Vignettes of a city by the sea

A city’s past appears like lost steps. However, Matthew Beaumont, author of The Walker: On Finding And Losing Yourself In The Modern City, notes that all “lost steps, paradoxically, are unlost, and only the steps that follow a specific, prescribed trajectory are lost.”

DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery)’s ongoing exhibition Once Upon A Time In Bombay at the Taj Mahal Palace, Colaba, renders glimpses into the lost steps that help illuminate how the city of Bombay has evolved over the centuries. With this curation, DAG, house to pre-modern and modern Indian art, attempts to look at Bombay’s metamorphosis into a “thriving urban centre”. However, the collection reflects much more than that. It maps everyday desires, presents dreamscapes, hyper-accentuates the city by the sea, and centralises the stories that help formulate the city’s myths and its excruciating reality. It can be witnessed in S G Thakur Singh’s Dusk at Chowpatty, Mumbai, L N Taskar’s untitled painting that presents a Maharashtrian temple scene, and A S Tendulkar’s untitled artwork Khada Parsi, Byculla, Mumbai, to name a few. In a conversation with DHoS, the CEO and MD of DAG, Ashish Anand, shares his views on the curation. Edited excerpts:

What was the impetus to curate this exhibition, spotlighting the city’s past in particular? Arundhati Roy once noted that “India lives in several centuries at the same time.” This rings true for its cities, Mumbai chiefly. In your opinion, is that reflected in this curation, too?

We always put together something special for the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, and for this iteration, it was an exhibition on Bombay itself — the city as represented by artists over approximately one century of their practice. It consisted of painters who had a strong link to the city — those who had taught at Sir J J School of Art, including the British art teachers during the Raj, as well as their students, and practitioners of the so-called Bombay School of Art.

It allowed us a chance to view the city as it existed from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century through the works of some of the city’s best-known masters of the time, and it [reflected] their views about cityscapes and neighbourhoods viewed with affection. They could hardly have known then that an exhibition such as this would turn into a platform of memories and nostalgia. Bombay has since morphed into Mumbai and is rapidly changing, with old landmarks making way for newer ones. This simultaneity is one of the charms of the city that we hope has triggered interesting conversations about the need to document places and people, not just as demographics but by way of popular culture.

In terms of technique, the selections are largely watercolour works. Was it deliberate? Additionally, would you say that the technique while being difficult also possesses qualities like porousness and osmosis, sitting rather well with the city’s cosmopolitanism?

The Bombay School emerged as a result of J J’s curriculum [which] was based on that of the Royal Academy of Art in London. With the Bombay Art Society setting strictures for its annual exhibitions, academic realism became an important facet of the art practice in and around Bombay and emphasised naturalism by way of landscapes, portraits and what is called history painting. Landscapes and portraits used watercolours because they were quick to make, with a quality of colour and light that has a luminous quality and transparency that became a hallmark of the Bombay School. We are glad to have been able to show works by so many artists who mastered this style: N R Sardesai, A S Tendulkar, A M Mali, Baburao Sadwelkar, D C Joglekar, G S Haldankar and several others.

While one sees several women in the canvases, the gaze appears largely male-centric— given it’s a male-dominated curation, focusing on architecture, commerciality, and even the leisurely sights. Would you say it represented the skewed, gendered opportunities from the eras gone by? Or there weren’t just enough works you could use by women for this particular period?

Once Upon A Time In Bombay is a glimpse of a larger exhibition on the theme. Since this was a smaller prelude, the curation was necessarily tight and did not include, for instance, portraits, which are an important facet [of] the larger show. We are fortunate today to have a large number of women artists, but this was not always so. Among the earliest were Ambika Dhurandhar and B Prabha, and their works are part of the expanded exhibition along with those of others — male and female — as long as they fulfil the criterion of the theme.

The exhibition is on till February 28.