Shirin Vajifdar, who died on September 29, 2017, exhibited an unusual love for classical dancing from childhood and defied taboos to train in multiple classical dance forms.

Article by Sunil Kothari | The Wire

Shirin Vajifdar. Credit: Mulk Raj Anand: Shaping the Indian Modern (MARG)

In the early 1930s, it was inconceivable that a young girl from the Parsi community would take up classical dancing. But that is what exactly Shirin Vajifdar did. The doyen of Jaipur Gharana Sunderprasadji had moved to Mumbai (then Bombay) and started teaching Kathak to the Poovaiah sisters from Coorg. Shirin studied under the great maestro and went for further dance training to Madame Menaka’s Nrityalayam dance institution in Khandala, near Bombay.

Her contemporaries at Nrityalayam were Damayanti Joshi, Shevanti Bhonsale and Vimla. Shevanti later joined Ram Gopal’s troupe. During those years, a young guru of Manipuri from Calcutta, Bipinsingh had joined Nrityalayam to teach Manipuri. There was another Kathakali teacher and dancer, Krishnan Kutty, who taught Kathakali. Shirin studied all the three forms and with excellent memory, mastered the complicated bols and mnemonics of Manipuri.

Madame Menaka had started choreographing dance-dramas with the help of Kathak gurus Gauri Shankar, Ramnarayan and Pandit Ramdutta Mishra. She included young dancers in those dance-dramas such as Menaka Lasyam and Kalidasa’s Malavikagnimitram. Madame Menaka used Manipuri and Kathakali dance forms for a court dance sequence in celebration of King Agnimitra ‘s victory over enemies. Shirin was thus exposed to early attempts of creating group works.

Shirin then taught dance to her two sisters Khurshid and Roshan and they started performing together as the Vajifdar sisters. They were often threatened by conservative Parsis who would disrupt their shows by throwing eggs and stones, but Shirin was not afraid and carried on receiving support from elite sections of the Parsi community.

Shirin and her sisters were contemporaries of Poovaiah sisters, Sitara Devi, Tara Choudhary, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Shanta Rao, Vyjayntimala, Ritha Devi and became quite well known. They were often invited to give performances for charitable causes. They gave private tuitions to young girls from their community when dance became acceptable as an art form. As a teacher, Shirin was a strict disciplinarian, recall her students. One of her students was a bright dancer, Sunita Golwala, who later moved to London. Another student was Jeroo Mulla.

Shirin was married to Mulk Raj Anand, the celebrated author, founder and editor of the quarterly magazine Marg. Khurshid married the renowned painter Shiavax Chavda and Roshan married Hiranmay Ghosh, a chiropractor, and later settled in Kodaikanal. She won a government of India scholarship and went on to study Bharatnatyam under Chokkalingam Pillai in Chennai. She won fame as a briliant Bharatnatyam dancer.

In 1954, Shirin was invited by the film director Kishore Sahu to choreograph a dance sequence for his film Mayurpankha, for which Khurshid and Roshan danced for a duet sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle. The music was composed by Shankar Jaikishan. The film won a Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

The three Vajifdar sisters – Khurshid (left), Shirin (middle) and Roshan (right) in a Marwadi Rajasthani folk dance. Courtesy: Jyoti Chavda

In 1955, a big delegation of dancers and musicians was sent to China, which included Shirin and Guru Krishnan Kutty, along with Indrani Rahman. Shirin performed the mythological story of Mohini and Bhasmasura with Kutty.

In those years, there was no video shooting of performances. Therefore, there are no recordings of Shirin and her sisters dancing. Films Division had made one small documentary of her performing a Bharatnatyam dance, which is now lost.

I came to know Shirin around the year 1957. By that time, she had retired from performing. I had met Mulk Raj Anand the same year. Mulk often invited artists and writers at his 25, Cuffe Parade residence. I used to attend the soirees – meeting painters and writers. Mulk encouraged me to write on dance and suggested that I should attend the All India Dance Seminar at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi in April 1958. There, he introduced me to Roshan Vaijfdar, who was to present a paper on Nayikas and Gita Govinda. Shirin had joined us and we met Devika Rani and the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, whose muse was Roshan. He had done a few portraits of Roshan. Shirin and Mulk were very close to Devika Rani and Roerich.

I often visited Mulk’s residence in Mumbai when I was assigned to write the book on Bharatnatyam for Marg. Shirin was a gentle person and always kept a low profile. She was writing her autobiography and would sometimes read out few paragraphs which were quite moving in terms of how the sisters suffered humiliation when they took to dancing. She would sometimes tell interesting stories about Ram Gopal who used to stay at Oceana building on Marine Drive. She recalled that he was a charismatic and handsome dancer with a gift of the gab. He would invite the sisters to learn Bharatnatyam from him.

Shirin was invited by Shamlal to write reviews of dance for the Times of India. By then, I was writing reviews for the Evening News of India. Shirin and I used to attend many dance performances together. She had a vast range of references, having seen many dancers and dance forms. She kept all her reviews carefully in a scrap book and advised me to keep a copy of my reviews. She was very meticulous. Her approach was to encourage young dancers and she wrote encouragingly about Yamini Krishnamurty, Sonal Mansingh (nee Pakvasa), Kanak Rele, (nee Divecha), Protima Bedi, Sanjukta Panigrahi, Kum Kum Mohanty, Shobha Naidu and other dancers from the south. Her approach was one of constructive criticism. Dancers still remember her kindness and have collected reviews written by her.

We used to visit Lonavala on weekends, where Mulk had a bungalow. I spent many weekends with them. Shirin would often speak of dancers like Indrani Rahman, who was her favourite and a close friend. She was fond of the Jhaveri sisters and traditional gurus Mahalimgam Pillai, Govind Raj Pillai and Kalyasndaram Pillai. By temperament, she was a happy dancer having performed and seen best of the times. As a partner of Mulk, she was a gracious hostess and never asserted her status as his wife or as a dancer.

After I left Mumbai for Kolkata to teach dance at Rabindra Bharati University and later at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, I used to call upon her. After Mulk’s passing away, she had moved to a small apartment where her niece Jyoti looked after her. She had been keeping well. I used to prod her to complete her autobiography as I knew it would be a valuable document of dance history and of her pioneering work. Shirin will be missed by her large group of admirers and dancers.

Sunil Kothari is a dance historian, author and critic, and fellow, Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Sooni Taraporevala’s Mumbai series gives a fascinating glimpse into the character of an ever-changing city and its people

There’s something captivating about an old man in a vest, sitting on a charpai (cot) on a summer afternoon, beneath the wing of a large aircraft. He appears disgruntled, glaring at the viewer with his head slightly tilted. This image was made by Sooni Taraporevala in Bombay in 1982. It now inhabits her series, Home In The City: Bombay 1977-Mumbai 2017, an important collection of black and white photographs that spans four decades, revealing the charm of an ever-evolving city and its people.

Article by Radhika Iyengar | Live Mint

The image serves as a memory of a time that no longer exists. Nowhere in the world today will you find a person sitting so casually on the airport tarmac inches away from an aircraft. But what really catches your attention is the nature of the image: It is so intimate that it gives you the sense of unwittingly intruding into the man’s personal space. And that’s the hallmark of Taraporevala’s style—her ability to capture people in their most uninhibited raw moments.

Taraporevala began documenting the city 40 years ago, when she had taken a semester off from her studies at Harvard University, where she was majoring in literature, to return to her home in Mumbai. The images were made using a Nikkormat, a camera she had bought in Boston in 1977 with the help of her roommate Cathy Dement, who had lent her $220 (around Rs14,430 now) to buy her very first professional camera (the first point-and-shoot camera Taraporevala owned was an Instamatic, gifted by her aunt and uncle).

Carrying the Nikkormat around her neck, Taraporevala walked the streets of Mumbai, photographing anything and everything that caught her eye. Little did she know back then that she was building a visual memoir of the city. “One of the earliest successful pictures that I took at that time was of the Gateway of India, framed by the window of the Taj Mahal hotel,” recalls Taraporevala. “It was around the same time that I took the photograph of the camel on Marine Drive. I never had an agenda to document Bombay,” she confesses. “It all happened quite organically.” Both these photographs form part of the series that will be on view at the Chemould Prescott Road gallery this week, an exhibition that has been curated by author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, with support from Dattaraj and Dipti Salgaocar (founders of Sunaparanta-Goa Center for the Arts, an arts education initiative).

Taraporevala has the eye of an archivist. In 2013, her photographs documenting the Parsi community in India found life in her series, Parsis: The Zoroastrians Of India (chronicled from 1980-2004), which gave an insider’s view into the lives of the otherwise closed community. The exhibition of this series announced Taraporevala (who was known to the general audience as a screenwriter and a film-maker) as a photographer to reckon with.

Sifting through Home In The City, you will see a city age and transform. There is a certain sense of lyricism—an unhurried fluidity—that is present in the images. They are visceral and alive. But it’s the character of the people who populate the images that is really the charm of the series. Often, they depict an individual within a crowd, focusing on their relation to the surroundings. The image of a young boy looking out of a window (Chi Lung Sean Ma, Air Show) is one of Taraporevala’s more memorable ones. “It’s a photograph of an air show in Bombay in 2005. That day, almost all of Marine Drive was packed with people, with not an inch between them. If you look at the photograph, the boy in the window is isolated, while below him there are thousands and thousands of people,” she says.

Taraporevala is a visual diarist. Consider her series on the Parsis, which took almost a quarter of a century to develop, or Home In The City, which took 40 years. One would think that she’s someone who, arguably, holds on to her photographs for decades so as to quietly ruminate over them and build them piece by piece, before sharing them with the world. But Taraporevala modestly puts such assumptions to rest. “It’s not an unwillingness to share, believe me,” she says laughing. “I would have happily done a show (on Bombay) five or 10 years ago.”

The idea of holding an exhibition specifically on Mumbai happened by chance. For years the photographs remained unseen, relegated to the confines of a file cabinet. They were taken out at the behest of Photoink’s founder-director Devika-Daulet Singh. “My friend Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi and I had initially thought of doing a show on my iPhone (colour) work. Then he invited Devika on board, and when she was looking at my photographs, she said, ‘Why don’t we do something with your Bombay work? Look at your archives.’ And that’s how it all happened.”

The Mumbai images that were shot on film were specifically culled and scanned for the show. Not all of them, particularly the older ones, were in mint condition though. “I had a leak in my roof once, and some negatives were ruined then because of water damage. Thanks to digital scanning though, the ones that could be saved were saved really well, and I could preserve them.” This particular exhibition features 102 photographs, of which 80 are made on film. The rest belong to the period after 2004 and have been shot using digital cameras (she currently uses a Leica M10 and a Canon 6D), when Taraporevala turned to digital photography for good.

Shanghvi has got the images bound in a book—with an introduction by authors Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie and himself. It will be launched on the opening day.

Home In The City displays a certain kind of photographic intimacy. In a time when images are made for immediate broadcast and “likes”, this particular series allows you to revisit a time that was much simpler, slower and far more cherished.

Home In The City, Bombay 1977-Mumbai 2017 will show from 14-31 October, 11am-7pm, at Chemould Prescott Road Gallery, Fort, Mumbai. Click here for details.

She is best known for writing films such as Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, and Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay. She also directed the National Award-winning film Little Zizou.

Since 1977 Taraporevala has photographed India’s western city of Mumbai in which she grew up.

Published on BBC

These photographs celebrate the odd and the everyday and provide a significant contribution to the social history of one of India’s most diverse cities.

Her images, cutting across class and community lines, are an insider’s affectionate view. Her photographs explore one of the most populous cities in the world.

The works on display at an upcoming exhibition in Mumbai are personal documents of the city’s eccentrics, its children, its elderly within the landscape: a gentle mirror to the culture and politics of Bombay with the secret sideways glance of a casual observer.

Sooni Taraporevala’s photo exhibition Home in the City opens on 13 October at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road

A camel ride on Mumbai’s Marine Drive in 1977

Actors Lilliput (left) and Stellan Skarsgard on the set of a film in 1987

A synagogue, 2012

Spectators at an air show, Marine Drive, 2005

Image caption A security guard sits on a rope bed at Juhu Airport in 1982

A film shooting on location, 1987

Actors Sarfu and Irrfan Khan (right) blindfolded during a workshop on the film, Salaam Bombay, 1987

One of India’s most famous artists, MF Husain at home, Mumbai 2005. He died in June 2011

A girl looks at the ocean while standing on a beach, Mumbai, 2015

Men laughing while celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi, a Hindu festival, 2016

Naseeruddin Shah (left) and Stellan Skarsgard on the set of a film, 1987

A poster of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the Congress party’s centenary celebrations, 1985

The navy band performs ahead of the premiere of the movie Janbaaz at Metro Cinema, 1986

Actor Raj Kapoor at the premiere of Janbaaz while a fan gazes at him, 1986

A Retrospective of paintings & sketches of the Master

WHAT: ‘The Dancing Line – revisiting Shiavax Chavda’, a Retrospective of paintings & sketches of the master.

WHEN: Tuesday October 24^th to Monday October 30^th, 2017

WHERE: Jehangir Art Gallery, Kalaghoda, Mumbai

TIMINGS: 11am to 7pm

‘The Dancing Line – revisiting Shiavax Chavda’

For the first time in 22 years, the family of late artist Shiavax Chavda will be holding a dedicated retrospective of his works at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, from October 24-30, 2017. ‘The Dancing Line – revisiting Shiavax Chavda’, is an opportunity to view a treasure trove of paintings and sketches by the master.

This retrospective aims to showcase the versatility of the artist, who over four decades experimented in various artistic styles and created a body of work that is still revered and appreciated by art lovers and students alike.  Art lovers will also get a rare opportunity to purchase one of these masterpieces.

The exhibition comprises a variety of the artist’s works including his human studies, tempera work, fisherfolk, birds, serpents & animal series, Balinese masks, Indian musicians, classical Indian dancers, semi abstract & abstract art.

Considered one of the pioneers of Indian modern art, Chavda was felicitated as fellow of the Lalit Kala Academi in 1986 and awarded Artist of the year by Maharashtra State government in 1990. The artist who was part of the Bombay Progressive Artists movement, held his first show at the Taj Mahal hotel Prince’s Room in 1945. He gave top priority to drawing and was considered a master draughtsman.

Over his four decade long career, he experimented with paper, canvas, silk, plywood, Chinese ink, crayon, water colour, tempera and oils. Chavda’s beautiful portrayals of dance in its various forms caught the art world’s attention & have made up a large portion of his body of work. He often created sketches of dancers from the Russian Imperial ballet, the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet, including renowned ballerinas such as Margot Fonteyn and Anna Pavlova. He was also fascinated by animals which he felt were “naked and offer a real test to one’s skills of draughtsmanship.”

Chavda’s paintings are currently exhibited in several esteemed museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum London, Budapest Museum, The National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Baroda museum, corporate houses like Tatas and Godrej & Boyce, institutions like Northcote nursing home and other private and public collections in India and abroad. He has held 42 one man shows in Mumbai, as well as a few in Ahmedabad, Djakarta, Singapore, London, Paris, Zurich and New York.

The artist passed away on August 18, 1990 at the age of 76. Kekoo Gandhy, a friend and owner of Chemould gallery said in an interview, “I will always like to remember him through his sketch books and his Gouache (tempera) technique (where you mix paint with egg yolk). His draughtsmanship was incomparable. But more than the artist perhaps it was Shiavax the man who had my greatest admiration and respect. He was very warm, dignified and very proper, a far cry from the archetypal shabby artist…”

About the Artist – Shiavax Chavda

Born on June 18, 1914 to a Parsi family in Navsari, Gujarat, Shiavax Chavda began his artistic training at the JJ School of Art. One of the few Indian artists to study abroad, he continued his training at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. It was here that he learnt from great artists who greatly impacted his style, Professor Randolph Schwabe, R G Eves and Vladimir Polunin, (a pupil of the great Russian stage designer Leon Bakst, working for Sir Thomas Beecham & the Diaghilev Ballet). Being awarded the Sir William Orpen bursary, he continued to hone his skills at the St Martin School of Art London and the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris, before returning home to India.

Upon his return, Chavda travelled extensively from the hills of Assam and the Himalayas, to the villages of Gujarat and South India, recording all he saw in his sketch books. Chavda, later travelled to Indonesia and Malaya which led to his numerous pen and ink sketches of Balinese dancers, masks and temple sculptures. His travels through India & other parts of the world have greatly influenced his style of art & this is visible in his work. But it was his portrayals of dance in its various forms that caught the art world’s attention. Married to Khurshid Vajifdar, part of the Vajifdar sisters trio who were experts in Indian classical dance, it’s no wonder that dance dominated his canvases. His deft strokes captured dancers of the Russian Imperial ballet, the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet, including renowned ballerinas such as Margot Fonteyn and Anna Pavlova.

He was also fascinated by animals which he felt were “naked and offer a real test to one’s skills of draughtsmanship.” He worked on a series of paintings on cocks, as well as captured animals in the local circus and the aquarium.

The artist who was part of the Bombay Progressive Artists movement, held his first show at the Taj Mahal hotel Prince’s Room in 1945. He gave top priority to drawing and was considered a master draughtsman. In an interview in the Indian Drawing Today 1987, the artist said, “In the summer of 1938, when war seemed imminent, I could not leave London. So I stayed on and systematically visited the British Museum’s Print Room and spent more than two months in making an intense study of World’s best original drawings of Italian, Dutch, French, Indian, Mughal and Chinese masters spending six to seven hours a day in a quiet atmosphere…Drawing according to me is a linear depiction of an idea or experience in shorthand. ‘Those who cannot draw have an excuse to paint,’ a statement made by Paul Gauguin was indeed profound.”

Over his four decade long career, he experimented with paper, canvas, silk, plywood, Chinese ink, crayon, water colour, tempera and oils and often used his Gouache (tempera) technique, where paint is mixed with egg yolk.

He worked on a number of murals during his long career for the Parliament House, New Delhi, Air India building Mumbai, Air India Washington DC, Gandhi Darshan New Delhi and the Reliance Textile Industries Ltd Mumbai. But perhaps his most prominent one is the three murals in tantric style at Tata Theatre, NCPA, commissioned by Jamshed Bhabha, executive trustee.

Chavda’s paintings have found a home in several museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum London, Budapest Museum, The National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Baroda museum, corporate houses like Tatas and Godrej Boyce & Co, institutions like Northcote nursing home and other private and public collections in India and abroad. He has held 42 one man shows in Mumbai, as well as a few in Ahmedabad, Djakarta, Singapore, London, Paris, Zurich and New York.

The artist passed away on August 18, 1990 at the age of 76. Kekoo Gandhy, a friend and owner of Chemould gallery said in an interview to Mid-Day newspaper, “I will always like to remember him through his sketch books, and his Gouache (tempera) technique (where you mix paint with egg yolk). His draughtsmanship was incomparable. But more than the artist perhaps it was Shiavax the man who had my greatest admiration and respect. He was very warm, dignified and very proper, a far cry from the archetypal shabby artist…”

What Notable Art Critics & Art Writers had to say about the Master SHIAVAX CHAVDA

W.G Archer, Keeper of the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert museum in London, where his paintings are on display, said, “Perhaps the greatest problem facing modern Indian artists is the harmonious reconciliation of two distinct influences, the traditions of European painting culminating in Picasso, and those of Indian painting with emphasis on poetry and line. Few artists have been able to reconcile the two with any convincing results but among those who have succeeded must be numbered Shiavax Chavda.”

Art writer Arkay wrote in the Afternoon newspaper, “All through his art journey, Chavda tried to put on canvas the meaning, the essence, the beauty and wonder of the classical dances of India particularly Bharatnatyam. He was evidently fascinated by the dance. He brought out the grace and the beauty of the dancer. He produced hundreds of sketches and paintings on this theme. The vibrations, the swirls, the rhythm, the balance, the creative energy of the dance were expressed in his paintings. For him it was an everlasting search, it walks like chasing a rainbow in child-like wonder, trying to catch it, hold it in one’s memory.”

Noted art writer A.S Raman wrote in the Sunday Standard Magazine, “Few artists in India have a mastery over draughtsmanship matching his. Chavda’s line is fluent, forthright and flawless. He can capture a given moment with uncanny accuracy and spontaneity. The studied casualness of his line is deceptive. For there is a good deal of concentration and preparation packed into it.”

Art critic H Goetz had written in the Lalit Kala, “The line is the life and soul of Chavda’s art. He is best where he can fully employ it without further considerations, above all, in sketches drawn in a few seconds, and in figures in excited movement. Chavda is the draughtsman of all dancers, whether Indian, Javanese or Balinese, Russian or English. He is likewise the draughtsman of animals, of the elastic suppleness of their slim or plump, but always musculous bodies. The verve of the medieval temple sculptures he has on his fingertips and thus is a master of their interpretation.”

Art critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni had noted in the New India digest, “The Murals had to be in Tantric style. Chavda read through all the useful books on that cult. In spite of his advancing years, he did not hesitate to get up on a scaffolding and do the painting himself…Few of us realise what an achievement it is for the now departed painter. In a way, these awe-inspiring murals with their authentic Tantric format are one of the best memorials for Chavda.”

Born into a wealthy Parsi family on 22 April 1906 in Mumbai, Ratti Petit, more commonly known as Li Gotami, was a talented painter, photographer and writer. Her family owned the Bomanjee Dinshaw Petit Parsee General Hospital located in Cumbala Hill, Mumbai. She attended a school in Harrow on the Hill (an area northwest of London) in England and later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1924.

Article Published on Tsemrinpoche.com

Li Gotami was a passionate traveller and journeyed all over Europe before returning to India in the 1930s. She was regarded as someone very unusual during her time and was one of the very few women from traditional Indian society who took the extraordinary step of breaking away from the norms of how Indian women, or women in general, should live their lives. According to her niece, Dr. Sylla Malvi, Li Gotami “was her own person.” She also spoke of Li Gotami’s resolve, “Unlike my obedient mother, my aunt was head-strong, and nobody could tell her what to do.

“Also, Li Gotami was part of a larger cultural movement of seekers discovering Eastern spirituality, long before the Beatles in the 1950s and the hippies in the 1960s.”

Later in India, she worked with artist Manishi Dey who introduced her to the Bengal School of Art, an influential art movement and a style of Indian painting that originated in Bengal, Shantiniketan and Kolkata. This genre would eventually have a significant influence on her life and works.

In the 1930s, Li Gotami married art collector Karl Khandalavala but their marriage was brief. In 1934, she travelled to Rabindranath Tagore’s ashram in Shantiniketan to study under the artist Nandalal Bose and to learn the art of Manipuri dance. According to Dr Malvi,

“Her parents were not happy about her going away. In fact, my grandfather even sent her brother [Maneckji Petit] to check on her.”

Dr Malvi also fondly recollected a time when all the children in the neighbourhood in Juhu were playing.

“She was like a magician. And she told us to bring her any object — twigs, stones, paper — and she would make something out of it. To challenge her, I took a raw coconut that had fallen down. I knew she wouldn’t be able to make anything out of it. But she turned it around, drew two eyes and made a little mouse. She was like that; so imaginative. She could see things in the ordinary.”

Li Gotami spent a total of 12 years at Shantiniketan, where she excelled in her studies and received a number of diplomas from the various Arts and Music Schools there. Later she met Abanindranath Tagore, the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, a significant painter of that time who also taught at the arts school. Abanindranath Tagore was very impressed by Li Gotami’s work and would later become her mentor. According to Malvi,

“She absolutely worshipped Abanindranath Tagore. It was he who told her that she would excel in religious and children’s paintings.”

During her time at Shantiniketan, Li Gotami also met Lama Anagarika Govinda for the first time. The encounter took place when she was making her way to the hostel where Lama Govinda was staying at the time. The encounter is described as follows:

“A door opened and out strolled this handsome, smiling foreigner dressed in the burgundy robes of a monk. She recalled asking herself who this “bright merry person” might be, and in retrospect (at least on her part) remembered the incident as very romantic.”

She proceeded to study under Lama Govinda, a Bolivian-German Professor of Vishwa Bharati University and a prominent teacher to notable students such as Indira Nehru, who would later become the first female Prime Minister of India. Under his guidance, Li Gotami’s interest in Buddhism grew very quickly.

He also brought her to meet his teacher, Domo Geshe Rinpoche. Lama Govinda’s book, “The Way of the White Clouds”, records how Domo Geshe Rinpoche had predicted that Li Gotami would become Lama Govinda’s wife. However, Domo Geshe Rinpoche had kept that information secret until the day of their marriage.

Li Gotami married Lama Govinda in four separate ceremonies in 1947. Lama Govinda performed one of the ceremonies himself, in the role of a lama. Two other ceremonies were held in Darjeeling and Mumbai, and the fourth was held in Tse-Choling Monastery in the Chumbi Valley, presided over Tibet by Ajorepa Rinpoche.

Prior to meeting Ajorepa Rinpoche, Lama Govinda had been working very hard to obtain permits to enter Tsaparang, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Guge in the Garuda Valley, and the newly married couple were full of anticipation at the prospect of visiting the beautiful city. When they arrived at Tse-Choling Monastery, then under the leadership of Ajorepa Rinpoche, the incarnation of the 8^th century Mahasiddha Dombi-Heruka, Ajorepa Rinpoche inducted both Lama Govinda and Li Gotami into the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

After spending some time in Tse-Choling Monastery, they continued their journey to the city of Gyantse. During their four-month stay in Gyantse, they explored various monasteries and retreat places, attended festivals and religious ceremonies, and Li Gotami took many pictures of everything that grabbed her fancy. Finally, they received the necessary permits in January 1948 and Li Gotami and Lama Govinda returned to India to prepare for their expedition to Tsaparang.

From Kasar Devi, the couple embarked on a number of expeditions to central and western Tibet between 1947 and 1949. The two-year expedition was fully sponsored by the “Illustrated Weekly of India” in exchange for a written account of the trip. The pictures taken during this particular expedition would later be featured in their books, “The Way of the White Clouds”, “Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism” and “Tibet in Pictures”.

During the expedition, Li Gotami and Lama Govinda often had to endure harsh and dangerous living conditions in the arid landscape. They also had to put up with extreme cold weather, and their diet mostly consisted of porridge and chapatis, cooked slowly over a brushwood and yak dung fire. Temperatures were so low that they literally had to drink their tea immediately after boiling, otherwise it would freeze inside their cups! Li Gotami recalled,

“A storm then broke. The rain nearly froze us while the wind howled like hungry wolves around us. Oh, those winds! They are Tibet’s worst enemy, and if I were ever asked to picture them, I would draw a hundred thousand ice-bound daggers with the head of a howling wolf for every hilt.”

As part of the expedition, Li Gotami and Lama Govinda also visited the beautiful Mount Kailash and spent a few days circumambulating the sacred mountain.

When they finally arrived in Tsaparang, Li Gotami and Lama Govinda lived in a hut in front of a cave, where a shepherd named Wangdu lived with his family. Wangdu would bring them the basic necessities – brushwood, water and milk – as there were no other families living in the area.

The couple always began their day with prayers and pujas, and then would work from morning to evening, tracing, sketching and photographing the remains of frescoes, statues, temples and other surviving artworks in the area.

A wealthy Tibetan woman in Lhasa, Gyantse. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

Their stay in Tsaparang was marked by many challenges, including difficulties caused by the local Tibetans and authorities who were suspicious of their work. Although conditions were difficult, they did not give up and remained buoyant in the face of these obstacles.

After completing their work, the couple planned to return to India but found that the Himalayan passes were closed for three months until spring time. While waiting for the passes to reopen, they lived in a rest-house run by a kind Nyingma Lama named Namgyal. Around this period, they also met the Nyingma Abbot of Phiyang Monastery, an extremely learned master who taught them the method of yoga practices and Tantric sadhana.

When the passes were finally accessible, Li Gotami and Lama Govinda returned to northern India where they stayed in a house rented from the famed writer Walter Evans-Wentz at Kasar Devi. Otherwise known as “Crank’s Ridge”, Kasar Devi was a bohemian home to various artists, writers and spiritual seekers such as John Blofeld, Earl Brewster, Alfred Sorensen and many others. Li Gotami busied herself with the practical matters of running the household and sketching, while Lama Govinda occupied himself by writing.

Dr Malvi, whose home is dotted with several of Li Gotami’s paintings, says, “My aunt travelled extensively with him, but never really earned a reputation as an artist.”

In 1955, Li Gotami and Lama Govinda moved to a 40-acre estate in Almora, located in north-west India. They maintained an ashram there and studied painting, Buddhist philosophy and meditation. Although their living conditions were ‘difficult’ – the area was completely barren and they had no access to running water and electricity – they enjoyed themselves very much as it was exactly the kind of life they were looking for – one that was simple, peaceful and quiet.

Li Gotami’s niece Roshan Cooper says, “It was absolutely in the wilderness. There was no electricity, no running water. And our mother would take us two youngsters to spend time with them. She would always say her happiest years were in Almora. Her happiness was in the soul.”

Dr Malvi adds, “She would also play the piano wonderfully and we would all sing.”

Towards the end of her life, Li Gotami and Lama Govinda were invited to live in the United States. Initially, they lived in California and later settled down in the San Francisco Bay Area due to health issues they were both facing at that time. She had Parkinson’s disease while Lama Govinda had suffered from several strokes.

A Zen centre that belonged to Alan Watts and Suzuki Roshi provided them with comfortable lodging in Mill Valley, California. In return for their assistance and care, Lama Govinda gave lectures in the centre. They later became permanent residents of the United States and were eligible for government health benefits.

Lama Govinda suffered a sudden heart attack and passed away peacefully on 14 January 1985 while having a conversation with Li Gotami. His ashes were interred in the Nirvana Stupa in Samten Choeling Monastery in Darjeeling, India. A few months after her husband’s death, Li Gotami returned to India and lived with her family. She passed away on 18 August 1988 in Pune, Maharashtra.

Numerous pieces of Li Gotami’s art and fresco tracings from Tibet are still kept in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, which hosted an exhibition showcasing her work on 2 February 2008 titled “Tibet through the eyes of Li Gotami”. Her books including “Tibet in Pictures” and “Tibetan Fantasies: Paintings, Poems, and Music” have become some of the most sought-after today and her life-long contribution to the arts has left a strong imprint in the modern world. Her incredible life and works will not be forgotten any time soon.

“Anta had just one wish,” says Cooper. “It was her dream to donate her photographs and collection to the museum, for generations to view Tibet that once was.”

Li Gotami, Lama Govinda and Nyanaponika Thera.

Another painting done by Li Gotami

A picture of Li Gotami in her younger days. She was a beautiful, spiritual lady.

A picture of Lama Govinda taken by Li Gotami

An old beggar in Gyantse. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

Yamantaka statue photographed in 1949 by Li Gotami

Avalokiteshvara in the White Chapel photographed by Li Gotami in 1949 and after the Cultural Revolution

A traditional Tibetan Cham dance in Tse-Choling Monastery. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

Lama Govinda performing a puja on the shores of Lake Manasarovar. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

A bandit in Western Tibet. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

Dhyani-Buddha Vairocana in Tsang Province. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

Kumbum, a multi-storied aggregate of Buddhist chapels in Gyantse. Picture courtesy of Li Gotami.

Li Gotami and Lama Govinda’s spiritual relationship is an inspiration to the modern generation

Li Gotami, Lama Govinda and a Tibetan Lama

Li Gotami, Lama Govinda, Terry Delamare (back) and Sangharakshita in Kasar Devi Ashram.

Christmas Humphreys with Lama Anagarika Govinda and Li Gotami, outside The Buddhist Society, 1960.

Maharajji with Li Gotami and Lama Govinda

The famed writer Walter Evans-Wentz’s house at Kasar Devi, painted by Li Gotami.

Li Gotami, Lama Govinda, and Sangharakshita.

Li Gotami’s book titled Tibetan Fantasies: Paintings, Poems, and Music

Li Gotami’s book titled Tibet in Pictures

In Tardeo, Mumbai, Cozy Building stands as tall as it did back in 1921—the year it was built. One of four buildings in the lane that are agreeably “Parsi,” it hosts conversations over newspapers and tea on its balconies even today.

“I can still sit on my parents’ balcony and make the same frame I did in 1980 with my photo evenings at Cozy Building,” said Sooni Taraporevala of how, in many ways, the city is still what it used to be in the ’80s. And it is seldom that a city goes back to being what it was once was, except for perhaps in old photographs.

Article by Paroma Mukherjee | Hindustan Times

In Sooni Taraporevala’s exhibition, “Home in the City: Bombay 1977 to Mumbai 2017” at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, the images hail her as the city’s relentless documentarian. Curated by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, a rich landscape of photographs that is intrinsic to the city’s charm hang on the walls and rest in a book. Taraporevala began photographing the city in 1977 with her first camera, a Nikkormat, which was bought with money borrowed from her roommate at Harvard.

“After I repaid her, I took a leave of absence for a semester and returned home with my new camera and 50mm lens. The photos dated 1977 were taken at this time and I haven’t stopped since then. I think my eye is still the same, my style as well, as well as what interests me has remained the same. What has developed is my speed and technical skills,” said Taraporevala.

Taraporevala is known for the proximity she exhibits in her images, be it the subject or her own relationship with the place she chooses to portray. Her photographs of Mumbai are a rare document of the change it has seen, even in the most publicly frequented spaces.

Check out some of the photos from the exhibition here

In her book of photographs of the same name, Pico Iyer makes an astute observation, “The crowds, the public world, the shared dreams are all part of a sometimes devouring disorder that shows no signs of subsiding; but in the eyes and lives of individuals is a dignity, a resilience and a sweetness that nothing can erase.”

Be it the faceless, dismembered statues of Lord Marquis of Cornwallis (Governor General of India) and Queen Victoria or a blindfolded, young Irrfan Khan during a ‘Salaam Bombay!’ acting workshop in 1987, Taraporevala’s portraits reveal the layered, cultural and historical milieu of the city’s past and present.

The affectionate eye with which she chooses her moments is incredible and rare, also making her observation of the city somewhat apolitical. But then, that is also perhaps a larger reflection of the distance that the city’s cultural communities keep from the nation’s everyday affairs.

As Salman Rushdie writes in ‘Eyeblink Choices,’ of her work, “To photograph it over the metamorphic decades, while it transforms itself from one city to another, Bombay into Mumbai, is to make those instant decisions, both moral and artistic, every day.”

From unguarded moments on film sets to public events, Taraporevala’s eye is trained on the oddities of daily life — a trait that is rather particular to Mumbai and never really hidden from those who truly roam on its streets.

“In my experience it (Mumbai) has always been an extremely welcoming city for photographers,” said Taraporevala when asked if it was harder now to make photographs than before. But then, there is a telling photograph of the back of an old man walking on the pavement titled “After the festivities are over, Mumbai 2016” that hints at an odd distance, perhaps for the first time, between Taraporevala and her quiet, aged subject.

Change, after all, is inevitable, even in a photograph.

What: Home in the City, Bombay 1977 – Mumbai 2017, an exhibition of photographs by Sooni Taraporewala

When: 11am – 7pm, Monday to Saturday, till January 24

Where: Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40 Defence Colony

Call: 24622545

Nearest Metro Station: Lajpat Nagar

Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photojournalist, is best known for documenting the country’s transition from a British colony to a newly independent nation. The BBC chronicles her life and career through a rare collection of her work.

Published on BBC

Image caption Ms Vyarawalla with her constant companion, the speed graphic camera

Ms Vyarawalla was born on 9 December 1913 in the western Indian state of Gujarat. .

She spent much of her childhood on the move because her father was an actor in a travelling theatre group. But the family soon moved to Mumbai (then Bombay), where she attended the JJ School of Art.

She was in college when she met Manekshaw Vyarawalla, a freelance photographer, who she would later marry. It was he who introduced her to photography.

Image caption Ms Vyarawalla’s earliest photos were taken during her college days

She received her first assignment – to photograph a picnic – while she was still in college. It was published by a local newspaper, and soon she started to pick up more freelance assignments.

She began to draw more attention after her photographs of life in Mumbai were published in The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine.

Image caption Her earlier work included photographing people from all walks of life

The Vyarawallas moved to Delhi in 1942 after they were hired to work as photographers for the British Information Service.

Ms Vyarawalla, one of few female photojournalists working at the time in Delhi, was often seen cycling through the capital with her camera strapped to her back.

Image caption A fox hunt in Delhi in the 1940s

She took her most iconic images, however, after India became independent – from the departure of the British from India, to the funerals of Mahatma Gandhi and former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Image caption Lord Mountbatten travels from the viceroy’s home to the parliament on 15 August 1947

Image caption India celebrates its first Republic Day on 26 January 1950 in Delhi

Ms Vyarawalla also photographed most prominent independence leaders.

But she said in an interview that her biggest regret was that she missed photographing the meeting where Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. She was on her way to attend it when her husband called her back for some other work.

Image caption Mahatma Gandhi Photo by: left

Her work also includes candid, close-up photographs of celebrities and dignitaries who visited India in the years following independence, including China’s first prime minister Zhou Enlai, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, Queen Elizabeth II and US President John F Kennedy.

Image caption Queen Elizabeth at a fashion show in Delhi in 1961

Ms Vyarawalla photographed many famous people but Mr Nehru figures most prominently in her work as her “favourite subject”.

Image caption Mr Nehru lights a cigarette for the wife of a British diplomat

She said in an interview that when Mr Nehru died she “cried, hiding my face from other photographers”.

Image caption Mr Nehru with his sister Vijayalaxmi Pandit

Ms Vyarawalla clicked her last picture in 1970, retiring after a four-decade-long career. She left Delhi after her husband died in 1969 and moved to Gujarat.

She was awarded India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2011. She died on 16 January 2012 at the age of 92.

Photos: HV Archive/ The Alkazi Collection of Photography

Homai Vyarawalla’s photography is part of the permanent collection of The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts based in Delhi.

When Michael Rakowitz first visited London in 1984, his family treated him to a grand tour of the city’s cultural attractions. On the loftier end of their itinerary was the British Museum, where the future artist first encountered the Middle Eastern archaeological wonders that would one day inform so much of his encyclopedic practice. In a somewhat lower-brow excursion, they also invested in tickets to the London Dungeon—an institution combining the aesthetic restraint of a Wes Craven movie with the curatorial diligence of a Hard Rock Café merchandise stand. It clearly had a gruesome appeal.

Article by Digby Warde-Aldam | Artsy

“It was this institution devoted to misery,” recalls Rakowitz, who fixated on one exhibit in particular: a wax figure of Lord Nelson, showing the various body parts he had lost in battle. Later that day, the family passed through Trafalgar Square, where the same British admiral’s likeness towers over the city atop his eponymous column. Young Rakowitz’s priorities, it’s fair to say, were less than scholarly: “All I wanted to do was look at him through binoculars to see if the statue had the missing limbs,” he admits.

Three-and-a-half decades on, Rakowitz is back in Trafalgar Square with a rather different agenda. This morning, his sculpture The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist was unveiled on a vacant plinth in the square’s northwest corner, where it will remain until March 2020. It is the twelfth contemporary artwork to take up residence on the site, which, since 1999, has hosted one-off commissions from European and British art-world giants including Marc Quinn, Antony Gormley, and Hans Haacke.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2018. Photo by Caroline Teo. Courtesy of the artist.

The plinth is one of four such pedestals arranged symmetrically around Nelson’s Column, all of which were intended to support statues of British monarchs and military heroes. While the other three were filled, plans to top out the final pedestal with an equestrian sculpture of King William IV foundered due to a lack of money. For a century and a half, the plinth stood unoccupied, an unintentional monument to near-sighted budgeting.

In the late 1990s, however, the recently elected Labour government began ploughing money into public art projects with the dual aim of boosting tourism and making culture accessible to all. Located at the heart of the capital, the Fourth Plinth was a perfect flagship for the strategy. Mark Wallinger was selected for the inaugural commission, with efforts from Bill Woodrow and Rachel Whiteread following in 2000 and 2001. A hiatus followed, but since 2005, it has been a regular event, and a popular one too—no mean feat in a city famous for its pessimistic temperament.

The program has its critics—notoriously, the former London mayor Boris Johnson’s election manifesto proposed permanently filling the space with a statue of a wartime fighter pilot—but it has arguably become the U.K.’s most prestigious running public art project. That Rakowitz, an American of Iraqi heritage, has been chosen is significant: He is the first non-European artist to be selected by the commissioning body, which has previously seemed, if not parochial, certainly limited in its tastes. Fittingly, then, that Rakowitz’s sculpture is a complex and highly original proposition that looks far beyond Trafalgar Square’s traffic-clogged confines.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2018. Photo © James O. Jenkins. Courtesy of the artist.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2018. Photo © James O. Jenkins. Courtesy of the artist.

The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is a recreation of a statue of a lamassu, a mythical winged beast that, for nearly three millennia, stood at the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh, in present-day Iraq. In 2015, this astonishing artifact was very publicly dynamited by ISIS militants, its destruction recorded for posterity in a widely circulated online video.

“It was performance, in a sense,” Rakowitz says. “Traditionally, the burning of books has been a gesture intended to demolish the pride of a people—a form of symbolic mass execution.” ISIS’s attempts to destroy Iraq’s extraordinary heritage of statuary served much the same purpose, even if some of the many supposed artifacts the terrorists desecrated turned out to be modern reproductions. “Replicas or not, the impulse was pretty much the same: liquidate items, and turn that action into part of a war machine.”

Rakowitz has made no attempt to conceal the fact that his lamassu is not the genuine article—quite the opposite, in fact. While the original was heroically carved from Mesopotamian stone, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is a work constituted of rather humbler materials: namely, colorfully designed cans of date palm syrup, a commodity once vital to the Iraqi economy. Over 10,000 of these tins have gone into creating Rakowitz’s scale-model lamassu, creating a painterly rhythm of color and shape that ripples across the sculpture’s surface. There is a poignant resonance to them, too: According to recent figures cited by Reuters, Iraq once produced three quarters of the world’s dates—but after years of war, insurgency, and mismanagement, the country’s stake in global production has fallen to around 5 percent, with predictably dire results for its people.

Michael Rakowitz

Grouping (The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist), 2017

Rhona Hoffman Gallery

This isn’t the first time Rakowitz has employed these syrup tins in his work. His 2005 project Return saw him attempt to import cans labelled “Product of Iraq” into the U.S. via Syria and Lebanon, at once circumventing sanctions and shadowing the passage of refugees fleeing the post-2003 chaos that engulfed the country. Nor is this the only reference to his wider body of work in The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which is just one component of a much larger, decade-long project of the same name. In 2007, Rakowitz took it upon himself to create life-sized recreations of the thousands of objects that went missing from the Iraq Museum after 2003, using a variety of materials so as not to create replicas that might be mistaken for the real thing. “Artifacts can end up mirroring the story of a people,” he explains. “It was important not to make an exact copy: You can try to reconstruct the artifact, but you can never bring back the people.” Following the rise of ISIS and the desecration that followed, the project’s scope expanded even further. “I felt it was a continuation of a commitment. The unfortunate thing about the project is that it’s had to continue.”

Despite this broad and astonishingly ambitious context—and the pouring rain that greeted its unveiling—The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist works brilliantly as a site-specific sculpture in its own right. Trafalgar Square, memorably described by the novelist Will Self as “one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world,” is not an easy location for an artist to work with: Traffic, crowds, street performers, and a small army of historical statues conspire to crowd out any new work seeking to assert itself here. Many of the artists who have taken on the Fourth Plinth commission have failed to overcome these compromises, but Rakowitz has aced it.

For one thing, no photograph will prepare you for quite how huge the sculpture seems atop the plinth; far from being dwarfed by the square’s vast dimensions, it holds its own even when seen in opposition with the vertiginous shaft of Nelson’s Column. And rather than jarring with its uniformly gray surroundings, the sculpture’s colors—subtly varying tones of green, gold, and red—create an effect that is at once arresting and oddly solemn. This is pleasingly at odds with the jingoistic effigies of monarchs, empire builders, and kings with whom it shares space, yet even if it appears to be speaking a different language, it is still in dialogue with these other statues. Like them, the lamassu is the product of cultural myth-making—but it is also a reminder of how abruptly myths, and the people who identify with them, can be forgotten.

The celebrated dancer collaborates with rudra veena artiste Baha úd-din Dagar for his new work

The word ‘contemporary’ that is bandied about in the performing art world today has a committed champion in Astad Deboo. The original modernist on the Indian stage, he used his Kathak and Kathakali training to come up with his own mind and body language. The twirls of Kathak and mime of Kathakali are visible, but they are part of the many influences that make up his choreography. It’s a vocabulary that defines art as a liberating experience making Deboo’s works throb with a rare energy.

Article by Chitra Swaminathan | The Hindu

Taking forward this vision, the 70-year-old dancer will collaborate with rudra veena artiste Mohi Baha úd-din Dagar to establish a connect between contemporary dance form and Indian classical music.

This experimental presentation, an excerpt of a larger production to be premiered this year end, will be staged as part of Mudra Dance Festival at Tata Theatre in Mumbai today.

“Whether I am dancing or not, I am constantly in movement. Sometimes, it’s a physical journey and at times, an emotional trip. And I embark upon them to find new ways of expressing through nuanced dance imagery. I met Baha úd-din Dagar, three years ago, at the SPIC-MACAY convention. Kiran Seth, the founder, asked me to come up with something impromptu and I took Baha úd-din on board too. Since then I had been thinking of roping him in for a choreographic work. So here we are,” says an excited Deboo.

Joining the two artistes will be a young pakhawaj player, Pratap. Though the production will largely revolve round raga Bhimpalas, it will not be strictly driven by the technicalities of Hindustani music.

“It is more about the camaraderie between Baha úd-din and me. The rapport helps in more ways than one. Despite the diversity in the thought process, approach and genre, the singular purpose comes through clearly in the work,” says Deboo, who has always been fond of dhrupad.

“Like my dance, dhrupad is vigorous one moment and meditative the next. This made my collaboration earlier with the Gundecha Brothers exciting. Like the way they unravel the many layers of their music, slowly and steadily, I too invest a lot of thought into every move and gesture. I like the dance to grow on me and the audience at its own pace.”

His cross-genre productions have taken Deboo around the world. And they have often been driven by a social purpose too.

“Artistes are basically healers. We could rid the world of many ills, bring a smile on faces and soothe minds. It was as satisfying to work with the hearing impaired and the street children of Salaam Balak Trust as it has been with the other established artistes.”

The rhythm of Manipuri drums, notes of shakuhachi, Hindustani swaras, Rumi’s poetry…Deboo’s oeuvre has no boundary.

Our dear friend and brilliant legendary contemporary dancer Astad Deboo has been credited for blending his kathak and kathakali training and creating a unique dance form that has been appreciated globally. He is also known for collaborative explorations with other artistes. This year he teamed up with rudra veena artiste Mohi Baha ud-din Dagar to create a connection between contemporary dance and Indian classical music, and performed at the Mudra Dance Festival in April. The maestro has now added another feather to his cap.

Deboo has received a lifetime achievement award – Yagnaraman Living Legend — from the Chennai-based Sri Krishna Gana Sabha. Established in 1953, the organisation is highly regarded across the country. “I feel honoured that an Indian classical dance foundation has bestowed this honour to contemporary dance. This is the first time ever that an award Is being given in this category. I have been In this profession for 50 years, so it is a recognition of what I have done,” said Deboo.

We are happy to announce that our dear friend and legendary contemporary dancer Astad Deboo shall be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award today in Chennai.

If music be the sounds between silence, dance is the language of holding stillness. And, with someone like Astad Deboo, the passing of time necessarily turns into a meditative experience. This weekend, as a part of the Yagnaraman July Fest 2018, the veteran artiste — now aged 70 — will be conferred with a lifetime achievement award. He will also present a dance recital, bringing some of the magic from his five decades of performing across the world, onto the stage at the Krishna Gana Sabha, in Chennai.

Article by Jaideep Sen | Indian Express

The occasion is landmark for many reasons — although, the most crucial of them all is to do with a sense of acceptance for his art form. “It feels good, it feels like a triumph for contemporary dance,” says Deboo, over a telephone conversation. “The Krishna Gana Sabha serves as a sort of gatekeeper for classical dance — for them to consider giving me an award for my journey and work, is important.” The late R Yagnaraman, in whose name the festival and awards are instituted, was massive in stature for the support he extended to artistes, notes Deboo.

By honouring Deboo, the award makes note of his tireless work to establish the contemporary idiom of dance, and its discipline. The most remarkable thing yet is that Deboo is active as a touring performer, and he’s still experimenting and evolving his work.

On contemporary terms

The award also goes a long way to indicate change, points out Deboo, who received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1996, and the Padma Shri in 2007. “When I started off (in the 1970s), ‘contemporary’ was a word not to be used, it was a strict no-no,” he recalls. “Today, you say contemporary, and it’s ‘yes, yes, yes’.”

Expectedly, Deboo has seen his share of below-par work. “Today, youngsters only want instant gratification,” he rues. “Even in contemporary dance, there are a lot of them with absolutely no training!” he exclaims. However, there are many others who have trained in classical dance, and are now looking in a different direction of presenting themselves, he adds. “I believe, the Indian classical dance scene is undergoing change as well — be it in Odissi, or bharatanatyam — there is an increased sense of openness. Now you get to see ensemble works, which you never saw earlier.” Among emerging artistes to look out for in India, Deboo names Surjit Nongmeikapam, Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy, Hemabharati Palani, Virieno Christina Zakiesato and Mandeep Raikhy.

“I keep telling youngsters, a foundation is all-important. A writer reads, a painter studies and paints and paints…” he offers. “Nowadays, everybody is doing contemporary dance! But they need to have a grounding (in terms of training) to build upon.”

The art of slowing down time

For his own part, Deboo admits that his personal style has been constantly changing. “In the last few years, I’ve become an introvert, and more interested in very controlled, minimalistic movements.” It is phenomenal to note that Deboo, as yet, has the stamina to pull off a 60-minute show. “There has to be riyaz,” he asserts. “If I’m to stand on one leg and balance — without practice, that wouldn’t happen!” Notably, Deboo’s movement vocabulary — a methodical, deeply emotive act of slowing things down — has influenced artistes across other fields, from theatre to visual arts. While it has doubtlessly taken a lifetime to hone and achieve that level of control over his gestures and expressions, Deboo recounts a thought handed to him in his childhood. “I always say, what my father embedded in me as a philosophy: ‘The going is delayed, not denied’,” he says. “This helped me take disappointments in my stride, and I believe, sometimes dreams do come true, and sometimes, you just have to keep on going. It’s all about the passion. If some avenues are closed at some point, other avenues will eventually open up.”

Ultimately, though, it’s all about hard work, perseverance and self-belief, Deboo adds. All said, “You have to keep pushing yourself,” he declares. It helps to realise that his sentiment comes with the validation of a lifetime’s incomparable achievements.

Pic courtesy: Amit Kumar

Four decades ago, after a world-wide tour of the West and East that helped him expand his conceptual horizons, a young Astad Deboo returned to his native India—and went down south to train in Kathakali.

The artist was close to 30, an age conventionally considered ‘too late’ to be initiated into the rigours of Kerala’s traditional ballet form, which bears no small touch of the martial art kalaripayattu.

Deboo was already a self-ordained disciple of dance, though. In Kerala, he met another of his gurus and soon he was to make his Kathakali debut in the temple town of Guruvayur.

Article published on Outlook

Yesterday, on the first day of July 2018, the septuagenarian maestro rekindled his organic links with the Deccan. A Gujarat-born Parsi and a Mumbaikar now, though formed in his growing up years in Calcutta and Jamshedpur, Deboo flew back from a Europe tour to receive a prestigious title from a vintage cultural organisation in Chennai.

It was a meeting of opposites in a sense. That blur of mobile geography is the only constant in the dancer’s life. And Madras is as heritage-conscious as they come, mostly known for offering indifference, if not outright resistance, to experimentations in Indian performing arts. It’s thus only on an authentic aesthetic plane that they could meet.

A recognition, if any were required, of Deboo’s auto-governed idiom.

Deboo’s artistry has evolved over the decades, and not just by subtly blending elements from various forms of India and abroad. His dance has acquired distinctness with a stage script thoroughly structured and coloured with signature movements.

Age has mellowed his movements—the bodily charged style has largely given way to a slower conduct through space, even as the flame within has gained a stronger glow.

There are nuanced streaks of eclectic forms, from Kathak to Kathakali to Western, in each of his productions. His idiom is free enough for him to be able to experiment with his accompanists too. If he danced to the deep tones of the rudra veena with dhrupad master Ustad Bahauddin Dagar in Bombay in April, this summer saw him team with a Japanese contemporary composer in Palermo, Sicily. (Those stunning images of him against a towering colonnaded edifice is from Palermo.)

On Sunday, the Padma awardee was honoured with a ‘Living Legend’ award by the prestigious Sri Krishna Gana Sabha Trust in the Tamil Nadu capital. The evening saw Astad staging a work titled ‘Dance Expression’.

As a tribute, Outlook gives you this photo feature on the veteran — he makes for stunning shapes of frozen kinesis, with intimations of some cosmic motion.

She is survived by her husband Feroze and daughters Khushcheher and Mahzeebar. The funeral took place on Monday.

Article by Pooja Pillai | Indian Express

Renowned ballet teacher Tushna Dallas, who counted among her students many of India’s leading contemporary dancers, passed away in Mumbai on Monday. She was 76.

Dallas had been ill for the past few months. She is survived by her husband Feroze and daughters Khushcheher and Mahzeebar. The funeral took place on Monday and the Uthamna ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday at Dungarwadi.

As the founder of the School of Classical Ballet and Western Dance, which was a first-of-its-kind in the country, Dallas was widely respected as a pioneer in ballet and other forms of western dance in India. Her journey began with a visit to the Ice Capades in the USA as a four year old. “She decided that she wanted be an ice-skater. But when her mother pointed out that there is no ice in Mumbai, she switched to ballet,” said Khushcheher. She picked up the basics of the dance form when she went to a boarding school in Kodaikanal, where she received instructions from a nun who was trained in ballet. She then went on to do a teacher training course at the London College of Dance and Drama, where she qualified in nine forms of dance, including ballet, ballroom dance and Latin American dance. She graduated in 1962.

Dallas began teaching ballet in Mumbai, with a batch of four students, in 1966 and soon established her dance school. Khushcheher, who trained under her mother before going on to the Royal Academy of Dance, joined the school as a teacher in 1993. Dallas herself remained active and for the past seven years she had been teaching at the Shiamak Davar Dance School.

“Anyone who is anyone in dance today, including Terence Lewis, Shiamak Davar, Ashley Lobo, trained under her at some point. Many students who learned from her, eventually established their own schools. My mother used to say that she had planted some seeds, which sprouted and blossomed into these flowers,” says Khushcheher.

Ashdeen Lilaowala dives into his fabulous family archives and has come up some “Vintage Tales”

Childhood memories never fade away. In fact, the talented tend to preserve these precious recollections by either penning a short story or creating an artistic impression. It also means a lot to those who live, work and dream fashion. This is what Ashdeen Lilaowala, a textile designer based in Delhi, has done in his newest collection, “Vintage Tales”. “In the late 19th and early 20th century, a fad swept across the Parsi community. Well-heeled Parsi women would pose for portraits and photographs in a variety of idyllic settings wearing their newly acquired, precious Gara saris,” says Ashdeen, whose new collection is available at his new store in Defence Colony

Article by Madhur Tankha | The Hindu

He fell in love with the traditional Gara saris as a child growing up in the close-knit Parsi community. And each year he reinterprets this in his own special way on multiple outfits. “For our latest collection, Vintage Tales, we dived into the fabulous archives of these portraits and photographs that can still be seen in Parsi-run institutions, fire temples, libraries, schools, and hospitals, and re-created Gara embroideries that have scarcely been attempted in over a century. The result is a rare collection of traditional Garas in blacks, violets and reds, on rich silks.”

Excerpts:

On interpreting Parsi Gara

Since the inception of our label in 2012, we have been working with Parsi Gara. I was very clear that our saris would be a modern interpretation of embroidery heritage rather than slavish copies of vintage pieces. Over the years, we have done several collections with varied themes. In 2015, Our “Scent of the Orient” collection was inspired by the classic Chinese pottery. From the classic blue-and-white pottery to exotic shades of crimson and burgandy from the snuff bottles, each season, the idea is to explore the multi-faceted, rich heritage and culture of the Parsis.

This collection has many new elaborate jaals and saris, which we haven’t done in our previous collections. We have pushed ourselves to do very fine detailing and work. We have also done saris in which we have created a khakha or peking knot effect using an aari needle.

On how it is different from other embroideries

Parsi Gara embroidery has a distinct style and varies from other embroideries in the way the colours combine, the motif placement and the artistic rendering of birds and flowers. Garas are usually in dark, rich colours like black, purple, red and blue with embroidery in soft shades of cream, dove, blue and lavender. This distinct combination with the very detailed motifs of chrysanthemums, peonies, roses and lilies set Parsi Gara apart from other embroideries.

On his experience with Parsi garas right from seeing them in family heirlooms…

The Parsi community has always been fascinated by Gara saris and these are treasured family heirlooms. They are cherished and worn with great pride at weddings and navjote ceremonies. Growing up, I was charmed by these exquisite creations and would notice them carefully. I was always riveted by our family’s Gara sari. As a textile design student at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, I did my first paper on Gara saris tracing its history, the motifs and the colours. This sowed the seeds for future research and documentation with the UNESCO Parzor Project.

On the highlights of the collection

The collection focuses on dense embroideries featuring a variety of butterflies and mythical birds with fantastic plumage, as well as flowering trees, plants and vines. We have also revived rare geometric lattice patterned Garas, as well as the Kanda-Papeta (onion and potato) Gara, a favourite, featuring a dense border of butterflies and flowers and a field of embroidered polka dots.

WORLD renowned Pakistani artist, social crusader and philanthropist Jimmy Engineer continues to promote and project soft, positive, moderate and forward looking image of Pakistan and its peace-loving loving people before the comity of nations through displaying his art and delivering talks.

Article in Pakistan Observer

Jimmy Engineer during his yet another goodwill tour of foreign countries has now displayed his selected creative artwork at The Mall, Erin Mills Town Centre in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. On the opening day of week long exhibition of his paintings, Jimmy Engineer talked about his life, illustrating his thoughts and motivation behind his paintings and also answered questions from the audience including large number of members of Pakistani community as well as local artists and art lovers present.

The inaugural ceremony of the paintings exhibition, according to a message received here, was also addressed by Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Mindshare Workspace Mississauga Mr Robert Martellaci, President of Ontario Zorastrian Mr Neville Patrawala, President of Canadian Pakistan Business Council Mr Samir Dossal, Pakistan Consul General in Canada Mr Imran Siddiqui, Consul General of Turkey in Canada Erdeniz Sen, Members of Canadian Parliament Kaleed Rasheed and Iqra Khalid, Councilor Pat Saito, artist and radio producer and Ambassador for World Peace Ms AroojArooj, General Manager of Erin Mills Town Centre Mr Will Campbell besides organizer of the event Nelly Engineer.

By and large, they said that the visiting world renowned artist, a social crusader and a philanthropist from Pakistan Jimmy Engineer has dedicated his life for social causes, his paintings have been highly appreciated not only in Pakistan but also all over the world wherever he has presented his art work, through his art work he spreads the message of peace and harmony and promotes soft and positive image of Pakistan and its people, each of his paintings duly highlight the different aspects of the life of the people, their struggles and achievements, to which he is deeply attached and committed.

Earlier, Jimmy Engineer had also delivered a talk about his art, life and achievements at a function organized by the Pakistan Society within the compound of Pakistan High Commission in London on July 25, 2018. Over all these years, Jimmy Engineer has created more than 3000 paintings, 1000 calligraphies and 1500 drawings that are in museums and private collections in more than 60 countries throughout v the world. Many, however, have remained undocumented, as he has been giving countless of these away to charities in order to raise money for good causes.

As a social crusader, he has to his credit introducing the concept of fun, food and awareness programmes for mentally retarded, physically handicapped, deaf and dumb children by entertaining these children in posh hotels and restaurants in Karachi, Lahore and also in Sri Lanka and has held more than one hundred solo walks raising awareness of a myriad issues, mainly those relating to serious disadvantaged children, to widows and orphans as well as to the hardships and the endemic health problems they continue to endure.

At 71, Astad Deboo still walks with the leaping grace of a warrior

Is it sweet revenge to be acclaimed as a living legend of dance right here in the most conservative of dance bastions?” I ask Astad Deboo. He is in Chennai to receive the Yagnaraman Living Legend Award for 2018 at the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha July Festival.

In conversation with Geeta Doctor | The Hindu

Deboo is not pretending to be a living legend. It’s still morning. He is wearing pink and grey candy-striped shorts and a T-shirt and sitting cross-legged on a sofa. His hair is steel grey. It is corn-row plaited into corrugated bands that hug his scalp. I am instantly reminded of the Caterpillar smoking a hookah in Alice in Wonderland.

I have known him from his bad boy days when he electrified the Mumbai dance world of the late 70s with a performance at Prithvi Theatre. It was so raw it ripped the sensibilities of what had been perceived as dance.

The stage was dappled with blood. His blood. That he allowed to drip from the incisions he made with a blade. A lit flame singed the hair on his powerful forearms. As a grand finale he contorted his body so that he became all tongue. The tongue became the dance. He licked his way across the stage wiping the dirt off the floor.

Ups and downs

“No. No. Revenge is never sweet,” he says reflectively. “My journey has been full of ups and downs. Even today after 50 years, or 40 years, it’s difficult to get a sponsor for contemporary dance. It’s not easy to produce oneself. You are always dancing on the edge.”

Of late, it’s Astad Deboo the legend who has been in the limelight. Last year for instance he was invited for a sparkling ceremony of artists, dancers, musicians and sportsmen at Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. He wore a black Jodhpur outfit with a magnificent shawl from the northeast of India draped over his left shoulder like a cape.

“What did you say to the Queen?” I ask.

“Well, I said: Good evening your Majesty,” he replies. “She greets you and then you move on.”

Later, he explains, as they were nudged discretely into smaller groups, the Queen came along and asked him; “You are a dancer?” And she added, “I hear you are a pioneer?” and when he nodded, she stretched out a gloved hand and said: “I too can dance a little you know!” And to Astad’s delight, she twirled her left hand into a little mudra.

London was one of the watering holes that nurtured the young Deboo’s passion for contemporary dance. He had been trained in the Kathak style early in life. He started when he was just six. His parents were living at Jamshedpur. Though born into a traditional Parsi family (he still wears a sudreh and kusti — plain cotton undershirt and consecrated waist string), Jamshedpur was a melting place of modern India. As he is fond of saying, the Jesuits at the school gave him a strong sense of Christian values, the Bengali Hindus included them in all their cultural activities, while the Kathak style instilled in him the essence of Islamic culture.

It was only much later, when he returned from his travels across the dance world, both learning and teaching different dance techniques, that he went to Kerala to induct himself into Kathakali and the martial arts.

It was the Age of Rebellion. Punk had entered the soul with the promise of liberation. In the arts, in music, in dance, in fashion, in sex, amplified by the revolution in communication that allowed for the dissemination of these radical ideas. The rebel was the anti-hero. Or as one of the popular mentors of the time, Carlos Castaneda, explained, the rebel was a warrior. “We choose only once. We choose either to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth.”

A disturbing language

Deboo chose to be a warrior. He does not actually say this. It informs the choices that he makes. After his time in the U.K. where he learnt the dance technique of Martha Graham, consorted with the Pink Floyd group, trained under Alice Becker Chase of Pilobolus and Pina Bausch, not to leave out the time he choreographed the famous ballerina Maya Plisetskaya in Paris under the eyes of Pierre Cardin, Deboo chose to spend a year in South America, where he learnt the Capoeira martial dance form. As he says, “I knew I had all these worlds within my dance language that I wanted to explore.”

Often, as the case has been with Deboo, the language of dance would be harsh and even disturbing. In his depiction of a drug addict in ‘Broken Pane’ in the 1990s, even his normally sedate Western audiences were shocked as he jabbed a syringe into the veins of his arm not just once, but three times in the course of the evening, banged his head repeatedly on the ground and writhed with the agony of the condemned. It was like a collaboration between Hieronymus Bosch and a Kathakali artist.

Giant puppets

“Even the French critics felt it was over the top, waving that syringe around sticking out of my arm. It should merely be symbolic, they cried,” Deboo shakes his head at the memory.

Equally disturbing were his experiments with ‘Death’ with the famous Parsi puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee’s giant puppets.

As against these often stark and even quasi-violent pieces, Deboo — who has also won formal accolades such as the Padma Shri and a Sangeet Natak Akademi award for creative dance — displays his most delicately nuanced side when he works with children.

His work with the street children of the Salaam Baalak Trust led to the piece ‘Breaking Boundaries’ that was shown at Kalakshetra.

And a long-term engagement with the hearing-impaired children of Kolkata’s The Action Players and The Clarke School for the Deaf in Chennai created some of the most life-affirming moments in dance. He led the audience and the performers in raising their arms in a ‘hand and finger wave’ signal at the end instead of clapping.

In every case Deboo has tried to create a narrative for himself. In the context of how so much of our ‘experimental’ work, whether in dance or the arts, is derivative at best, or imitative at worst, Deboo’s instinct to let the body lead him into revealing its secrets has been what makes him a ‘warrior’.

In recent times his work with Manipuri martial art dancers and drummers has led to a cultural cross-fertilisation of the most vivid kind.

As he described it, the Manipuri dancers have a very strong tradition of wielding their instruments of war and swirling with the momentum of getting ready to kill and be killed. While he was in the process of deconstructing these movements for a performance-based display, he observed how their traditional teachers would come and watch. “It was only when I suggested that they crouch as though crawling through the jungle, that they protested. Warriors never crouch. They leap!”

The dancer who turned 71 on July 13 still walks with the leaping grace of a warrior.

The 87-year-old veteran artist had been ailing for a while

The Mumbai-based artist, Mehlli Gobhai has died at the age of 87 in a city hospital this morning. The artist was said to be ailing for a while and had been hospitalised for a month.

Poet, curator and cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote’s tweet — an endearing image of artists Jehangir Sabavala and Mr. Gobhai along with him – recalled a friendship of three decades and “many years of conversation, travel and meetings”.

Article by Gauri Vij | The Hindu

Mr. Hoskote said to The Hindu, “He was one of the last great original characters [in the art world]. Absolutely eccentric and with a marvellous experience that crossed three continents in the most interesting decades in the 20th century. He landed in New York city in the most interesting decades and was really a witness to all the incredible moments in art history. He was easily our finest abstractionist. He really crafted his own amazing abstractionism idiom and that was literally special. Had he played his cards better in terms internationally he would have been in a different league. He’s in the same league of [Mark] Rothko and [Barnett] Newman.”

Auction house, Saffron Art’s website describes Mr Gobhai as, “a classical abstractionist with traditional artistic leanings”. Born in 1931, Mr. Gobhai graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. He later studied at the Royal College of Art, London and then Pratt Graphic Centre and the Art Students League, New York. He lived and worked in New York for over 20 years, returning to the city of his birth in the late 1980s.

Mr. Hoskote said that, “Nancy [Adajania] and I are currently working with memories of his work for a retrospective of his work, slated to go on display in March 2019. This will be a tribute to the great purity of [Mehlli’s] abstraction. He was such a kaleidoscopic character.”

Below is an article on Mehli from 2002.

Diagrams of energy

An art such as Mehlli Gobhai’s is a sacramental practice, a gesture that connects the secular world to the sacred; the work, therefore, occupies a space midway between easel and altar, writes RANJIT HOSKOTE.

Link with the past… The paintings of Mehlli Gobhai now on show in Mumbai.

MEHLLI GOBHAI’S recent paintings stand like dark, shrouded angels in his studio; they glow slowly to life as the light touches them, an effect that has been replicated through meticulously calibrated lighting at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, where these works are currently on show. At first sight, these seven paintings appear to mark an unbroken continuity with Gobhai’s preoccupations over the past decade. They record the dialogue of spare line and burnished field: the gradual luminosity emerges from beneath the sombre colours layered in strata of roughened and smoothed textures; the painting aspires to the condition of leather or parchment sanctified by years of ritual.

Gobhai, who was born in Mumbai in 1931, took a degree from St. Xavier’s College there; he went on to train as an artist at the Royal College of Art, London, and the Pratt Graphic Centre and the Art Students League, New York. He lived and worked in New York for two decades before choosing to return to Mumbai in the late 1980s. It is significant to an understanding of his work that he came of age, as an artist, in the United States rather than in Europe, which was the favoured destination for the young Indian artists of his generation. Many of his confreres arrived in Paris or London, only to find that the flight had left without them (actually, they didn’t find this out until much later, but New York had already supplanted these centres as the capital of the international art world). But Gobhai, like the intrepid Mohan Samant and Natvar Bhavsar, caught up with the flight on the other side of the Atlantic.

The early 1960s in New York were a time and place of lively contradictions. The refined high modernism of such Abstract Expressionists as Rothko, Newman and Clyfford Still was at its zenith. But the reaction against it was already under way, in the form of “postmodernist” idioms emphasising conceptual strategy, popular imagery, playfulness, identity politics, naked autobiography and self-dramatising performance. As a post-colonial subject in the pre-eminent global metropolis of the period, Gobhai found himself faced with a variety of artistic choices; but pure painting was the idiom that the best Indian artists aspired to then, and the young artist took up his position on the painterly side of the divide.

* * *

Even today, four decades later, Gobhai makes no apology for painting in series, attending to an image until he has drawn out its resonances to the fullest. Far from denoting the exhaustion of a theme by repetition, such a serialism connotes that system of correspondences and mutations, which unifies an artist’s work in time, carrying it forward through acts of intensification, affirmation and renewal. It is through serial encounter with his material that the artist re-visits a theme that has exercised him, not only exploring it within the span of a current suite of paintings, but also returning to paintings executed in the past, to retrieve and re-direct their impulses.

Gobhai’s works address a specific formal problem: the split between surface and structure that is a defining characteristic of much modern painting. After the pictorial revolutions of Cubism and abstractionism, it was no longer possible to pretend that surface and structure could unproblematically be melded in the production of a representational picture space. It seemed that the painter would have to choose between rival mandates: the sensuous immediacy of surface or the austere linearity of structure. But the problem would not admit of so dualistic a solution; the greater and more stimulating challenge is to reconcile the two principles after the critique of the representational.

Gobhai proposes a resolution by establishing a dynamic relationship between surface and structure. The surface is associated, in his oeuvre, with a tactile eroticism: here, he dwells on the attractions of organic form and metallurgic physicality, charging his paintings with the feel of stone and fruit-rind, earth and leather, river-veined rock and metal sheet. Structure marks the other pole of Gobhai’s personality: here, he refines the bodily human presence to the briefest but starkest notation, that of the axis, which is also the pivot around which the universe turns; the relationship of the body to the cosmos is indicated through an elegant economy of means. Surface and structure are tuned finely to each other: Gobhai’s is an art of deep coloristic and textural saturation held in counterpoint by geometric precision.

The colours and textures may bear subliminal associations, but the sharp linearity and the deliberate saturation remind us that Gobhai registers the primacy of the human imprint of order over the contingencies of nature and chance. These paintings function as energy diagrams, holding a set of forces together through linear symmetries, chromatic assonances, subtle allusions to the genres vestigially latent within Gobhai’s abstractionist idiom, such as the figure and the landscape.

Significantly, the artist often draws metaphors from geomancy and cosmology to approach his work; it is clear that he continues to regard the painting as a kshetra, a field of action, a ritual theatre of forces that becomes a model of the universe. An art such as Gobhai’s is a sacramental practice, a gesture that connects the secular world to the sacred; the art-work, correspondingly, occupies a space midway between easel and altar.

* * *

Let us turn, now, to the process by which Gobhai achieves these paintings. These magisterial works, powered by archetypal allusions — the clay tablets of the law; steles for fallen heroes; edicts graven in stone; scriptures written on parchment or leather — are painted on a base of handmade kalamkhush paper. The deckle edge of the kalamkhush is left intact: untrimmed, irregular. Work begins when the stiff, thick paper is stapled down to a hard board that serves Gobhai as an easel; he then builds up the painting in layers of graphite and zinc powder, pastel and acrylic, washing in the paint with a brush and rubbing the pigment and powders into the paper with his fingers and a rag.

Gobhai insists on the unnameability of the colours produced through this intensely satisfying activity of “staining and polishing”, and the varying gradations of rust, olive, verdigris, grey and black in his paintings change hue with changes of light and viewing angle, to reveal hidden tones (he is notably ambivalent towards colour, relishing it but damping it down before it can exercise its full enchantment). As the painting emerges from the alternate scumbling and glazing of the surface, Gobhai marks in his definitive lines, drawing and sometimes incising them with a burnishing tool.

While Gobhai enjoys an intimate, full-bodied relationship with his material, he does not believe that the process is more important than its product; complex and intricate as it is, the process is finally subsumed and attains its fulfillment within the resolved image. Which is not to say that the process does not secrete any evidence of itself in the product: its impress and character are evident in an unmistakeable sense of embodiment, in the incision of line and the staple scars, the varying degrees of patina and the ragged edge left close to the preliminary stage of colouring and less worked over than the main surface. As a result, these art-works gain a palpability and even a manifest corporeality, becoming emphatic presences.

In the studio, before being set in frames, they possess a free-hanging, sculptural quality. And while Gobhai’s concern with the worked-over surface keeps him wedded to the two-dimensional space of the painting, his preoccupation with structure ought to urge him in the direction of the four-dimensional realm of the sculpture-installation, and the re- positioning of his classicism in a new context. In this sense, I would speculate that these new works are transitional or indexical forms.

Pointing beyond the space of painting as they do, I would suggest that they signify the threshold of a new project, a throwing forward of energy into engagement with untested situations. Mehlli Gobhai has not yet permitted himself to articulate these possibilities, but his recent works indicate that he has begun, if I may adapt Jiro Yoshihara’s vivid and memorable phrase from the Gutai Manifesto (1956), “to hear the tremendous scream of the material”.

He came to his canvas with no feelings of certainty about what he wanted, with no pretense that it was a willing ally in the act of creation.

We were sitting in a Charles Correa-designed house, looking out at five acres of “cultivated wilderness” and talking about death and painting.

“Perhaps that’s why we create,” Mehlli said. “Because death is certain. And because we can’t believe it will happen to us, we react as children might. We try and throw something at the bogeyman, to scare him away. That something is art.”

Article by Jerry Pinto | Scroll

Mehli Gobhai, Mumbai, 2015. | Sooni Taraporevala & PHOTOINK

Mehlli Gobhai, who died on Thursday morning at 87, was one of my closest friends. He was the man who taught me to eat cheese that smelled different and lamented my lack of a drinking habit. He taught me to look at modern art, he taught me how to respect the sacred geometry of a Chola bronze. He taught me the correct way to tie my shoelaces and he taught me to shake out my shoes before I put them on in the country lest a scorpion had sought the acrid shelter of my footwear for the night.

He was one of the greatest of abstract expressionist painters we had, no, one of the greatest painters we had and he took his work seriously. So seriously in fact that he often waited for a painting to begin happening for months. And then there would be the first approach, the black thread taken from his mother’s sewing box. This would be pinned carefully to the canvas and then he would sit back and light a Gaulois and consider what had happened to space and time and him and us by this simple intervention. When it seemed as if this might be able to bear the burden of what he wanted to magic into being, he would begin the work of painting.

But it wasn’t work; it was a campaign. Mehlli Gobhai approached his canvas with no feelings of certainty about what he wanted, with no pretense that it was a willing ally in the act of creation. He would often speak of what he was doing in terms that were spiked with violence. “I must brutalise that section,” he would say. “I must rough that up a bit.”

The early years

Mehlli Gobhai was born into an India that was still under British rule and went to Bombay’s Saint Xavier’s High School and Saint Xavier’s College. He even started a degree in law before he moved on to join J Walter Thomson to work in the creative department. There, he drew some magnificent roughs for the Air India campaigns being managed by the legendary Bobby Kooka. Kooka looked at the roughs and declared they didn’t need any refining.

He moved for a while to England where he lived and studied in London before moving to New York, a city that suited him perfectly. It was rich, it was vibrant with energy. But there was also his home by the Arabian Sea, Bombay, with its dramaturgy of monsoon cloud and rain greys; and the foothills of the Himalayas where creeks ran muddy brown and a water snake lurked in the pond where he drew his water. There he earned his money by working on a series of children’s books that Speaking tiger will bring out soon translated in a variety of languages: Punjabi, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu.

Finally, he returned home and it was when he was having his first show at Gallery 7 in 1985 that I met him. He kept encouraging me to buy the papier mache creations that Pushpamala N had produced. We next met in 1994 when Ranjit Hoskote curated “Hinged by Light” for Pundole Art Gallery. I was a mathematics tutor then and worked in the area around his home on Carmichael Road. I would often drop in for coffee and cheese and endless conversations about everything from whether naïve art could really be naïve to the mathematics of Carnatic music. In the background, a painting would be burning quietly, its colours rich and strange and interior…can a colour be interior? On a canvas? You have to look at a Mehlli Gobhai work to see how that can happen.

He began to come to the Poetry Circle, enjoying working with words and having them critiqued. I think now of how Tagore said that art was a release because there were no expectations. But Mehlli took his writing seriously. Whether it was an ode to Bombay or a catalogue essay for his good friend the artist Sheetal Gattani, he worked out what he wanted to say and then sat down to work on it.

Untitled, 2007. Mixed media on canvas. Courtesy: Gallery Chemould

A big thing

A few years ago, a stroke knocked him over. When I went to see him, I asked: “How does the other guy look?”

“Don’t make a big thing out of it,” he snarled. Making a big thing out of anything, even if it was a big thing like a stroke, was a cardinal sin in the Gobhai theology. But a few days later when he began to slur some words, we went to see a doctor. We were sent to a neurologist. Peripheral neuropathy, one of them said. It was a cruel thing this disease. It took his hands from him and then his feet. It took his work from him. He was the man who had once wondered if his skill at life drawing was making his line glib and so he had shifted to his left hand and found that drawing came just as easily. Now he could not work with precision. And if he could not do exactly what he wanted to do, if he could not control everything, everything, he was not going to do anything.

He stopped working.

And then he began to withdraw. Just a little. The long phone calls became shorter and then telegrammatic. His wide circle of friends, from postmasters upcountry to aspiring artists, from kindergarten school teachers to egg ladies, shrank and shrank until it was a man in front of a television set with the images playing on and on, the hysteria of news, the accretion of meaningless detail. I tried to slow things down. Sheetal Gattani tried. His brother Cavas, a midwife of ideas in the United States and now felled by a similar stroke, tried. His nephew Dinshaw tried. But without the ability to lob another work of art in the face of time, Mehlli was having none of it.

Going away

Ten days ago, he began to experience respiratory distress. He was admitted to hospital. He had been there before and come back in a day or two. This time he would not return.

Ranjit Hoskote, noted art critic and cultural theorist, said: “Had Mehlli’s career trajectory been managed differently, or had he belonged to a later generation that benefited from globalisation, he would undoubtedly have been acknowledged as a key figure in the history of global abstraction. His art was not derivative of Western exemplars. Rather, it stood its ground beside Rothko, Newman and the other masters of Abstract Expressionism. In the specific context of Indian abstraction, also, Mehlli was unique. He made no concessions to the phantoms of landscape, or to inherited symbolism, or to the evocation of retinal reality, to which some of his confreres in Indian abstraction remained wedded. He was proud to describe his art as a ‘non-objective’ art. And in the late phase of his work, he experimented boldly with blurring the line between painting and sculpture, to produce results that were neither and yet more expansive than both. I used to speak of these as ‘image-objects’. They remain among his most compelling work. While many (and careless) observers believed that his work remained more or less similar across the decades, the reverse is true.”

Hoskote explained: “Any consideration of his oeuvre demonstrates the clear shifts from one phase to the next, the emphasis on the incised line yielding to a devotion to the saturation of colour as palimpsest, this yielding in turn to a sculptural interest in edge and mass. Too many in the art world saw him as a genial eccentric. Too few saw the driven, inspired nature of his artistic explorations.”

On September 9, 1925, Jehangir Tata wrote a letter to his father Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata from the barracks in the south of France. The 21-year-old had come up with a way to help the family business. He wanted Pathé News, a famous newsreel maker of the time, to produce short films about current events in India to be shown in the country’s cinemas.

Article by By Deborah D | scroll.in

The young Tata scion believed that footage of Mohandas Gandhi’s visit to their steel factory in Jamshedpur in 1925 would be “excellent and free propaganda and advertising”. “Too many people in India believe that steel works are just the same as a cotton mill, a foundry or a power station,” he wrote. “That is why they are all so amazed when they see that people who have seen this marvellous plant and the fine town we have built don’t wonder afterwards or shout where the 21 crores have gone to!”

Gandhi had made the trip to Jamshedpur to resolve labour disputes and ask that the Jamshedpur Labour Association be recognised by the company. Jehangir Tata had been informed that Gandhi’s preconceptions were shaken after he visited the factory and believed sharing the footage with the public would quell any similar distrust among them. In 1969, the year of Gandhi’s birth centenary, his Jamshedpur visit finally made it to promotional material. A Tata Steel advertisement from that time said, “…we proudly recall that, when [Gandhi] visited Jamshedpur in 1925 and 1934, he was happy to see the cordial relations there and felt their further extension would help to achieve a ‘Miniature Swaraj’”.

Jehangir Tata, who would later be popularly known as JRD Tata, apologised to his father in case he was “talking rubbish”. “It is the best way to talk sense one day, isn’t it?” he wrote. The letter was but a small glimpse into events that would transpire in the future.

JRD Tata took charge as chairman of the Tata group in 1938. During his 53-year tenure at the helm, it published numerous advertisements asserting its contribution to the country. Long before its companies were asking consumers to “Jaago Re” or add a pinch of “Desh ka Namak” to their food, they were communicating – in a variety of ways – its alignment with India’s mission to be a self-sufficient and expanding economy with a high standard of living. Over 200 vintage ads of the conglomerate, from the early 20th century up to 1990, along with the letter that JRD Tata wrote to his father, are on display at the Tata Central Archives in Pune. And if there is one theme that runs right through them, it is nation-building.

“The exhibition [Tata Vintage Advertising and Publicity] showcases not only the genesis and history of the Tata group, but also highlights in parallel the integral role that the group has played in India’s industrialisation and progress,” says the press release.

The foundation of the Tata group was laid by Jamsetji Tata in the 1870s with a textile mill. The young Parsi had made a tidy profit of 4 million rupees sending supplies to the British troops in the Abyssinian war, and had held nationalist sympathies. After his death, Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India between 1898 and 1905, said that “no Indian of the present generation had done more for the commerce and industry of India”.

The Tatas continued to be regarded by many as patriots after Independence. But the Indian leadership at the time also held strong socialist ideals, and both advertising and large private enterprises were viewed with suspicion.

Early in 1968, JRD Tata, in a letter to World Bank adviser George Woods, wrote: “I am afraid that in spite of all the lessons of the past twenty years, there’s no real change in Delhi’s attitude toward ‘big business’, nor have our politicians and bureaucrats realised that what seems big business to them would be little more than peanuts elsewhere”.

Companies in the private sector faced strict government controls and often felt that they were at the mercy of politicians’ caprices. Author and researcher Claude Markovits observes in his essay The Tata Paradox that the group lost the unique position it held before Independence, when it enjoyed the protection and support of the colonial state and benefited from patriotic enthusiasm simultaneously. “When British rule came to an end, other big Indian firms had a more intimate connection to the Indian state as a result of the support they had given the Congress during the independence struggle,” wrote Markovits. “This was particularly true of the Birlas and some of the Ahmedabad textile magnates.”

Against this backdrop, it’s clear from the advertisements that the company wanted to be seen as a force for good – one that wasn’t focused on accumulating wealth and power for its owners and shareholders, but devoted to improving the country.

Veteran adman Roger Pereira, whose early assignments involved working on Tata advertisements at J Walter Thompson in the 1960s, mentions a time when advertising helped the company navigate political hurdles.

In 1977, George Fernandes, the industry minister at the time, wanted to nationalise Tata Steel. In response, the company ran a campaign that detailed its philanthropic work and added, almost in passing – “we also make steel”.

“They said ‘we’ve built these hospitals, we’ve done this and this…and we also make steel. This is how we spend our money’,” said Pereira. “[The Tatas] weren’t profiteering for the sake of profiteering, they were investing in the country. That was a brilliant campaign, the most brilliant advertising campaign of all time in India. That’s what made Fernandes really look like a fool.”

This brand positioning is also seen in a Tata Iron and Steel Company advertisement from October 1955 that was created by J Walter Thompson. It portrays a man in a loincloth holding a long sheet, and says that India has come from importing the bulk of her textile requirements 30 years ago to having the second-largest textile industry in the world. Written in a larger font size below this, it reads, “Private Enterprise Serves the Nation.”

An advertisement announcing the opening of the Trombay Power Thermal Station in 1956 said it was “yet another Tata contribution to a higher standard of living through an expanding economy” and an “example of the work of enlightened Free Enterprise”.

Earlier in 1949, Tata made the connection between steel and agriculture in an advertisement that talked of the mechanisation of agriculture. It had a photograph of Nehru watching a tractor in operation. That same year, the company ran an ad that said, “Steel links India’s Frontiers”, and described how 7,000 tonnes of steel were used in the newly-laid railway line connecting Assam to the rest of the Indian Union.

Indian companies at the time strove to distinguish themselves from multinationals by emphasising their swadeshi credentials, and Tata was no exception with its Hamam soap – “Tata’s Hamam is a bigger soap – it’s truly swadeshi, too” read one advertisement. Another reminded consumers that Jamsetji Tata had set up the Swadeshi Mills Co. Ltd in 1886, twenty years before the swadeshi movement gained prominence.

“Winning the government’s approval was important during the Licence Raj days – this meant appearing to serve the people,” said Arvind Rajagopal, professor of Media Studies at New York University. “Large companies also began to reflect aspects of national developmentalist ideology. Advertising agencies all publicly avowed support for the planned economy, for example, and the biggest ones were all foreign.”

“Nation-focused ads were released not only by Tata but by all companies,” said Arun Chaudhuri, head of the marketing research company BRAND and the author of Indian Advertising: Laughter and Tears. “Obviously all these ads helped to support the government line that India was on a rapid path of progress. The reality was that the majority of the people lived pitiable lives hardly managing a square meal a day.”

According to Chaudhuri, another reason why advertisements tended to focus on the country and its progress before liberalisation may have simply been a lack of creative output from agencies. Since demand for goods was greater than supply in most industries, companies didn’t need bigger markets and didn’t care all that much about the content in ads. They were bought to keep newspapers – an important tool for public relations – happy.

Also in short supply were Tata Mercedes Benz trucks, which were “speeding prosperity to the countryside”, according to an advertisement from August 1960. The truck was compared with the Gwalior Fort that played a role during the Indian Mutiny (“Stalwarts Both”) and the India Gate (“Gateways to Prosperity”).

The messaging was clear: Tata wasn’t just driving India to a brighter future; it was also taking her back to her illustrious past. An ad for Tata Exports Limited, talks about “reviving the age-old glory of Indian exports”. Other Tata Iron and Steel Company ads advertisements refer to “implements of steel used by master craftsmen of ancient India”, “exquisite swords of Indian steel” used in the past and admired by outsiders and Indian ships being “once again on the high seas”.

If this rhetoric sounds familiar today, it is because it is used by politicians to invoke a sense of nationalist pride. But for the Tatas, that was not the only motivation. Even today, according to a recent survey, Tata Motors, a company that was founded 73 years ago, is viewed by Indians as the second-most patriotic brand in the country.

Tata Vintage Advertising and Publicity is on display at the Tata Central Archives in Pune until December.

All photos courtesy the Tata Central Archives.

Zubin Balaporia’s photography exhibition explores how he listens to his pictures

Contemporary Design Store BARO will host photographer Zubin Balaporia’s first Photography Show titled “BLESSED BY THE LIGHT”.

The show will feature 30 framed Photographs and a selection of Digital images (on iPad) that can be ordered for print.

Framed Photographs and Prints can be purchased or ordered at the exhibition.

Buyers will receive their photographs after the end of the show.

Show opens: 6th – 7th Oct. 2018

Show continues 9th – 14th Oct. 2018

Please Note: The show and venue will be CLOSED on 8th Oct. 2018

Venue: BARO

12 Sun Mill Compound, Lower Parel, Near Manyavar, Mumbai 400013. Phone: 022-40344888

Zubin Balaporia’s photography is inspired by music

When veteran musician Zubin Balaporia was first introduced to “serious photography” by his friend Subir Chatterjee, he found it to be as uplifting as music. “I’ve always looked at music in a visual sense and so, I ‘hear’ photography as a natural extension of the way I ‘see’ music,” says Balaporia, who has been with the famed rock band Indus Creed, for the last 30 years. Since then, the keyboardist and music composer has ventured into Amazon, Siberia, jungles of Laos, and the Arctic Circle with his camera, shooting photographs that document his strange encounters with killer ants, baby pythons, angry tarantulas to frozen lakes and racing huskies at -32 degree celsius.

Article by Nasrin Modak Siddiqi | Mid-Day

Balaporia will now be displaying these photographs at his maiden exhibition at the lights and furniture store, BARO. “You can’t shoot great photographs sitting in your apartment in Mumbai. You have to get out and get your feet wet and your hands dirty,” says the musician, of his work.
Srila Chaterjee, founder of BARO, says she “loved the stories that Balaporia’s pictures told and the light he captured”. “My absolute favourite is a snake,” says Chaterjee. “Zubin’s wife Tanu and friend Charu were very involved in his journey. We all looked at the images together and tried to curate a collection that looked harmonious,” she adds.

Up next, Balaporia wants to marry his two favourite art forms — photography and music — and create a series of photographs, which would be accompanied by his compositions. “When I shoot a photograph, I want the viewer to be transported to that very place. He must be able breathe the air, listen to the sounds and share the story in the photograph. I hope my photographs already come to life, but to enhance this, I’d like to compose and design sound for the photographs. It will make the viewing experience extra special,” says Balaporia.

More about Zubin Balaporia: https://zubinbalaporiaphotography.com/