busy and full of activity, fish markets take it to the next level. I walked in with three adventurous sketchers from our sketching group who braved the madness for a quick standing-space-only session.

This next sketch is really just to record the very striking Arvind Gawde, assistant to shopowner Hitesh Dave. His vertical red tilak worked so well with his aquiline features.

This is a shop in the spice market, where bags of chilis line the shopfront and piles of assorted spices fill the rest of the store.

Most of these sketches were done as part of the weeklong workshop I ran in Jan 2023 in Mumbai with Zainab. It was, in fact, such an incredible experience that we are running it again in Jan 2024 and will announce it next month. If you think you want to join in on this adventure, join the interest list by writing to me to let me know.

Here are the earlier posts in this series of sketches from India:
• Kite flying in Gujarat
• My great, great grandparents home and more sketches from Surat
• Stepping back in time in Mumbai