Sir Howard Hodgkin’s deep and enduring affinity with India is one of the most compelling threads running through his long career. His fascination with the country began after his first visit in 1964, and from that moment onward India became a recurrent subject and spiritual locus for his work. For Hodgkin, it was not a matter of documenting places, but of internalising the experience of India — its light, its rhythms, its colours, its emotional pulse — and translating these into his expressive abstraction. The experiences of travelling, observing, and absorbing the sensory world of India empowered him to forge a visual language that fused colour and memory, not literal representation.

His affinity with the city is vividly expressed in his painting Hello Bombay (2016). The work embodies Hodgkin’s evocative response to Bombay/Mumbai: the shapes are fluid, the brushstrokes dynamic, the palette suffused with vibrant yellows, oranges and greens reminiscent of heat, sunset, life, and memory. This piece stands as a kind of visual salutation to the city. The painting was exhibited in three major venues: in Hong Kong at the Gagosian Gallery in Howard Hodgkin: In the Pink (Jan–Mar 2017); at the Hepworth Wakefield in the UK for Howard Hodgkin: Painting India (July–Oct 2017); and finally in London at the Gagosian Gallery London in Howard Hodgkin: Last Paintings (June–July 2018).

Hodgkin’s sustained return to India throughout his career afforded him a form of artistic renewal. In the years leading up to Hello Bombay, he created numerous works under titles such as Bombay Morning, Bombay Afternoon, Bombay Night, and In the Garden of the Bombay Museum; each drawing on his personal archive of visits, sketches, and emotional impressions of India. These works stand not merely as depictions but as meditations — colour-fields and textured strokes that reflect not just what he saw but how he felt. With Hello Bombay, Hodgkin encapsulated the city’s energy, his own desires, memories and reveries, and in doing so reinforced the notion that for him India was not an external muse alone, but a deeply internalised creative force.