Otago Museum is thrilled to host Areez Katki’s acclaimed textile-based art exhibition, Bildungsroman, at the H D Skinner Annex opening on Saturday 11 January.

The embroidered works explore Katki’s two, often conflicting, identities.

Katki is a Parsi, an ethnoreligious group originally from Iran who fled to India during the first Muslim invasion between the 8th and 10th century. The Parsis are an opaque and insular population, traditionally only marrying within their community and keeping centuries old customs. They follow Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion, mostly known in the West for the ‘towers of death’ where bodies of the dead are taken to be fed to vultures.

Katki was born into the sacred Osta clan, and as such is an ordained Zoroastrian priest. But alongside this identity is another; Katki is also an openly queer New Zealander, living as a fashion practitioner and artist in Auckland.

The push and pull of these two worlds, and an open celebration of Parsi culture and family are explored in the textile pieces.

Bursting with colour and playfulness, they weave the threads of his heritage together. The exhibition displays 29 new works by the artist, developed over the past eight months while he was living and working in India. Borrowing from his Mother’s 1970s stenography notebook, the works feature shorthand, along with patterns and images to tell his stories.

Alongside the works, the exhibition also contains a number of documentary elements from the artist’s travels – photographs, heirlooms, audio content, and journal entries – giving a dense and layered experience for viewers.

The exhibition was recently named by Art Collector magazine as one of the top 50 in Australasia, and is free to the public here in Dunedin.

Craig Scott, Head of Exhibitions and Creative, said, “We are just so pleased to have this amazing exhibition in our city. Areez is one of New Zealand’s best contemporary, craft-based artists, and these pieces carry an incredible depth, communicating so much”

Open for the next four weeks the exhibition is highly anticipated among Dunedin’s art community and offers a window into the veiled world of the Parsis.

About Areez

Areez Katki is a multidisciplinary artist & textile practitioner based in Auckland, New Zealand. Drawing from historic and social research, he addresses his value for craft sensibilities through a research driven contemporary practice. Over the duration of his career Katki has focused on the significance of materiality in the domestic realm through personal processes of fabricating textiles and an ongoing engagement with their narratives. With a background in Art History and an early childhood imbibed in the values of craft, Katki developed a practice based on instinctive responses to textile & fibre research. Often juxtaposing the ephemeral synaesthesic responses to his environment with a subjectivity around formal processes of fabrication that were matrilineally inherited.

Culminating in richly contextualised bodies of work since 2015, Katki raises questions around the political nature of craft; proclaiming his role as a craftsperson within the realm of contemporary art. The works have addressed social constructs of identity, spirituality and sexuality that have since been explored through various mediums including beaded tapestry weaving, embroidery, paint, sculpture and printmaking.

In 2019 after a ten month-long residency based in Mumbai, India, Katki exhibited his premiere solo body of work Bildungsroman. A narrative that surveys the depths of domestic materiality whilst investigating issues around identity, spirituality and sexuality. Traversing his genetic landscapes across Persia and his birthplace in India, the work was exhibited at Malcolm Smith Gallery in the Eastern region of Auckland where Katki was raised. Bildungsoman is currently touring to institutions across Aotearoa over 2019-2020.

Exhibition Info

Otago Museum

10am–4pm, 11 January to 9 February

419 Great King Street, Dunedin, New Zealand

The London filmmaker on chronicling the legacy of Khorshed and Kekoo Gandhy.

As a young woman, Behroze Gandhy tried hard to maintain a distance from her artistic lineage. “Growing up, I didn’t want anything to do with art, my parents [Bombay’s original art couple Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy] or their gallery,” says the London-based filmmaker. “I felt I should get away from it and make my own mark… but after a point, I couldn’t escape the goodwill my parents had, and the doors it opened for me.” In town for the screening of her 90-minute documentary feature, Kekee Manzil – The House of Art, Gandhy pursued media studies in the UK in the 1970s and decided to stay on. “A series of chances led me to film and research at the British Film Institute,” she says.

Article by Reema Gehi | Mumbai Mirror

“I had memories of my father talking about the Bengal school and the Bombay Progressives, and when I started my academic work, all this began to feel connected, and I began exploring the link between early Indian cinema and art.”

Though she was trying to circumvent the world of art, it found her. “And because I was a filmmaker in the UK, people kept telling me that I must record my father, that it was going to be all history one day,” she says. “My parents were, after all, witness to key moments of the Indian contemporary art movement from the early 40s, and established the first contemporary art gallery in Bombay. So, I conducted a long interview with them in 2002, but unfortunately I lost the footage.”

Their beautiful sea-facing home in Bandra has, thus, become the anchor for this film. “In the last years of my parents’ lives, they spent a lot of time in Kekee Manzil. I kept coming back to spend many months with them,” says Behroze, who brought on board a camera team to film them again a few years later. “After they died in 2012-13, I knew I had the material to make a documentary, which could reflect on the story of Indian art. So, I started collaborating with Dilesh Korya, who edited and co-directed the film, which I financed.”

From family members — siblings Rashna, Adil and Shireen, uncle Dara — to old archives in 8 mm film, it all helped to provide an account of how her parents journeyed into contemporary art and their encounters with Italian prisoners of war, Jewish emigres and Belgian businessmen.

“The story of the film is about how my father, a casualty of the World War II, landed up being one of the catalysts of an art movement, which was at odds with his Parsi business background,” says Behroze.

“My dad’s journey revolved around a shop selling picture frames, and a series of curious coincidences leading him to the point of opening Gallery Chemould in 1963.”

This story is told through interviews with artists and personalities from across fields, such as SH Raza, Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta, Sakina Mehta, Anish Kapoor and Salman Rushdie, who knew the couple well, and were able to reflect on their legacy. In fact, in the film, Rushdie even speaks about the confidence he developed to “invent a painter in the The Moor’s Last Sigh,” because of his associations with artists such as Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Vivan Sundaram.

The film, however, is not only about the couple’s involvement in the arts. It is punctuated by seminal political events — the Independence movement, the Emergency, and the 1992-1993 riots — and how it influenced them. “I saw my father work closely with the peace committees during the Bombay riots, for instance,” says Behroze. “So, the film is as much about art as it is about their political lives.”

B-Creative Hand painted Glass Art By Binaifer

On a background of beautifully textured art glass, my creations are painstakingly hand painted and come ready to display with an aesthetically complementary frame. Popular themes include artistic representations of religious symbols such as the Zoroastrian Farohar and the Hindu God Ganesha, in addition to abstract renditions of elephants and other motifs I am inspired by. The dynamic interplay of opaque, translucent and vibrant colors makes these pieces perfect when juxtaposed against a backlit location, such as a window, lamp or votive. They can also be traditionally wall mounted to add a splash of color or auspiciously hung above an entryway.

Check out Binaifer’s creations on her Etsy page at:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/BCreativeByBinaifer

Contact: Binaifer Medhora Mehta

binaifer1@gmail.com

Cell: +1 732 593 7833

Legendary artist and India’s greatest contemporary dancer and our dear friend Astad Deboo shares a short message during the current COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Chemould Prescott Road is doing a wonderful series on The Collectors. Here are some of the Parsi collectors it has featured

Homi Bhabha

Jehangir K. S. Nicholson

Kavas Bharucha

A newsletter from our dear friend Dinyar Wadia of Wadia Associates, an award winning architecture and design firm from Connecticut, USA informs…

“The Wadia Way”

We hope this finds you well. If you own a Wadia Associates designed home, or have visited a Wadia Associates designed home, you are immediately struck by the harmonious spatial arrangement, the quality of the materials, and the attention to every elegant feature.

How does this happen on every job we do? It’s simple. We focus on the details. We call it “The Wadia Way.”

It means as architects and designers, we go out into the building environment to make sure each project is built with the same level of detail that was specified by the architect, and as it was envisioned by the client.

It means Dinyar Wadia goes to every jobsite to make sure each home is built to his exacting standards.

So to better understand how Wadia Associates works to make your project come to life, please view the video and go to our website to see how Dinyar and our clients describe “The Wadia Way.”

Elephant and Artsy have come together to present This Artwork Changed My Life, a creative collaboration that shares the stories of life-changing encounters with art. A new piece will be published every two weeks on both Elephant and Artsy. Together, our publications want to celebrate the personal and transformative power of art.

Article by Rhea Dhanbhoora

Pestonji Bomanji, Feeding the Parrot, 1882. Image via Wikimedia Commons

The artists of the 19th century often came alive for me in my grandmother’s living room.

During hot days in the Mumbai summer, we paged through books about artists and paintings that inspired her. As we passed over artists from some of her favorite art movements, heat-wave hallucinations brought Cézanne dancing in through the lace curtains. Renoir twirled into Degas , who skipped over Monet and bumped into Manet as a mess of mediums poured onto the floor. I loved them all, but I had not yet seen the painting that would speak to me most personally: the quotidian depiction of my minority Parsi Zoroastrian identity on a canvas, Pestonji Bomanji’s Feeding the Parrot (1882).

Still, I spent many hours captivated by the artists my grandmother had tried to emulate before a near-fatal mishap stripped her of her creative faculties. After a pedestrian accident, she was left in a near-vegetative state. Even after miraculously coming out of a coma, she could never again paint with the same precision as before.

As a child, I did not consider the effects of this cataclysmic loss, of the agony she must have felt over the incident that impeded her artistry. My grandmother, who once painted true-to-life portraits, and could have painted portraits of Parsis like Pestonji Bomanji had, if she had not lost her ability to do so.

The earliest art history lessons I ever had took place in her home, and it was not unusual for us to traipse through India’s National Gallery of Modern Art or Jehangir Art Gallery. What was unusual was getting the chance to see an entire exhibition of Parsi art. When my aunt suggested visiting one in 2002, I was unenthused. Even with a declining Parsi population in India, I was more ashamed than excited about the opportunity to celebrate my ethnoreligious minority. Why hold an entire room hostage for a group that was so small, so invisible, so…irrelevant?

And then I saw Feeding the Parrot for the first time.

The seminal painting by Pestonji Bomanji depicts a woman impassively feeding a parrot, her dispassionate gaze pointed away from, yet still somehow looking into, the viewer. I was transfixed by the caged parrot, the lifelike folds in the blue sari with brocade border worn by the woman at the center of the painting, and the child peeking into, but never interrupting, the scene.

Bomanji—who wanted to be a sculptor, but was drawn to portraiture after training under Pre-Raphaelite painter Valentine Cameron Prinsep —contributed significantly to Bombay’s oft-overlooked contribution to Academic Realism. The style was eventually overshadowed in the 20th century by the Progressive movement, but it left behind some of the most iconic paintings of the 19th century in India. Feeding the Parrot was a striking callback to the European art that I was so familiar with from the summer days in my grandmother’s living room. But my fascination went beyond the adroit brushstrokes and the way the shadows in the work both concealed and revealed at the same time. It was not even the similarity of Bomanji’s work to that of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer that held my attention.

When I moved closer to marvel at the play of light and marriage of pigments, I was pulled into the tension of its somber yet uplifting palette. Even when I looked away, I still saw the woman’s characteristically Parsi features: high forehead, inimitable long nose. She bore no resemblance to my grandmother, but still I saw her—at her easel, in the kitchen, by the window.

It was the same feeling I had when I engaged with my grandmother’s painting of Zarathustra’s likeness, hanging in our bedroom back home; a familiar, but more personal piece than other art we admired together. It echoed  Van Gogh’s swirls, Monet’s mists, Manet’s detail—but it was our Zoroastrian prophet rendered in my grandma’s syncretic style. Not entirely sui generis but still distinct, because apart from my grandmother, who else would paint this homage to our ethnoreligious minority?

I had heard of Parsi artists like Bomanji, Jehangir Sabavala, and MF Pithawalla, who painted our diaspora. But much like the declining minority I belong to, I did not see them in many galleries or read about them in art books. And, like all declining diasporas probably do, I grew up aware of our decreasing population, and of census data that has many in our community worried that one day there will be no Parsi Zoroastrians left. It was something we were resigned to, just like we were resigned to the lack of representation in art and culture in India as well as globally. Before I saw Pestonji Bomanji’s work in person, I saw all art as something foreign to appreciate, not relate to.

When I looked at his paintings I was staring at a convergence of Western-Indian styles, typical of Bomanji’s J.J. School of Art instruction, and yet also of the quotidian patterns of our declining diaspora. It made me want to create, record, represent, and preserve some of these scenes myself in an effort to leave something behind of this near-extinct community I was a member of.

I rediscovered Feeding the Parrot in 2013 when I read about an exhibition in Delhi that listed the painting as part of the works on view. It had been a while since I’d thought about how strange it was to see my diaspora represented on canvas, or even in daily life. Again, the urgency to create something streamed through the side-angled woman and half-views of parrot and child. I realized: What I had seen in Bomanji’s work was the power of representation. Sure, I painted flowers en plein air, dotted canvases with crude pointillism, and finger-swabbed soft pastels. But Feeding the Parrot showed me art could fight diaspora erasure, that it could preserve and represent.

After my grandmother died in 2014, I found comfort in the muted palette and pathos of Bomanji’s Portrait of a Parsee Lady (1914). And Bomanji’s At Rest (late 19th–early 20th century) still reminds me of my grandfather and other Parsi gentlemen reading the paper outside fire temples in our religious town of Udvada. But always, I go back to the half-shadowed woman, feeding a caged bird.

To this day, Feeding the Parrot still moves me. When I look at the child—seemingly more aware of the artist capturing the scene than woman he clings to—grabbing the folds of the sari of the woman in the center of the painting, I feel seen. Sometimes, it also reminds me of my grandmother and her art. At other times, I think of diasporas broadly, and the fact that mine one day might cease to exist.

But through all that, the thought that an artwork like Feeding the Parrot, or even my grandmother’s paintings, will remain to tell our story provides me with a modicum of solace.

A master of light and play, with a blend of Impressionist and Cubist elements, Jehangir Sabavala’s blue-chip art has inspired a sense of wonder and awe. Akara Art’s latest show revives the late artist’s legacy

Article by Shaikh Ayaz | Architectural Digest India

PUBLISHED: NOV 04, 2020 | 09:30:19 IST

Jehangir Sabavala, The Miasmic Shore, Oil on Canvas 28 x 42 inches, 1967

Puneet Shah remembers only one brief encounter with the late Jehangir Sabavala who passed away in 2011 at 89, but he met the stylish artist’s equally elegant wife Shirin a couple of times. During one conversation, early on in the Akara Art founder’s career, she had suggested, “Why don’t you do a Sabavala exhibition at your gallery?” A decade later, the long-cherished dream has just come true with the opening of ‘Pilgrim Souls, Soaring Skies, Crystalline Seas.’ This is Mumbai-based Akara Art’s first major physical exhibition after the Covid-19 lockdown. Conceived during the sedate hours of the lockdown, Shah calls ‘Pilgrim Souls…’ “the most prominent show” of this kind, offering 15 works of art from different stages of Sabavala’s seven decades of work.

A Good Time for Sabavala

Sabavala was a subject of a prestigious retrospective in 2015 at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya that curator Ranjit Hoskote (also Sabavala’s official biographer) had dubbed an “introspective” for the sheer scale and intimate sweep that the show managed to achieve. By contrast, ‘Pilgrim Souls…’ is a smaller but sublime overview of the artist’s life and career. The city of Mumbai—the Parsi artist’s home and muse for decades—will see its first Sabavala show in five years. “Any time is a good time to have a Sabavala exhibition,” Puneet Shah offers. “He was not a prolific artist and to put together 15 paintings, most of them rare, is definitely an interesting proposition. There is a lot of interest in his work and much more in the recent past, both commercially and curatorially.”

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Sanchi, Oil on Board, 24 x 34

Mystery of Light

A viewer stepping into ‘Pilgrim Souls…’ will at once be immersed in Sabavala’s serene world, with spartan landscapes and vistas springing up on you. Are they a treatise on nature? Naturally-lit movie scenes? The artist’s monologue? Or harbours of intense solitude? None, perhaps because the artist was fascinated by the mystery of light, using his landscapes for which he was most famous to convey a sense of topographic beauty and bounty. “All artists across the 1960s and 1970s romanticised the play of light in their works, but Sabavala went much further to capture all its moods and nuances,” Shah says. The selection of paintings in ‘Pilgrim Souls…’ attest to his penchant for light, expanse and a deep study of the infinity of horizons and seashores. For example, in canvasses like ‘Beached Boats’ (1962), ‘The Miasmic Shore’ (1967), ‘Elegy’ (1967) and ‘The Shadowed Strand’ (1977), Sabavala allows light to permeate the surface to produce a mysterious shifting topography of translucent seas, opaque headlands and free-floating atmospheric forms. Also included in the exhibition is a wonderful watercolour of an Italian church that gives us a dekko into the artist’s preparatory travel diary. Ranjit Hoskote, who knew Sabavala well, says the artist enjoyed being in his studio but delighted in plein-air painting just as well, “setting up his palette in a piazza or on a beach, in Italy or France, and rendering what he saw around him—the architecture of churches or public buildings, the cascade of houses in a valley, the relationship between built form, social life, and nature—in vivid watercolour.”

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Elegy, Oil on canvas, 50 x 30 inches, 1967

Panoramic Opulence

Sabavala explored human figures, too, a remnant from his academic style days. “He reached out to the experience of hard work and austere devotion, and memorialised, in his stylised manner, the shephard, the farmer, and the monk,” Hoskote says, adding, “He could also open his imagination up to enigmatic otherworldly presences such as apparitions, visitants, shamans, and wizards, inhabitants of the worlds of myth, legend, and archetype.” Even though these eclectic characters teem his canvas they are bereft of emotions and stand apart with their melancholic expressions albeit uplifted by Sabavala’s muted and sophisticated palette. Part of his art’s understated triumph lies in its academic formality and at the same time, his ability to transcend it to narrate an emotional state in simpler forms that any thoughtful viewer can profoundly resonate with. Mark Rothko famously encouraged a “consummated experience between a picture and onlooker.” The American abstract giant further declared, “Nothing should stand between my painting and viewer.” The same could be applied to Sabavala, who by resisting interpretation, urges viewers to stare at his paintings and drink from its mythic diffusions, much like a wayfarer who stands facing the sea, marvelling at its panoramic opulence. Shah agrees, “The more one sees his work and realises his dedication and integrity towards his practice, the more one grows deeply fond of him.”

The Accomplished Works

The artist’s highly personal spin on landscape can be best glimpsed in ‘The Shadowed Strand’ (1977) and ‘The Miasmic Shore’ (1967), both included in the exhibition. A quintessential Sabavala from the ’70s, ‘The Shadowed Strand’ depicts a luminous play of light, depth in the landscape, figures and tonality. All the attributes that make for a classic Sabavala. ‘The Miasmic Shore’ is another excellent example of the artist’s mid-career style. However, Shah cites ‘Sanchi’ (1960) as one of his landmark paintings, especially for representing a key shift in “Sabavala’s trajectory where he is transitioning from the structured cubist works to his own distinctive style of the landscape.” Hoskote calls it an “accomplished work”, noting, “the cubist framework of balancing tensions has been reshaped to serve the genius loci.” Yet, it is ‘Elegy’ (1967) that could well be the presiding genius of the show. It is Shah’s favourite work. “It has a very strong presence,” he says. “With its view against the light, a central path and two immense figures floating out of a pale mist, outlined by the bold diagonal cutting across the top half of the painting and the mountains worked on with palette knife and brush… this is Sabavala at his best.”

Fusing Different Schools

Sabavala’s art is strangely free of any style, be it Cubist or Impressionist though he followed both schools closely. Hoskote explains, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala broke away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism, to which he had apprenticed himself at Andre Lhote’s academy in Paris. Departing from the impasto materiality of his earlier work, with its knife-edge lines, thick borders, and grand masses, he softened his paintings.” About his famed style, Sabavala had himself once said, “It’s an amalgam of academic, Impressionist and Cubist styles. Instead of being in just one discipline, I thought, ‘Can they combine and what would happen if I fuse them together’? This was the reckoning that eventually led to the Sabavala trademark. “He didn’t want to be confined to a particular style of painting,” Shah says, elaborating, “His artistic development offers an insight into the steady transformation of art as a medium of self-expression and discovery. You will find that he’s confident enough to keep revisiting themes and subjects from earlier paintings all the time.”

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Santa Euphemia, watercolor on paper, 21 x 15 inches, 1954

Belongs To No Group

Born into an affluent Parsi family in Bombay (his father was a manager at the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel), the aristocratic Sabavala lived a life of timeless beauty. In the 1940s, he travelled to Europe to study painting. Paris was his mother’s favourite city—and that’s exactly where her son spent some of the best years of his life. He brought back to India the technique and craft he had learnt in the epicentre of modern art. Back in India, the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group which included such titans as FN Souza, MF Husain and their associates like Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, Akbar Padamsee, Krishen Khanna and Ram Kumar were becoming a rising force, radically transforming our idea of what constitutes art and aesthetic. Evidently, history would recognise them as the founders of Indian modern art and they would go on to become some of India’s most popular artists. Thankfully, Sabavala has not missed that bus—though never a part of the PAG his contribution in the making of homegrown modern art is as heartfelt as it is enormous. As Shah says, “He welcomed the versatility of all influences.” After his return from Europe, Sabavala stayed in India, taking in all the inspiration that the diverse country had to proffer. Being a product of bourgeois may have meant easy access to high society and the cliquey world of art but for Sabavala, the early years were nearly as tough as for any struggling artist. One story goes that it was MF Husain who helped Sabavala mount his first exhibition at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, where the debut-making artist himself had to pin his works to the wall!

Jehangir Sabavala, Untitled, 60 x 40 inches, Oil on Canvas, 2000 (1)

‘India’ Missing in His Work?

Graceful, friendly and forthcoming, the cravat-sporting Sabavala’s perfect manners and calm demeanour has led to him being called a “gentlemanly artist.” Indeed, in his clipped English accent he loved to regale audiences and admirers with stories of the past as well as art in general. (He loved Juan Gris, whom he described as the “most monastic Cubist.”) Sometimes, due to his European temperament critics have dismissed him as “too romantic” and worse, “not Indian enough.” Was his work too removed from the Indian reality? Did India ever really exist in his work? He wasn’t a “social painter” as he was made out to be but “a much more serious artist,” Shah adds. Tellingly, his wife Shirin Sabavala, ever the champion of his art, pulled no punches when she said, in a TV interview with a media house, “What is truly Indian about Jehangir is his empathy for the Indian countryside and landscape. He’s never been able to paint a foreign landscape well. But when it comes to India, especially the Sahyadris or Deccan plateau his work catches the essence.” Hoskote recalls, “Over the 1950s and early 1960s, Sabavala embraced his homeland through travel, sketches, and an immersion in the cultures of India’s various regions. During these decades, the Sabavalas would travel to Kerala and Rajasthan, to Madhya Pradesh, the Sahyadri Hills and along the course of the Tungabhadra River.” Those walking into ‘Pilgrim Souls…’ can see for themselves a brief but important survey of that journey.

‘Pilgrim Souls, Soaring Skies, Crystalline Seas’ will be on show at Akara Art till December 10, 2020

In an exclusive conversation with The Morning Standard, Puneet Shah, Founder of Akara Art, and Curator of the show tells us more.

Connoisseurs of Jehangir Sabavala (1922-2011), will take delight that a new exhibition titled ‘Pilgrim Souls, Soaring Skies, Crystalline Seas’, stands true to its name as the showcased works contain all the signature details that the Parsi modernist came to be known for.

​It is organised by Mumbai’s Akara Art and is on view both online and in the gallery space. In an exclusive conversation with The Morning Standard, Puneet Shah, Founder of Akara Art, and Curator of the show tells us more.

What led you to curate this show?

As you may know our gallery has been an active host to well curated exhibitions of modern Indian art. The idea of the show came about as a fluid conversation with Shirin (Sabavala’s wife) and Afreed (Sabavala’s daughter) quite many years ago, when we moved into our new space at Churchill Chambers and I mentioned to them about having a show of Sabavala’s works at the gallery. This conversation took a serious turn in the lockdown, which gave us an opportunity to research on Sabavala’s practice and find his works in various private collections for the exhibition.

What particular aspects of his works drew your attention?

Sabavala didn’t want to be confined to a particular style of painting. He deviated from the classic Synthetic Cubism and developed an exclusive style of his own. The artistic development of Sabavala offers an insight into the steady transformation of art as a medium of self-expression and discovery and you find a confident Sabavala revisiting themes and subjects from earlier paintings all the time.

Could you talk about the legacy of the artist?

Jehangir Sabavala was one of India’s most desired artists who left a lasting mark on the art scene. India was in a transitional and testing time when Sabavala returned from Paris in 1951. He chose not to be associated with any one group or ideology, welcomed the versatility of all influences and built his own language which kept evolving. In his career of over 60 years, Sabavala was honoured with the Padma Shri (1977), and the Lalit Kala Ratna (2007).

AT: akaraaart.in

WHAT’S ON the newsletter of the Karachi Zarathoshti Banu Mandal informs…

Video: “The Servant of Pakistan: Jimmy Engineer” Honours “apro” Jimmy Fali Engineer

As a tribute on the 143rd birth anniversary of Pakistan’s National Poet Allama Iqbal, Asmaa Zia has made the above video, and writes that “I am honoured to make documentaries on the different aspects of the life and work of the legend Jimmy Engineer (Jimmy Fali), so that the world may know his dynamic personality.”

In the forward of ‘Javed Namah’, Dr Hamid Yazdani, translator of Farsi Iqbaliyaat, documents that Allama Iqbal had a desire to have his greatest Farsi ‘Masnavi Javed Namah’ brought to canvas by some artist.

The daunting task of painting exceptionally vivid and picturesque narrative was assigned to Jimmy, known for his paintings of landscapes of Pakistan and exquisite Pakistani architecture.

“The mural Javed Namah is based on the spiritual philosophy of Iqbal and it was his great desire that some artist would do this poetry artistic justice. I don’t know how far I have succeeded but I eventually completed it in the year 1982,” says Jimmy with his usual humility.

Above video on Jimmy’s work has been created by Asmaa Zia and, produced by Cocoon Art and Entertainment. It can be seen at:

‘His works represent an important segment in contemporary dance expression in India,’ the Sangeet Natak Akademi had said.

Dance pioneer Astad Deboo passed away in the early hours of Thursday, his family said in a brief announcement. He was 73.

“He left us in the early hours of December 10, at his home in Mumbai, after a brief illness, bravely borne,” the announcement on social media said. “He leaves behind a formidable legacy of unforgettable performances combined with an unswerving dedication to his art, matched only by his huge, loving heart that gained him thousands of friends and a vast, number of admirers.”

The announcement added: “The loss to the family, friends, fraternity of dancers, both classical and modern, Indian and international, is inestimable.May he rest in peace. We will miss him.”

Deboo is noted for creating a modern dance vocabulary that was uniquely Indian.

He “has created a dance-theatre style which successfully assimilates Indian and Western techniques”, said the citation for the the Sangeet Natak Akademi he received in 1995 for his contribution to contemporary creative dance and a Padma Shri in 2007.
“He has experimented with a variety of forms, themes, concepts and performance spaces, and has collaborated with other dancers, composers and designers to create innovative works of aesthetic value,” it said. “His works represent an important segment in contemporary dance expression in India.”

Deboo, who was born on July 13, 1947, in the town of Navsari in Gujarat, began to train in kathak under Prahlad Das in Kolkata and in kathakali under EK Pannicker.

“Later, he attended the London School of Contemporary Dance, learning Martha Graham’s modern dance technique, and learnt Jose Limon’s technique in New York,” the Akademi said. “He has also trained with Pina Bausch in the Wuppertal Dance Company, Germany, attended workshops of the Pilobolus Dance Company, and attended American Dance Festival classes in the United States.”

He was noted, among other collaborations, for his work with hearing impaired people and with street children.

In an interview with Ranjana Dave in Scroll.in in 2018 looking back on his 50-year career, Deboo said that he drawn in influences not only from dance but other artistic disciplines too.

“My main problem was that there were no dancers who wanted to work with me,” he said. “Indian classical dancers would come to me in order to start exploring their own language, but they were always afraid of being rusticated by their gurus. So, I turned to other performing arts disciplines – puppetry, thang ta and pung cholom. I liked that they had a vocabulary of movement I could create with.”

Astad Deboo looks back on his 50 years in dance and the time he travelled on a ship with goats

The great dancer-choreographer has lost none of his grace and curiosity: ‘I may be 71, but I don’t feel 71.’

n 1967, the Films Division of India commissioned filmmaker SNS Sastry to make I am 20, a film on the hopes and desires of Indian citizens born on August 15, 1947. As the first generation born into an independent India, they were finding their place, and the film probes their philosophical thoughts and material aspirations – from the progress of the new nation to the need to have a versatile wardrobe, to an anticipation of the future, tinged with Nehruvian optimism.

As the film celebrated patriotic responsibility and distinct individuality as seen among young Indians in the 1960s, another twenty-something, the choreographer Astad Deboo, was embarking on a journey of his own. His time as a college student in Bombay had brought him closer to new developments in music, visual arts and theatre, while giving him the opportunity to watch performances by travelling dance companies. While his father saw college as a step towards feasible career choices, the young Deboo was keen to see what he could make of dance. Now, several decades on, Deboo will celebrate his fiftieth year as a professional dancer in 2019.

After a childhood spent training in kathak, Deboo deployed an autodidactic impulse in the way he shaped his dance experiences as a young adult. Sometimes he traded lessons in kathak for lessons in contemporary dance technique. On other occasions, he was only allowed to observe – when he travelled east to watch kabuki, the classical Japanese dance-drama, for instance.

God Gifted Cameras/YouTube.

On one trip, Deboo boarded a cargo ship to the Persian Gulf, sharing space with goats and sheep. There is an oxymoronic charm to watching an older Deboo, clad in crisp, pristine white, recount his days spent loitering on the deck to avoid his pastoral living arrangements in the innards of the ship. This was a world that bore fewer geopolitical connotations – one that enabled a journey from Iran to London – where performative experiences, not border crossings, became the most memorable signposts of the journey.

The Asian performance traditions Deboo observed in trips to Indonesia and Japan fed his dance language. He was inspired by the hand gestures used in Balinese dancing, an influence that endures in his use of the limbs as quivering extremities, his fingers making their way through transitory states, not necessarily consolidating themselves into legible gestures. The face has remained mobile territory, with the eyes, lips and minor facial muscles drawn into the conversation.

In our conversation, Deboo describes a piece he made for the East West Dance Encounter in 1984, a watershed event in the history of contemporary practice. The Encounter was a meeting of Indian and German choreographers, and Deboo had just returned from spending time with the German choreographer Pina Bausch in Wuppertal. His piece for the Encounter revolved around a character named Joglekar and his daily life in Mumbai. Deboo recalls being upbraided for his use of Bollywood music, but remembers the work for how it highlighted a strain of light-heartedness that he was fond of locating in his work, regardless of its overarching themes or frameworks.

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Blending vocabularies

Deboo’s career has been characterised by long spells of work with artists trained in other performance disciplines. “My main problem was that there were no dancers who wanted to work with me,” said Daboo. “Indian classical dancers would come to me in order to start exploring their own language, but they were always afraid of being rusticated by their gurus. So, I turned to other performing arts disciplines – puppetry, thang ta and pung cholom. I liked that they had a vocabulary of movement I could create with.” The challenge was to find a way to choreograph with different vocabularies, without imposing on the fundamentals of those forms. Deboo says that he has seen the artists working with him draw from elements of staging and presentation he uses, then incorporating these elements into their presentations of traditional choreography.

In my years living in Mumbai, I also saw Deboo in another avatar – as an avid viewer of works by younger contemporary practitioners. He showed up to watch the premiere performances of first-time choreographers, and agreed to teach the occasional workshop, exhorting dancers to be bolder with their movement decisions. “When I struggled, I wanted to see what others were doing,” he said. “I was curious about the ways in which their work was received. I am very approachable and open.” Deboo has mixed feelings, though, about the ways in which the term contemporary is used blasphemously, as he puts it, often with little training or rigour to support the label. He is optimistic, however, about the work of a few young choreographers, and tries to follow their work and track their careers.

A chance meeting in Sweden in 2014 with one such choreographer, Rani Nair, led to An Evening with Astad, a biographical dance that recaps some of his earlier work in a performative conversation between the two collaborators. When she first began working with Deboo in Delhi, Nair had just performed Future Memory, a citational rendering of a Kurt Jooss piece she inherited from a dancer named Lilavati after her death. This interest in using dance to retell histories of movement and practice endured in their collaboration on An Evening with Astad.

Nair asked him questions he hadn’t encountered earlier, including about the provenance of Deboo’s trademark twirling. The twirling had featured in Deboo’s performances in the last fifteen years or so.It came from his kathak training, he said, but he had truly discovered its place in his work while at a discotheque in Mexico. “I’m a big disco person, you know,” he bashfully told Nair. All the twirling – sometimes up to ten minutes of it – unfolds in an extremely heightened state of awareness. This is no trance – Deboo specifies he can sense every aspect of the movement and its resonance in the space around him, using the constant movement to play with speed, music and to create sharp juxtapositions of energy in the performance.

The twirling, though, is receding from his work, he says. His latest preoccupation is working with his back and finding the strength to stay in challenging positions that engage the back for minutes. “I may be 71, but I don’t feel 71,” he said. Fifty, then, is just another number.

All photos by Ritam Bannerjee.

‘Astad had the courage to plough a lonely furrow. He made a life of his own, on his own, and created a path-breaking dance style.’

‘Only a few in the performing arts could do what he did.’
‘A classical dancer can fall back on tradition, but Astad created something absolutely new.’

Article by Archana Masih | Rediff

IMAGE: Astad Deboo, the legendary dancer who died after a brief illness on the morning of December 10, performs at the Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur. Photograph: Kind courtesy Ritam Banerjee

Ambassador Gautam Mukhopadhaya — who has served as India’s envoy to Afghanistan and Myanmar — shares his memories of the Incomparable Astad Deboo with Rediff.com‘s Archana Masih.

Astad is gone, but is more alive than ever. He lives on in the sunny warmth of memories.

What does one think of when one thinks of him? Three things foremost.

First, his astonishing drive, creativity and determination to carry his art forward. He believed in himself. He was ferociously committed to his art.

Second, the sheer struggle he underwent to carry his flame forward, just finding funding and organising his events. Yet, his sheer enjoyment of what he did.

Third, his extraordinary capacity to keep in touch, to talk to you every few days wherever he was. And keep in touch otherwise through photographs, images and videos.

As a friend, he was incomparable. He took the burden of friendship on himself. He didn’t leave it on you.

And he did it lightly. He would joke and tease… usually a phone from him meant that it would be a long call.

Sometimes when you were busy, you would groan. But knowing how much it meant to him, you could not decline it. He would chide you if you did not call or text back.

It was not just me. He kept in touch with all his friends. He was interested in their lives.

My world and his were far apart, but he would query in what I was working on, what I had spoken or written, and discussed issues where he felt that I could share something. Sometimes he shared gossip about my colleagues.

He would do this to all his friends. There was never a vested interest. He valued relationships.

He was very shaukeen, an aesthete, very well dressed, yet very spartan in his habits. Who can forget that incredible haircut!

He was a restless traveller. He travelled so much, to the ends of the earth, but never bored you with his exploits.

He liked good food, but would settle for anything.

IMAGE: Astad during a performance. Photographs: Kind courtesy Astad Deboo/Facebook

He was very cosmopolitan. He could be anywhere. He could pick up a few words of any language and use it. He was very much a global citizen. He could be in the East, West, in high society or in a village; and he dealt with people exactly the same way, whether a domestic help or anyone else.

I got to know him when I was posted in the Indian embassy in Paris and helping with the Festival of India in France in 1985-1986.

One day Astad walked into the embassy and introduced himself. He was in Paris to choreograph the great Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya at the Espace Cardin, a performance space belonging to the fashion designer, Pierre Cardin. I was impressed.

I was always interested in the performing arts and had heard of him and probably seen him, but did not know him.

I have also been particularly interested in music. Our association began with sharing music.

Once, upset that I was not paying attention to her talking to him, our daughter also called Maya, marched into the living room and told him crossly, ‘He is my papa, not your papa’! He recalled this story at her wedding where he performed for her and her husband, exactly two years ago.

Our friendship built up over time. He would visit me wherever I was, Syria, Myanmar, wherever I was posted.

Sometimes I was able to help in getting local sponsorship, like when he performed with the Manipuri dancers when I was in Myanmar. I also organised a public event in Syria where he performed. I would introduce him to colleagues wherever he went.

There were a number of other colleagues in the Foreign Service who recognised his talent and drive almost from the beginning of his career and organised performances of his. Astad remembered and kept in touch with all of them.

Those who liked his dance were devoted to him.

Madhu Trehan recently wrote a piece which captured his struggles very well. I encourage everyone to read that piece simply to be kinder to artists.

It’s not that Astad didn’t get recognition. He got recognition in various circles, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Padma Shri by the Government of India. But he did not get his due.

It was a challenge for him to get funding, help, from the bureaucracy, including the cultural bureaucracy and sections of the corporate world. Many saw his art as one man’s passion without much larger value. Artists need funding to keep their art alive.

When it came, it often came as charity rather than appreciation.

And yet, here was a person who came from Jamshedpur and from a minority community, who had the gumption at really a young age to take a boat to Europe and train with international masters like Pina Bausch Martha Graham, the Murray Louis Dance Company and others.

He trained in Kathak, and later Kathakali. He brought to the Indian performing arts something that did not exist before, a distillation of his explorations, and brought it national and international recognition.

He suffered some rejection from the community of artistes in the early part of his career. He often spoke about the difficulty of working with classical musicians, something he liked to do. Many considered collaborating with him as compromising their own art. But later, some, like Dhrupad musicians like Bahauddin Dagar and the Gundecha brothers did.

In a way it was a blessing in disguise because it forced him to experiment in many different directions. It took him to work with the hearing impaired, the blind, street children and Manipuri drummers. He also worked with the puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee.

His art also took him to crazy locations. He would dance on monument walls and convert a table or chair into a prop for a dance. He could animate anything with his dance.

I remember him once at a home in Damascus to which we were invited. He improvised a dance with a Oud player just like that, using anything or anyone coming his way. He made it look choreographed, not ad hoc.

His mind was constantly searching for spaces, like a sensor, using body and movement in new ways.

He would walk into a room and see what he could do with it. He brought a space alive. One part of him was always searching.

Constraints in India also forced him to take his dance to audiences abroad and experiment with international groups, artists and musicians. He did some great work with Korean, Japanese and other artists and in the process expanded his art.

He found easier recognition abroad. Sometimes the environment in India was too parochial for his work. It was easier for him to be appreciated outside the country, but he never took the easy way out.

He got his due, but among a small slice of society where he was really appreciated. He was also his own publicist; his own secretary. He just lived by his dance.

Most of his performances that I saw were in later life. I would have liked to see his earlier work. I remember him doing a playful mujra like dance at one of the annual Sahmat New Year events in Delhi.

He used more props in his earlier work when he was younger and could do more acrobatic, gravity defying moves.

I have seen black and white stills of his earlier dances. He would send photos on WhatsApp. Those photos are astonishing. I feel his photographers also deserve credit for those great pictures. His costumes were spare.

I would have really liked to see some of his earlier performances when he was just coming up. Most of the later work was rooted in stillness and concentration.

One of his performances I remember well was his choreography with the hearing impaired from Chennai. He used it to highlight their different engagement with sound and the world. He worked with hearing impaired not only in India. He also had a collaboration with the Gallaudet University in Washington for the hearing impaired.

His performances with the Manipuri Thang ta artists were spectacular visual experiences. His later works were profound. He brought a Sufi quality to his dancing.

Ironically, his costumes became more flamboyant, works of art in themselves, signature angarkhas, plumes of fabric that created shapes and silhouettes of their own, living forms, like birds perched for flight.

Astad had the courage to plough a lonely furrow. He made a life of his own, on his own, and created a path-breaking dance style.

Only a few in the performing arts could do what he did. A classical dancer can fall back on tradition, but Astad created something absolutely new. It did not come from a particular style. It was entirely new.

IMAGE: Astad performs at the Hotel Grand, Stockholm, June 2, 2015.
In attendance were then President Pranab Mukherjee, the Swedish king and queen, the crown princess, Indian MPs and business delegations.

My last conversation with him was on December 2. There was WhatsApp group of his close friends where his sister sent out health updates. The initial updates were encouraging and then it started getting darker.

He worried for his medical insurance cover, whether it would be large enough for his treatment. The whole period between the detection of illness and passing was barely over two weeks.

On the morning of December 2, concerned about a thread of messages on him on sleeping badly, I texted him asking if he was well for his next chemo.

He called back immediately to say that he was feeling better, but was simply unable to sleep.

What struck me was that his voice was not sounding good, but he did not know or realise.

I didn’t want to make him talk too much because I wanted him to conserve every bit of his energy.

He called back after a few minutes to say that the doctors had told him that it was too far gone for chemo. One suggested Ayurveda. It had been known to work miracles in some cases.

It was sad that it happened over COVID. I asked him if I could visit him in Mumbai. His answer was the trademark ‘No darling’.

That was our last conversation. He sounded resigned. He fought hard, but he lost. He did not rage or rant.

The messages became less and less. No news meant bad news.

IMAGE: A tribute at the Ojas Art Gallery.

I’m sure there are people working on documenting and archiving his work. This was his one big dread and lament. He was too busy with dance to bother about his legacy. Now, it mocked him.

He had a foundation that was mostly to help his dancers, but he did not to get down to putting together a tangible legacy.

He talked to me about the fear of not leaving behind anything once he exits stage. To do this he needed funds.

I was sincerely hoping that he would recover and realise that he has to retire and focus on archiving his work for posterity, perhaps a museum.

I never thought that he would go. I realise that I will never get that telephone call from him again.

Gautam Mukhopadhaya served as India’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar.

Katayun Saklat , 82, is a charming and exuberant painter and stained glass artist

Seated in the drawing room of her Auckland Square apartment, Katayun Saklat, painter and stained glass artist, though not necessarily in that order, speaks about her exceptional life and her art, as a number of her assistants come and go, pleasantly interrupting her for instructions.

Saklat, 82, is a charming and exuberant personality and the room is a bit like her. But then it is also her gallery, Gallery Katayun. There are paintings on the floor, against the tables and chairs, and of course on the walls — a mix of still lives and portraits. An easel, with work in progress, stands near a door. Above the settee hang three large paintings. The one in the middle is a striking portrait of an old Parsi woman, who was an older friend of Saklat, sitting inside the Tower of Silence.

Article by Chandrima S. Bhattacharya  | The Telegraph India

Another shows her parents. Two others feature another striking old Parsi woman, who suffered from Alzheimer’s.

The people in her paintings are distinct presences, sometimes disturbingly. 

Gallery Katayun, started in 1989, used to hold regular shows till a few years ago here. Now it still holds shows, but at other addresses. Saklat also uses the apartment for her stained glass work. It has been her home since the early 70s.

But speaking of homes, Saklat goes back to her first one.

She grew up in a large three-storey house in Grant Lane. “It was a happy house. There was always something happening there,” said Saklat, trying also to explain the constant activity around her now.

Saklat was born in a Parsi family settled in Calcutta. Her father worked in the Singer sewing machine company. He was the first Parsi to be born in Srinagar and had settled in Calcutta after his marriage.

In the Grant Lane house, each whimsical floor had its own spectacle. The family — Saklat was the youngest of three sisters — led its own bustling life. And there were lots of people. “We never locked our doors in that house,” she said. Later, through her, a lot of contemporary art would also move in.

But art was there already. “We never bought pictures to hang on the walls,” said Saklat. Her father was a natural artist. All the frames on the wall contained monochromatic sauce pen stick sketches, mostly landscapes, by him. Her mother painted in oil on satin fabric — on saris and cushion covers and tea cosies household objects. Those were finely detailed.

After studying at Calcutta Girls’ High School, Saklat had enrolled at JJ College of Arts in Mumbai, then Bombay. But she did not like being taught commercial art at JJ and came back to Calcutta to enrol at Government Art College first and then at Indian College of Arts and Draughtsmanship.

She thinks that the teaching of art can really improve here. What are we taught here?… Not even anatomy, she said. 

But at Indian College of Arts she had met graphic artist Arun Bose as a teacher. Here she also met her group — young artists who would set up a studio together, at the Grant Lane house. Other than Saklat, this group included Bikash Bhattacharjee, who would become famous later, Amal Ghosh, Mrinal Danda, Maya Danda, Smriti De Roy and Panchunarayan Gupta, “a fine watercolourist”. These were the early 60s.

The studio was set up by the artists themselves on the first floor of the Grant Lane house. They put together everything themselves, from the easels to a loft for paintings.

Bhattacharjee’s famous doll series was inspired by a doll that belonged to Saklat’s niece. Saklat also painted the chubby doll in a white dress. But by the time the artists were done with it, the niece had grown up enough to not want the doll any more.

On the floor below, artists Lalu Prasad Shaw and Suhas Roy were tenants, who had decided that the Saklats would be their landlords.

One can imagine the heady atmosphere in the house, the young minds fired by imagination, the laughter, the conversation. “But we had to wind up by 8pm every day, as our family had to have dinner together,” said Saklat, who has always supported young artists and stressed the need for encouraging environments.

As it often happens, some of the artists in the group moved away. But Bhattacharjee remained a regular. When in the early 70s the Saklat family moved to the Auckland Square apartment, Saklat, one of her sisters and Bhattacharjee set up Gallery 52 in Chowringhee Road.

The Grant Lane house features on the cover of the catalogue of an exhibition in 2009 that was held in Gallery K2, with which Saklat was associated closely. The painting, beautifully done, shows the top two floors, as if standing on their own.

Soon after the family to the new apartment, Saklat’s life would take a turn. In those days, she was also feeling a little guilty about being dependent on her father financially. Saklat was beginning to get known. However, even if art wins appreciation, it often pays very little.

In 1973, she was in the UK and got three grants from the British Council. She had always wanted to learn an old craft. So when she heard about the noted stained glass artist Patrick Reyntiens, who taught stained glass making in Buckinghamshire, she decided to learn it from him.

In her first encounter with Reyntiens, she saw him perched two-storeys high, fixing something. He showed her two small bits of blue glass, from that height, and asked which one she liked. “There are 3,000 shades to choose from. The glass here is like pigment in painting.”

The effect can light up the dreariest building. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that Saklat chose stained glass. One can see how light and colours appeal to her. “Stained glass can change the environment,” she said. Two of her best works have been installed in the city. One is a glass wall, which is ceiling to floor and wall to wall, a landscape with birds, butterflies and an island in the middle. This is owned privately.

The other is a large window of several panels, inside the Fire Temple, depicting the seven Amesha Spentas (seven archangels) with Zarathushtra in the middle.

In 1998, she held a 100-piece stained glass exhibition for Art Today in New Delhi. The exhibition space looked stunning. Her stained glass works abound with fishes and mermaids.

Stained glass cannot be installed anywhere; there must be light falling on it. “The north light is good for stained glass,” she said. And the work changes, with every change in light.

Very recently, Saklat has taken up the challenge of metal staining work. It looks like a brave new work.

But the past is always present. The paintings she is working on now seem to take her back to the past. One is a family portrait, of herself with her parents and sisters. The other of her principal at Calcutta Girls’. The third features a lot of butterflies. She has borrowed them from her mother’s tea cosies.

“I cannot do them so well, though,” said Saklat.

“It’s only now that I realise that she was a much better artist than I am.”

Stained glass designer Katayun Saklat’s paintings, with their disconcerting details, give a dark twist to sweet nostalgia

At first glance, Katayun Saklat is just another kindly, elderly lady with a thatch of grey hair. But she is much more than that. She is one of the most accomplished designers of stained glass in India, with her work included in several public and private collections. She is also a painter, working chiefly with oil and watercolour. At 83, Saklat is trying her hand at a new medium, creating decorative steel panels using glass, paint, even shells. An exhibition of her work was held recently at Debovasha, a gallery-cum-publishing house in Kolkata.

Article by Soumitra Das | The Hindu

Saklat’s paintings are deceptively simple, seemingly dipped in sweet nostalgia. They are gorgeously coloured — as one would expect from a stained glass designer — and often feature dreams, flowers, and Parsis, whom she calls the “endangered species”. Saklat is Parsi herself, with her father from Kashmir and mother from Lahore. They moved to Kolkata in 1928 and Saklat was born 10 years later. Their yellow-and-green painted house in Grant Lane in central Kolkata with its jalousied windows and terrace appears in Saklat’s early works.

Phantom faces

Even when Saklat paints her family, she catches them in elaborate formal wear, as if they were in an old-fashioned studio, holding their breath, waiting for the photographer’s signal to relax. In what seems to be a family group portrait, there are numinous ladies in gauzy saris and young men in dark blue jackets and caps — they could well be out of a Byzantine painting. The babes in arms here are anything but cute, more like phantom presences suspended in time.

Time is a silent presence in her painting of an elderly woman captured from three different angles. Her wrinkled face is uncannily vacant as if she is caged in a world of her own from where there is no escape. Is she losing her memory, her sense of self? Her hands fumble, her eyes are unable to grasp what she is trying to unravel. The striking counterpoint is the floating visage of a younger woman, her dark, glowing eyes curious and penetrating.

Trapped in memory

Even when Saklat paints her parents one cannot miss the wry humour. In one of her paintings Mummy is very much the introverted young bride (“Mummy’s only friends were her cousins. She always wanted me to stay home,” says Saklat) while Daddy is a typical moustachioed paterfamilias. They are isolated, hemmed in by a barbed wire fence. Are they too trapped in the no-man’s land of memory?

Hovering mid-air, right above Daddy’s head, is a sewing machine, a reference to her father’s first job as a Singer sewing machine salesman, which brought him to Kolkata.

Design is what matters the most to Saklat, in art and life. “Another word for nature is design. Arteries, veins — everything is designed so beautifully,” says Saklat sitting in her living room stacked with paintings. She started drawing from age four, making dress designs with “so many additions to the same dress that it was not humanly possible to tailor them.” “I over-egged the pudding,” she chuckles. Later, when she started working in a toy and hobby shop, she designed children’s clothes.

In 1957-58, Saklat briefly joined the J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, didn’t like it there, and moved to Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship in Kolkata eventually. There she met artist Arun Bose, whom she describes as a “wonderful teacher and good human being.” Saklat shared her studio in the Grant Lane house with her classmate Bikash Bhattacharjee and other artists for many years.

Glowing windows

When Saklat was in London in 1973, she trained at the studio of Patrick Reyntiens, one of Europe’s leading stained glass artists, for a year. Saklat recalls some of the memorable stained glass panels she has created over the years — she says the most exciting design was for a toothbrush factory in Baroda that featured giant toothbrushes scattered all over. She has also done a dozen stained glass panels and lunettes for Kolkata’s only Parsi fire temple in Metcalfe Street. The largest piece is a glowing ovoid with Zarathustra in the middle surrounded by the Amesha Spentas, the divine entities.

Saklat opened Gallery Katayun at her current residence in Auckland Square, Kolkata, in 1989, and hopes to turn it into a museum one day.

Her only regret is that her clients commission her to do only figurative or pretty stained glass works. She would love to raise a toast to abstract design.

The writer focuses on Kolkata’s vanishing heritage and culture.

Wonder how the world-famous author Rudyard Kipling, a Parsi artist and a Rhinoceros are connected? Look at the portrait of a Parsi artist, Pestonjee Bomanjee (1851-1938) with his long white beard, working on a canvas and beside it is a facsimile of a story written by Rudyard Kipling, on ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Wrinkly Skin’. This is a must for all English literature buffs and all those who have for long inhabited the mesmerising world of Rudyard Kipling.

Article By: Firoza Punthakey Mistree

Pestonjee Bomanjee’s connection to Rudyard Kipling is quite fascinating. Bomanjee was the first Indian student to study art under Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who was appointed as head of the department of artist-craftsmen at the ‘Sir JJ School of Art and Industry’ in 1865. The school was established in Bombay in 1853, by another Parsi Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, a wealthy China Merchant. Rudyard Kipling was born in the principal’s bungalow on the grounds of the Sir JJ School of Art and a bronze plaque commemorates this event.

Bomanjee was a natural artist and his time was spent largely in the big airy studio on the grounds of the school, making the various clay models of flora and fauna, griffons and fantastic creatures, required to decorate the many neo-Gothic style, buildings that were being built on Hornby Road (now Dadabhai Naoroji Road) a mile and a half away from the art school.

Harry Ricketts, the biographer of Rudyard Kipling notes, that Rudyard remembered ‘vast green spaces and wonderful walks through coconut woods on the edge of the sea where the Parsees waded in and prayed to the rising sun.’ This was perhaps one of Kipling’s earliest memories of the Parsis.

Bomanjee, then the only Parsi student at the JJ School of Art, was well acquainted with Rudyard whom he described as an impish child, who would frequently wander across the compound to the School of Art where Bomanjee and other artists were creating models and would pelt them with clay pellets, before being scolded and banished to his home by his father.

These and other encounters with Bomanjee, inspired Rudyard to weave a fantastical tale centred on the artist titled ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Wrinkly Skin’. It was one of the bedtime stories Rudyard narrated to his daughter Josephine.

Kipling weaves this story around a Parsi who lived ‘on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea… and from whose hat, the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour’. This was Kipling’s imaginary description of Bomanjee. The story is about a Rhinoceros who rudely invaded the home of a Parsi and chased him out and of how the beast ate up a freshly baked cake and the way the clever Parsi took revenge on the beast. The curious lesson to be learned from this strange adventure was put into verse by Kipling — ‘Them that takes cakes/ Which the Parsee-man bakes/ Makes dreadful mistakes’.
In a note in the 1955 edition of Just so Stories For Little Children, Kipling confirmed, ‘This is the Parsee Pestonjee Bomonjee sitting in his palm tree… wearing a new more-than-Oriental-Splendour hat of the sort that Parsees wear…’. Perhaps a reference to the shiny lacquered hats Parsis in Bombay wore on a regular basis.

The small portrait of Bomanjee by Ardeshir Pestonji, which is nothing like Kipling’s fantastical drawings of him, depicts the artist precariously balanced, with his foot raised on a stool, intensely mixing paints on a wooden palette. Bomanjee eventually took up painting under John Griffiths who taught him the rigours of European portrait painting, and he was among the first group of Indian artists trained by European teachers who worked on reproducing the Ajanta frescoes.

Firoza Mistree,writes about Rudyard Kipling & Pestonjee Bomanjee. #EverlastingFlame https://t.co/ogFfaor0sc pic.twitter.com/Xq0VWeO6aV

— National Museum (@NMnewdelhi) May 4, 2016

Photographer Arif Mahmood’s Pestonjee, Silver Linings leave one in sweet melancholy

KARACHI:

As the pandemic makes us nostalgic, longing for the yesteryears when times were simpler, a studio-light setup and a little brown bench in front of a dimly lit Arif Mahmood photo helps in turning the bitter yearning into a sweet melancholy. This is precisely what makes Mahmood the maestro.

Article by Tehreem M Alam |The Tribune

Often associated with black and white photography, the Karachi-born artist has made two more additions to his poetic series of photographs – Pestonjee and Silver Linings.

The first is a photo essay chronicling the life of an aged Parsi living in Karachi, from 2013 to 2020, while the latter is a compilation of 32 years of work on the Sufi trail, from 1988 to 2020.

The romance of nostalgia

The majestic scale of Mahmood’s work is hard to wrap one’s head around. Dimly lit, yet pristine, Mahmood’s Pestonjee makes the onlookers yearn for the past. The photo book titled ‘P.S Pestonjee’ is a compilation of nostalgic prints, at times blurry; mocking the façade of ephemerality, for the snapshots have what it takes to be timeless.

Introducing Pestonjee, Mahmood says he is an old man who he started photographing in 2013. “I started shooting Pestonjee in 2013, and after a year of shooting frequently, I asked him if I could do a book on him. He lived in an old house, in an old area near Soldier Bazar. The romance of nostalgia is what stirred me,” said Arif Mahmood.

Mahmood was inspired by Pestonjee’s spirit. He draws a parallel between his father and Pestonjee. “In 2016, my dad fell seriously ill. He passed away in 2019. While in contrast, Pestonjee – who was a year older than my dad – was walking around, alive and well. This inspired me greatly,” he said while talking to The Express Tribune.

However, with the compilation of this series of picturesque moments, Mahmood’s photos also mark a fierce appearance of loneliness.

On a photo titled ‘Monument of Love’ Mahmood remarks a ‘confession’ and writes, “It was evening time, the winter light had just started to pour into his hiding space area which I had been visiting for the past five years or so. I hadn’t seen this decorative piece before in his living/sitting room before. Maybe it was meant to be seen today by me. A symbol of love. A basic desire of all humans, to be loved and cared for. I have this feeling that he might have desired this feeling from another all his life. He was a lonely man heading towards his nineties with only an indifferent nephew in the States.”

Besides nostalgia, there is also an inherent romance of solitude in Pestonjee. The onlookers are exiled from the present just by viewing Mahmood’s work as it draws parallels between the artistic and intellectual impulses of aestheticism.

A spiritual journey

As is well known, Mahmood has been collecting photos of shrines and mosques since the beginning of his career as a photo-journalist. In Silver Linings, he explores the limitlessness of the Sufi experience. “This compilation consists of my work from 1988 to 2020. It is my life as a photographer, and, maybe, my main retrospective,” he writes in the prelude of the monograph.

Mahmood’s Silver Linings is an introspective journey that he took after the death of his mother, who was a seasoned traveller of the mystical path. Presenting the monograph as an ode to his mother, Mahmood writes that the first time he visited Sehwan was with his mother, in 1998.

With his long-standing interest in the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, the photographs in this series are almost haunting. Mahmood focuses a lens on the paradox of despair and hope and produces snapshots that are a mixture of wistfulness and submission.

“This was purely my life of faith. The search for solace through the path of the wise. And the wise mostly taught how to cherish life and live through its bounties and recognise the beauty in all this intricacy. To feel a holy presence inside you, to experience God through the world you were thrown into.”

While the monograph is fairly simple, it opens doors we don’t normally enter from and allows us to wander into places of beauty.

The Canvas Gallery will house Mahmood’s Pestonjee and Silver Linings till March 4, 2021.

We are thrilled to inform that our dear friend Veera Rustomji will have a solo exhibition at VM Art Gallery in Karachi Pakistan.

VM Art Gallery is pleased to present Fish Meets Grill, a solo exhibition by Veera Rustomji, opening on 24^th March 2021 from 11am – 7pm. The exhibition will continue until 11^th April 2021.

The title refers to a recipe as an anecdote for the ultimate fate of creatures cooked to reach charred perfection. If we think about the ‘manly’ activity of fishing, it is usually an idealised form of bonding and an attempt of being at one with nature. However, perhaps we should also consider how fanfare masculinity expressed through activities such as fishing and hunting leave traces of unwarranted developments and divisions in our environment through both intangible and seaborne ways.

This is a story of disparate elements connected through autobiographical and fantastical accounts. The subtle kookiness of mythic sea life leaves us to ponder about fictitious beings and erased lands connecting architecture and storytelling. This body of work also takes into account the pleasure sought from consuming and participating in these narratives, animating marine life through colonial waves, and gendered footprints. Some of these stories are told by production houses like Disney or Netflix and some of the marine life stories are excavated through researchers and archaeologists. As we are embroiled in a perpetual contest of erasing diversity from the coast to the hills, pulling the land out from underneath others’ feet, and wearing the skins of beings on our backs, it is safe to say we are at an irrevocable stage with our surroundings. These are the musings before the calamities.

VM Art Gallery will only allow a limited number of visitors within the space at once in order to follow social distancing SOPs in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. To avoid having to wait outside the gallery, please call ahead of time. All visitors will be required to wear a mask and get their temperature checked at the door.

Failure to follow Gallery protocol will result in visitors being asked to leave the premises. Please help us follow safe practices during your visit to avoid unnecessary complications.

About the artist:

Veera Rustomji (b. 1992) is an artist from Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (2015) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (2019). Alongside pursuing her visual art practice, she teaches within the Fine Art Department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. From 2015 – 2018 she curated and managed residencies in Karachi with Vasl Artists’ Association as a Project Coordinator and during her time in London she worked with the Learning & Collections Department at the Royal Academy of Arts. She is a recipient of the UAL Postgraduate International Scholarship Award and is part of a Chelsea alumni collective named Portland. As an artist she has displayed internationally; some key highlights include Rossi & Rossi, London, The Arts Licks Weekend, Aicon Gallery NYC and the 2017 Karachi Biennale.

www.veerarustomji.com

A photograph taken seven years before her passing says much about the life, times and character of the trailblazing Meherbai Tata

The much-loved wife of Dorabji Tata and daughter in-law of Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Tata group, Meherbai Tata was a woman of personality. A participant in the ornamental theatrics of being imperial within Empire, one finds her name regularly among the maharajas, nawabs and begums in royal chronicles. And deservedly so.

Meherbai was honoured with the ‘Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ (CBE) in 1916 for her philanthropic efforts in service of the Crown during World War I. She hosted Queen Anne, along with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, at her home. She was India’s first woman Olympic athlete — at the 1924 Paris games, although her name is missing from India’s records — and the first Indian woman to fly in an airplane (in 1912). As founder of the National Council for Women in India, she fought for the ‘modern’ educated Indian woman.

Article by Sneha Vijay Shah | Horizons Tata Trust

is an art historian, curator and arts entrepreneur. She divides her time between London and Mumbai

The Lafayette Studio photograph of Meherbai Tata from 1924 and, commissioned after her death, the painting based on it (Images courtesy: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (above left), and, Trustees, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai)

In the midst of a global pandemic, with grief and loss surrounding us, the time is perhaps apt to ask the hereafter questions. What becomes of us once we leave this realm? How would we like to be remembered? What happens to our legacy, our life’s work, the impact we make through our time in this world?

Photographs and portraits have long been used as a way to remember our ancestors and loved ones. Such remembering was not as straightforward in Meherbai’s day as it is now. The process of being photographed took far too long for the possibility of candid captures. One would carefully choose a photo studio, attire, props and then strike a calculated pose as the camera registered the image. Photographs images from this period, thus, represent the stories the people posing wanted to tell about themselves, how they hoped to be seen and remembered.

As an art historian, I research how such archived portrait photographs, when interpreted through the lens of art history, can recover ‘lost identities’. In the case of Meherbai, the photographs illuminate the private, the public and the political, as also the life, times, achievements and insecurities of a once dominant woman who belonged to one of the most powerful industrial families of India. The attempt here is to uncover the secrets hidden within Meherbai’s official portrait.

On 27 June, 1924, Lady Meherbai Dorab Tata walked into The Lafayette Studio at 160 New Bond Street, London, for her official photograph, possibly on the occasion of being summoned to court at Buckingham Palace. The studio had built a reputation as portrayers of a rich and powerful empire and had been decreed the title of ‘Photographer Royal’. The warrant was a magnet for the studio’s clientele, among them India’s royals and other eminences. These dignitaries flocked to Lafayette for the explicit purpose of having an ‘official portrait’ made.

‘Court’ attire

Within the black-and-white frame of her glass negative, located in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s archives in London, Meherbai looks ethereal. In the Lafayette archives, translated from plate into printed form, within the transferred image the light changes immediately (see image on page 68). One’s gaze is drawn towards her white gloves — the whitest element of the portrait — the very piece of her outfit that makes it definitive English ‘court’ attire. A gold bangle, with intricate leaf motives, traditional to Indian dressing, sits subtly over her gloves on each hand.

Meherbai appears dressed in a crisply ironed satin-silk sari, the folds still visible around the skirt. The image reveals photography’s ability to capture the unintended. The ironing around her hip gives way to crumpling. She probably arrived at the studio wearing the outfit — no easy task — and she would have had to climb up the three flights of stairs to the top floor studio, where the cumbersome equipment of the photographic trade would have been waiting for her.

A little rosette sits upon Meherbai’s waist, and it pieces together two eclectic elements of her outfit: the Edwardian blouse with a V-neck and her sari. The pallu (loose end of the sari) gracefully drapes her combed bun before flowing in the Parsi-Gujrati style to the front. Meherbai’s attire immediately identifies her as an Indian, somebody with knowledge of western fashions. Her hands come to a close, right hand tucked within her left, as she holds an ostrich feather plume and Indian batwa (purse) within her palms. Her dual allegiance to India and the Crown is evident.

For Meherbai, the ‘national sari’ was almost obsessively a patriotic symbol. She wore it while driving a motorcar or riding a horse, even at tennis tournaments. Furthermore, she was noted to have — in the words of Stanley Reed, then editor of The Times of India “regarded with some impatience the younger members of her community who discarded the traditional costume for Western modes”. In an address delivered at Battle Creek College on November 29, 1927, she stated proudly while drawing attention to her attire: ‘This is the sari, the dress that I wear. The sari was never worn in Persia, but we have modified it a good deal and we wear it a little differently from the Hindu ladies from whom we took the dress”.

By the early 1920s, the sari had emerged in India as a political garment, helped along by Gandhi’s push for women — as “mothers of Indian industry” — to give up foreign consumption and switch to Khadi fabrics. Meherbai’s choice of modified court dress, an amalgamation of the Indian-Gujrati sari draped over an Edwardian-fashioned bodice with a plunging neckline, is intriguing within this political context. It occupies a threshold position, much like her in society, between the English and the Indian.

Meherbai accessorises her outfit with her ‘Jubilee diamond’ pendant necklace, named after Queen Victoria’s centenary anniversary. This is set in a platinum claw and hung on a thin platinum chain, surrounded by a double-chain pearl necklace that extends to her torso. At 245 carats, after being cut and polished, the diamond is twice as large as the Koh-I-Noor, that vexed icon of colonial plunder.

Found in a South African mine in 1895, the Jubilee diamond was acquired by a consortium of London diamond merchants. During the cutting and cleaning process, the consortium realised the brilliance of the diamond and planned for it to be presented to Queen Victoria as a gift on the occasion of her ‘jubilee anniversary’ in 1896. This did not happen for some reason.

The consortium decided to display the diamond at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It is here, in the centre of much hype and attention, that Meherbai and Dorab Tata ‘shopped’ for it. ‘Shopping’ at the Paris expositions was almost a tradition within the Tata family. In 1878, Jamsetji Tata brought from his trip much that fascinated him, including animals that he kept at his zoo in Navsari and the spun-iron pillars that till today hold up the ballroom of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai.

The Jubilee, which holds the rank of the sixth-largest diamond in the world, was purchased by Meherbai and Dorab for £100,000. Every time the Tatas removed it from their safe deposit vault in London for Meherbai to wear it, they were reportedly ‘fined’ £200 by the insurance company. Posing confidently with the Jubilee, a gift for the queen within this portrait, one cannot help but wonder how the diamond might have been received as part of her garb in court at Buckingham Palace.

Diamond for a cause

The Jubilee was part of the jewellery pledged by Dorab Tata to the Imperial Bank when the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) was undergoing a crisis in 1924. The diamond was eventually sold following Meherbai’s demise from leukaemia, along with the rest of her jewellery, to set up the Lady Meherbai Tata Trust for cancer research and women’s education.

Coming back to the portrait, upon Meherbai’s lapel, almost camouflaged by the gradient of her sari, is her CBE badge. The award was instituted by George V to reward military and civilian wartime service to the Empire. It was almost a bribe to draw elite members of the colonies to help the imperial war effort. As Parsis with no title of their own, the CBE and other similar honours may have been the only way for them to gain the social clout to match their growing business power.

Unlike many of her female counterparts, Meherbai is careful not to lean on or take the support of any props in her portrait, an authoritative pose that marks her unconventional individuality. Meherbai stages herself as youthful, stands tall and poised, showcasing the grace, dignity and athletic spirit she was bred to embody. She is proud of her figure — Lafayette’s ‘retouchers’ were experts at bringing in waists and correcting arm widths, but Meherbai seems to have excused herself from such services — she is self-aware and confident.

The portrait’s backdrop is painted in a style typical of the period’s fashions, blurred out like the background of a Rembrandt painting. Lafayette’s expert team ensured that Meherbai, even embellished with all her adornments, is the only distinguishable subject. One sees a hint of a frame with a western balcony sneaking through. The only studio prop seen is a stool in the middle ground that partially hides behind Meherbai, its purpose seemingly to ground her within the composition.

The lighting is dramatic and Meherbai’s expression austere. She is well aware of her beauty, a notion that during this period alluded in part to a fair complexion. As Persians, Parsis were not as ‘white’ as Europeans, and not as dark as Indians. They held an in-between position even in this aspect. Meherbai doesn’t have to hide behind her colour. Her complexion is in fashion.

The Tatas were certainly proud of Meherbai’s portrait. It is the one the family chose to convert into an oil painting, upon her death, to immortalise her memory (see image on page 68). Queen Victoria’s court painter, John Lavery, was employed for the commission. Curiously, Meherbai’s batwa is missing from the painting’s composition.

Within the portrait, colour is brought to Meherbai’s skin and garb. She materialises as a manifestation of Reed’s description of her: “Above medium height, clear cut, and clear-eyed, with that flush through the faintly tinted olive skin…”

Sneha Vijay Shah is an art historian, curator and arts entrepreneur. She divides her time between London and Mumbai

Nineteenth century Parsee traders returned to India from Canton with embroidered silk cloth which was fashioned into unique saris which came to be known as garas

Traditional Parsee embroidery has its roots in ancient Persian culture and Silk Road influences, with proponents of the craft hoping to popularise it globally

Article by Huzan Tata | South China Morning Post

A gara with multicoloured embroidery of Chinese motifs and initials in gold on the border (kor) and front (pallav). Photo: Courtesy of Zenobia Davar

One of the first questions many people ask when meeting a Parsee woman is “How many garas do you own?” The intricately-designed sari is considered the small Indian

community’s traditional dress and has long been admired for its unique handiwork.

There are fewer than 90,000  Parsees remaining across the world, with most living in India after they migrated there in the 7th century following the Islamic conquest of Persia (

Iran). They are known for their contributions in fields from the economy to the arts, and their fabrics are just as significant.

The gara, draped like a Gujarati sari, is considered their pièce de résistance in the world of textiles. But they are more than just yards of cloth – garas are an amalgamation of many cultural worlds woven into one fabric.

A dark green sari with a white floral border from Ashdeen’s Emperor’s Garden Collection. Photo courtesy of Ashdeen Lilaowala

How did this mix come to be? During the early 1800s, Parsee traders frequented the ports of Canton (Guangdong), Hong Kong, Macau and Shanghai to sell Indian cotton, opium and spices in return for Chinese tea, porcelain and silk. Rumour has it that one of these traders asked a Chinese craftsman to embroider six yards of silk cloth for his wife, to fashion as a sari. This was well received and more Parsees started wearing these pieces, which came to be known as garas – the wooden frame within which the weaving is done.

Parsee embroidery style has its roots in Persia, though, and only later absorbed influences from Chinese needlework and designs, as well as Indian and European motifs. “Since Zoroastrianism [the religion Parsees follow] spread right to the borders of China during the Achaemenid Empire till 330BC, there was a lot of intermingling of culture, style, symbol and stitch,” explained Dr Shernaz Cama, director of the Unesco Project for the Preservation and Promotion of Parsee Zoroastrian Culture and Heritage (ParZor).

“With the emergence of the Silk Route, Persians and the Chinese began looking to one another for their wealth of embroidery,” she said. The Chinese chain stitch, along with the satin, long and short stitches, remain popular methods of needlework on garas, originally made from mulberry silk.

When 19th century Parsee traders began returning from China with embroidered silk, the first garas had Chinese motifs like the Divine Fungus, the Endless Knot, roosters, pagodas, foliage and butterflies. Soon, as more women took interest in these garments, they adapted them to their tastes and traditions. Instead of the multicoloured Chinese fabrics, they would ask for embroidery in white and cream on dark colours to match with their sudrehs – a muslin undergarment worn by all Zoroastrians, visible from underneath the sari.

Persian symbols of nature, and Indian motifs like the ‘ambi’ or mango paisley were also added. Plain saris with elaborate borders known as ‘kors’ were designed, or those with embroidery only on the ‘pallav’, the front of the sari. Children’s tunics or ‘jhablas’ and borders for capri-length pantaloons called ‘ijars’ were popular items too.

A 19th century ‘Cheena Cheeni’ gara brought from China for an engagement in a Parsi family. Photo courtesy of Parzor

Ashdeen Lilaowala, a renowned Indian fashion designer who specialises in Parsee embroidery and has worked with the ParZor Project, said he travelled through Iran and China to trace the roots of gara-making and “find a connection between the motifs”.

“During my travels, I discovered that this was a proper trade, with families of Canton whose livelihood ran on this exchange. The women chose designs; the men were involved in the selling. Garas were ultimately an amalgam of Chinese art with Persian influences on a very Indian garment, with sprinkles of a European aesthetic.”

As British influence grew in several spheres of Indian life during colonial times, it made its way onto the gara too – scalloped borders and motifs of baskets, bows and ribbons were incorporated on pieces. While saris that feature figures and scenes of Chinese men and women are known as ‘Cheena-Cheeni’ (the Gujarati term for people from China) garas, the ‘kanda-papeta’ (onions and potatoes) garas have round baubles, giving them their name. The ‘Chakla-Chakli’ gara is dominated by sparrows (chakli) and floral designs.

Every single gara, every single design has a story behind it. It’s ultimately a heritage of humanity, because it merges the best of the East and West Dr Shernaz Cama

“Cranes are one of our popular motifs apart from the ‘Cheena-Cheeni’. A lot of people love florals, so we do detailed chrysanthemums, peonies and roses as well,” said Lilaowala about his brand, Ashdeen.

Mumbai-based designer Zenobia Davar, who has been creating garas for almost two decades, said garas on off-white silks with pastel shades have their own charm apart from those in traditional purple, red and black. “The beauty depends upon the uniqueness of the design, and blend of colours and stitches used … it’s nothing less than painting with a needle.”

One gara can take from three weeks to several months to stitch, depending on the intricacy of the work, with the more detailed ones costing upwards of 80,000 rupees (US$1,o62) due to the skill involved. Many prefer to buy machine-made saris as they are more affordable, but they lose out on the charm and authenticity of a handstitched gara.

While traditional garments are considered family heirlooms today, production declined when many Parsees tore up or gave away their garas in the 1930s and 40s, complaining they were too heavy to wear and maintain.

Handstitched clutch purses with Persian, Chinese and floral motifs. Photo courtesy of Zenobia Davar

“Fashion changed; due to the growing nationalist movement in India, people wanted to wear more khadi, the locally handwoven natural fibre cloth popularised by Mahatma Gandhi, and the affluent gravitated towards French chiffon. That’s when people realised we were losing out on this craft,” explained Cama.

“Since I inherited authentic garas for my wedding, I realised their precious value. If we don’t preserve our inheritance of this rare art in its original form, it will perish forever. So I provide regular work as well as train artisans in this field, creating an awareness about authentic Parsee embroidery,” Davar said.

The handful of designers who create garas have diversified into creating bags, clutches, shawls, tops, and lehengas – the long skirt and crop-top that many Indian women wear for celebrations – using this style. As fancy saris are rarely worn in daily life, these products help to keep up sales and provide artisans with work. “We continue to pay homage to what constitutes a gara – the motifs, stitching and designs – with newer collections and ideas,” said Lilaowala.

As the craft is relatively unknown outside India, its proponents wish to take it to global audiences someday. Said Cama: “I hope more people popularise this art – every single gara, every single design has a story behind it. It’s ultimately a heritage of humanity, because it merges the best of the East and West.”

Huzan Tata

Huzan Tata is an independent journalist based in Mumbai, India. She writes on arts, culture, books, lifestyle and travel. Her work has been published in National Geographic Traveller India, TimeOut, Travel + Leisure India & South Asia, Verve Magazine, Scroll, and more.

India

Jimmy Engineer said that he has been painting for well over four decades and has so far created hundreds of paintings but he considers transforming big murals into colour

Article by Muhammad Zahid Rifat | Daily Times.

World-renowned Pakistani artist, social crusader and peace activist Jimmy Engineer has said that he is genuinely proud having transformed in colours in a big mural great poet and philosopher Allama Mohammad Iqbal’s collection of Persian poetry “Javid Namah” and regards it as his major artistic achievement.

He said this while talking to this scribe in connection with 83rd death anniversary of great poet and thinker which was observed by the grateful people on April 21, 2021.

Jimmy Engineer said that he has been painting for well over four decades and has so far created hundreds of paintings but he considers transforming big mural into colours.

Allama Iqbal’s Persian poetic collection “Javid Namah” is one of his two major artistic achievements, other being his historical series of Pakistan Movement paintings highlighting Muslims exodus to their new motherland carved out on the world map out of nowhere under inspiring leadership of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah on the basis of concept of a separate homeland for the Muslims of the sub-continent presented by Allama Mohammad Iqbal.

He said that both these major artistic achievements were created with the blessings of Almighty Allah during first decade of his turning into a professional artist and have given him recognition and appreciation, both nationally and internationally, as an imaginative creative artist. Incidentally both these major artistic achievements were created by him while he was still staying in Lahore. He is presently living in Karachi for many years together and busy working there as dedicated and committed creative artist, social worker and peace activist.

Allama Iqbal’s Persian poetic collection ‘Javid Namah’ is one of his two major artistic achievements, other being his historical series of Pakistan Movement paintings, highlighting Muslims exodus to their new motherland carved out on the world map out of nowhere under inspiring leadership of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah on the basis of concept of a separate homeland for the Muslims of the sub-continent presented by Allama Mohammad Iqbal

Giving more details regarding mural of “Javid Namah”, Jimmy Engineer said that Allama Mohammad Iqbal in one of his letters to his son Javid Iqbal had written that in the first instance, no artist will ever be able to transform “Javid Namah” in colours on the canvass or as a mural and if anyone at all accomplished this then that artist will be attain international fame and reputation. He said that a number of local and foreign artists had tried their hands during life time of great poet and philosopher and even after his demise in April 1938 but had failed to accomplish this challenging task. He emphatically stated that he had undertaken this gigantic task as a challenge to him as a creative and imaginative artist and was able to complete it in one year with the blessings of Almighty Allah.

Jimmy Engineer further said that that he had started working to transform “Javid Namah” into a mural of 10 x 15 feet size on the wall of a room of Dr Javid Iqbal’s newly acquired bungalow on Main Boulevard Gulberg Lahore in 1981 and had completed it one year in 1982 staying throughout this period there.

He said that research scholars on Iqbaliyaat can visit the bungalow of Dr Javid Iqbal, who has since expired couple of years back, with the prior permission of his wife Justice Nasira Javid Iqbal to view the mural of “Javid Namah” which will be greatly helpful in their researches.

In respond to a question about publication of images of “Javid Namah” mural in a book published in October 2012, Jimmy Engineer said that well-known India writer and intellectual Mumtaz Currim had edited and compiled number of articles written by scholars from India and abroad and published these in a book under the title of “Jannat: Paradise in Islamic Art” which was published by Marg Foundation.

One of the article in the book was titled “Javid Namah: Iqbal’s Heavenly Journey” which was written by Syed Khalid Qadri. The said article included images of the big mural of “Javid Namah” created by me, he added.

Jimmy Engineer went on to say that he regarded this as a great honour for himself as well as his loved motherland Pakistan that the images of mural of “Javid Namah” had been published in a book in this manner.

Replying to a question, Jimmy Engineer said that he will be talking about his other major artistic achievement Pakistan Movement paintings some other times as creation of these huge canvasses into colour also make interesting and appreciable reading for people of all ages particularly the younger generations.