Udi Baba's Art Is A Pulp & Grindhouse-Inspired Dialogue With Pop Culture

While the term 'pulp fiction' may conjure images of lurid paperback covers and dime-store detectives in the West, India had its own thriving pulp culture long before Tarantino made it cool. Hindi and Urdu pulp fiction was an explosive genre in the 1980s, with Meerut at its epicenter. Authors like Ibne Safi, Om Prakash Sharma, and Surender Mohan Pathak were household names; their books filled with intrigue, crime, and unapologetic melodrama. These stories were loud, brash, and dripping in the over-the-top aesthetics that would later bleed into Indian grindhouse cinema.

Indian horror, too, had its own unruly golden age. The Ramsay Brothers turned low-budget horror into an art form, crafting films that mixed supernatural horror with campy, almost operatic performances. The garish lighting, and wildly exaggerated makeup became their signature. And yet, these films carved their own space; their sheer pulpiness lending them a kitschy charm that modern horror rarely captures.

It is this deliciously chaotic world of pulp and horror that fuels the creative spirit of Udi Baba. The Kolkata-born, Delhi-based artist goes by the very response you give to something that catches you by surprise. His work is a sort of recurring dialogue with pop culture itself, twisting it into a playground of absurdity and dark humour. Borrowing from dramatic visuals like an Ajanta circus poster and even works of Raja Ravi Verma and Butcher Billy, the artist sees his craft as a curation of contemporary nostalgia. The result is a visual experiment that respects its source while playing with its edges.

As a child, Udi Baba sketched scenes on a slate, building narratives panel by panel like an amateur filmmaker before his parents, exhausted by his obsession, took the slate away. Unbothered, he moved to sketching on the floor. When the chalk was confiscated, he switched on to the margins of schoolbooks. He was so relentless that the school eventually called in a doctor to check if he was 'sane'. Spoiler: he was. And he carried that irrepressible energy all the way to the National Institute of Design, where he studied Film Design.

For a while, advertising held his attention. The alchemy of selling an idea in thirty seconds fascinated him, but over time, the corporate grind chipped away at his love for storytelling. So, he turned to art; not as a pastime, but as an escape hatch. “It became my cheat code out of the system and all its soul-sucking weight,” he says.

Udi Baba is a medium agnostic artist but his love for the old comes through nonetheless. "Even if I am working digitally, I treat it the same way I would traditional tools: messy, impulsive, and open to happy accidents. There’s a kind of magic in combining the tactile sensibilities of traditional art with the fluidity and freedom that digital art allows for," he shares. His approach is chaotic but intentional. He starts with an idea and lets it morph organically as it takes on a more bizarre and offbeat form.

While his work doesn’t follow a structured style, it does rely on his instincts. “I don’t care about being boxed into an ‘artistic style’. I’d rather be known for my artistic voice," he explains. That voice is unrelenting in its curiosity, and jumps from halftone-heavy, Bauhaus-tinged pieces to full-blown grindhouse chaos. His inspirations range from Satyajit Ray’s humanistic storytelling to the absurdity of Ramsay Brothers horror. And yet, a common thread runs through it all: take popular narratives and twist them with his own brand of mischief.'

His projects reflect this delicious rebellion. Take ‘Pop’Art, for example, where he playfully elevates his father, an unassuming railway employee, into a pop culture icon. The word 'Pop' becomes a double entendre; both a nod to pop culture and a tribute to his own father. The series juxtaposes an ordinary man that exists outside of the digital age with the "overwhelming spectacle of pop culture."

Then there’s भयkhana (Bhaykhana), which reimagines Bollywood’s forgotten ghouls as gallery-worthy exhibits. Instead of simply recreating old horror posters, Udi Baba builds a fictional museum — 'The Museum of Bollywood Ghouls and Creeps', where these monstrous characters are given a new lease of life as eerie yet elegant exhibits. The typography, composition, and aesthetic mimics an art gallery invite, subtly elevating the kitsch and camp of Indian horror into something almost reverential.

Even his tribute to Satyajit Ray, 'Children of Ray', takes an unconventional route. Instead of celebrating the director’s films as a whole, he isolates the children in Ray’s stories, portraying them as central figures rather than secondary characters. “These children aren’t just characters — they’re reflections of Ray himself. Curious, sensitive, quietly rebellious,” he explains.

There’s something eerie about the way pop culture operates in our hyper-online age. It's polished, predictable, and endlessly recycled. Udi Baba's work offers a sharp and very necessary contrast; slicing through the gloss with a playful sense of disruption. It refuses to conform and invokes a necceassary chaos. He unsettles the expected not just through mere shock value, but by invoking a deeper mystique.

Follow Udi Baba here.

If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:

Shubhankar Rai's Vivid Short-Form Comics Make Existential Dread Surprisingly Palatable

Sahil From Nature's Creative Practice Is A Journey Through Surrealism And Spirituality

Indian Creative Anand's Cat & Alien Sculptures Reject The Hyper-Seriousness Of Modern Art