Two Koli artists are recording shifts in their identity via pop-up museums

Parag Tandel’s parents used to tell him a story that all parents in Thane’s Chendani-Koliwada told their children: If he ventured to catch fish in the creek abutting the village, he would most certainly be attacked by the monster maankaape, or “neck cutter”, that lurked on its banks. This piece of fiction, invented to save little ones from falling into the water, rarely stopped young Parag from fishing in that water body nor in the multiple lakes and fish farms nearby. Had he not found his calling in contemporary art, he would have liked to have sold dried fish for a living. However, of late the artist has been drifting closer to his Koli origins. 

The most recent manifestation of this is the Tandel Fund of Archive, which he co-founded with his artist wife, Kadambari Koli-Tandel, who also grew up in his fishing village. The latter also deals with the Koli community in her practice, looking particularly at forms of jewellery and costumes. The duo intends to record the unique and shifting cultural histories of more than 40 koliwadas (Koli villages) that are located within Mumbai but which are strangely removed from it. But rather than use this material for contemporary art, they will show it in the form of quarterly pop-up museums. “Both of our works deal with Kolis. But we realised there are areas which go out of our practice and which we need to show,” says 40-year-old Parag.

"I like to work with poisonous materials because that is what human beings are. We destroy things," Parag Tandel, Co-founder, Tandel Fund of Archive

Kolis are among the aboriginal inhabitants of Mumbai. S M Edwardes wrote in the Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island in 1909: “Older than the cocoa-nut palm, older than the Bhandari palm-tapper, are the Koli fishing folk of Bombay.” According to him, among them one could likely find “the blood of the men of the Stone Age”. The Kolis are said to have developed the coastlines of the seven islands that would later form one city, but as the British administration began “reclamation” of land in the late 19th century, the fisherfolk were slowly pushed to smaller pockets. They have settled in Cuffe Parade, Backbay, Sion, Worli, Vasai and Uran among other regions.

The Tandels’ first pop-up was held last month near their own koliwada. It dealt with the work of the late Dattatray Mahadeo Koli (1931-2004), a photographer who had shot the wedding of Parag’s parents. His collection of black-and-white photos threw up many colourful surprises. “He documented the city on varied levels,” says Parag, displaying the original prints which bear scenes of Koli family functions, political meetings , film sets, as well as self-portraits shot with a timer. The story goes he had been gambling to fund his photography habit and got a camera from his parents as a pre-condition for getting married. But the gambling never quite stopped. He had been ambitious by recording his local landscape and also working in the bigger world of Mumbai.  He went by the pseudonym “Diana”, a stylish nickname coined by his friends in show business, notable among whom was Raj Kapoor. 

What the Tandels also found interesting was the fact that some of the photos were stamped with the words “artist and photographer”. “It was rare for a studio photographer in the 1950s to have seen himself as an artist.” Dilip Mahadev Koli, “Diana” Koli’s son, says his father became something of a local hero after Dilip Kumar asked for him during a visit to Thane. Yet, the photos remained largely forgotten until they were shown at the Khule Kaladalan, a small open-air gallery run by the Thane Municipal Corporation, where Diana had been employed for a period. Digital copies of the photographs were used as some of the originals are in delicate condition. They are to be restored from their negatives, and some unseen 35 mm slides will be screened in a follow-up exhibition about the artist.

For most people, ‘Koli’ means music and dance. That is it,” observes Kadambari. Indeed, the popular imagining of the culture is borrowed from superficial references in Hindi films such as in the song “Galyan Sakli Sonyachi” featured in Toofan aur Bijli (1975) and later Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahi (1991). In Mumbai’s museums, the Kolis are typically a footnote. Occasionally, Kolis come to public attention because of their opposition to large projects affecting the sea such as the coastal road and the Shivaji memorial recently, and the Bandra Worli Sealink before that. City walking tours advertise koliwadas as a “different side of Mumbai” and charge as much as Rs 3,500 to visit one, listen to an expert, eat and take home a souvenir. One encouraging development has been the launch of an annual seafood festival by the Kolis of Versova to mark the beginning of the fishing season. 

The natural tensions between tradition and modernisation that exist within the community were perhaps amplified in the Tandel household, where Parag’s mother sourced and sold fish and his father held down a company job while also helping with her shop. Historically, his koliwada had been a mercantile village where shipping rather than fishing was the primary occupation. Thane, once being a halt port for ships, and later connected with Mumbai by the maiden local train in 1853, encountered and embraced the new relatively quickly. The onset of Nehruvian modernism there a century later is glimpsed in Diana’s photographs. Capitalism took people further away from fishing and towards aspirations such as speaking English and working in offices. Such hierarchies were less visible in Vitawa, just across the creek, where the duo has their studio and where some families still fish for themselves. The Koli language which survives in other koliwadas has disappeared in Thane.

An archival image of a family function in Chendani Koliwada

Parag hopes the archive will eventually help address the disconnect with fishing in his area. He has broached related questions in his practice of 20 years as illustrator and sculptor. TARQ gallerist Hena Kapadia has showed his work from 2016, including his first solo exhibition Chronicle, in which he evoked water pollution by crafting sculptures that resembled sea creatures out of toxic transparent resin. “He has since looked at a variety of aspects that both directly and indirectly affect the Koli community, including focusing on the idea of community and heritage through the lenses of development, food, ritual and nature,” says Kapadia. “I like to work with poisonous materials because that is what human beings are. We destroy things,” says Parag. Having seen fishermen in Vitawa return with large amounts of trash in their nets, he fashioned a giant fish out of a fishing net and filled it with debris. This is in contrast to the early years of his career when he was consumed by the subjects of migration and urbanisation in Mumbai at large.

In their apartment where they also stock their art, the couple seems excited and overwhelmed at their archival project. Over the years, they had tinkered with ideas of starting an art residency or a permanent museum. Those concepts would have needed investment and space, but the pop-up format appears to be a malleable and less expensive way to engage with the fishing community. They have already archived a number of traditional and even lost recipes. Their forthcoming pop-ups, to be held at various koliwadas, will show how each village has its own variant of dishes like umbar, a deep-fried snack served in weddings and usually made from wheat, urad and jaggery. 

Keeping in view community sentiments, the pop-ups will take place during Koli festivals such as Narali Purav and Sakhar Chauth. The archivists expect that the historical documents shared by the Portugal government in 2017 will improve our understanding about the community’s culture between the 16th and 19th centuries. The idea for the Tandel Fund of Archive actually came from an 18th-century concept, when villages raised a fund to keep homes running when some members were away at sea. By reviving it, the pop-up museum’s title itself becomes an archive.