How can we get India invested in our culture? Feroze Gujral explains

Gujral speaks to Veenu Sandhu on the urgent need to get India invested in its culture

Those who’ve grown up in the eighties would remember what teenagers’ rooms back then looked like — with walls plastered with posters of cricketers like Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Viv Richards and Imran Khan; of bands and singers such as George Michael, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Abba, Guns N’ Roses; and collages of actors and models. One person who’d invariably occupy a place of pride on these collages, created after snipping out pictures from magazine after magazine, was Feroze Gujral — standing out as an Indian model with an international look.

She’d soon move away from modelling, though, and start her boutique (Fizzarro), get into ceramics export, anchor a TV show, write columns in newspapers, before finally finding her calling in art and culture.

Co-founder and director of The Gujral Foundation, Feroze Gujral is a woman on the move, nonstop — a pandemic notwith­standing. When the lockdown was decla­red, she was stuck in Colorado — “gleefully so with my brother, cousins and my aunt”. She’d go on long car drives on weekends, did a bit of skiing and played a lot of golf and tennis. Then, she was off to the UK, travelling to historical sites outside London. Back home, she visited the Partition Museum in Amritsar, Rishikesh, Kasauli, Goa, Hyderabad, Dubai, Maldives… “I am very careful and I hope I am smart about it,” she says.

Even today she has been out and has managed to rush back home just in time for our virtual meeting. She logs in on her phone video and thereafter holds the device for a good hour or so as we chat.

In a year, The Gujral Foundation, which was set up in 2008 with her husband Mohit Gujral, organises one or two international art and culture projects and at least three or four in India. Last year, it had a big project featuring international artists at the Kochi Biennale that got cancelled, as did the India Art Fair and her speaking tour in the US.

“That’s been sad,” she says, “but I won’t call it a setback. It’s been a great sabbatical after running for 12 years with a tight team. It’s also presented a moment to sit back and assess how we should restructure ourselves.”

Every idea, she says, has a time. “We have decided not to repeat ourselves.” When she and her husband started the foundation, they felt there was a gap in the knowledge of contemporary Indian culture. “There was a lot of ancient, historical knowledge and a lot about the crafts, but the contemporary world was missing.” So they showcased what normally wouldn’t be: Light art, performance art, food art, sound art, contemporary theatre. They also did a lot of installation-based projects that nobody wanted to do because these are not for sale. These were larger than the gallery format, in open sites more accessible to the public, whether in the Maldives, UAE, Moscow, US, or at Delhi’s Sunder Nursery or the Kochi Biennale.

With legendary architect, painter, muralist Satish Gujral as father-in-law, Gujral says art, politics, literature were part of everyday conversations, discourse, arguments and learning. On the wall behind her is one of Satish Gujral’s “Icon Series”. She moves her phone camera so I can get a better look at it.

“I don’t have any shelves in this house,” she says, laughing. “I have books on the floor and paintings on the wall – not a single object; everything is a piece of art.”

Someone hands her a cup of tea and we raise a toast, I with coffee.

Having grown up in multiple, culturally rich countries — Paris, Egypt, Turkey — that influence was always there. “My own mixed heritage (she was born to a Malayali father and Hyderabadi mother) added to it.” As did her artistically inclined mother, who runs a charitable organisation that works with children. And then there were engage­ments with people such as the Kennedys, Orhan Pamuk, Madonna and so on.

Gujral is now grappling with a question that is the focus of her boundless energy: How can we get India invested in our culture?

“The British Museum gets 60 million tourists a year. London has over 240 museums, even a comic museum — that’s just one city,” she says. “Our country has so much to show; why can’t we make it work?”

She feels the art world is a little closed, as all specific interest groups are. “It has so little backing,” she says, taking a sip of her sugarless tea (there was a time she’d have four spoons in a cup). “As the years go by, we are getting less interested — we are getting Americanised. I don’t know if that is going to do us any good.”

There is a strong India moment coming, she says. “China and India will rule. We have an advantage; we are English-speaking, educated, social, democratic, very high on tech. It is such a powerful moment for India and I am keen we don’t lose it.”

How do we make creative intelligence work in the cultural capitalist space? How can we make the busi­ness of benevolence an imp­ortant part of every busi­ness? These are ques­t­ions she would like to see an acti­on­able response to. “In the West, everyone gets it, for whatever reasons – they get a huge tax advantage by giving to culture.”

So, it has to be a top-down approach. In some ways it has started. “The Red Fort, for instance, has so many museums now,” she says. “Elsewhere, the culture ministry is very powerful, works closely with finance, tourism ministry, transport and heritage,” she adds. “Look at France. They are spouting how amazing this French thing is — whether it is bread, cheese or a great piece of art.”

She and her husband helped push the policy to get built heritage (architecture) to be allowed to be included in corporate soc­ial responsibility. “Mohit and I pushed to get corporate cultural responsibility (CCR) included. Unfortunately, we could not get contemporary art in, even so it is a start”.

Contemporary art is tomorrow’s mod­ern art and the day-after’s ancient art, says Gujral, her words racing to keep up with her thoughts. “We have to understand that capitalism is not a bad thing – why can’t our cultural institutions be profitable?”

Yale and Harvard, she adds, have corpuses that are as big as the GDP of a small country. “This gives quality and permanence to run a system for millennia.”

A small big idea for her is to do a “City as Museum”. For instance, Mehrauli, one of the seven ancient cities that make up present-day Delhi. It has some 300 monuments; has Bahadur Shah Zafar’s broken down haveli (Zafar Mahal, also called Jangli Mahal); barber shop with signs from the 1930s; old stepwells. “We have already mapped it and intend to put up installations and art in the open havelis, in the ancient stepwells, in the Jain temple gardens and in those old shops,” she says. A project like this would work wonderfully if the local politician joined in and, say, helped reroute traffic on certain days.

Gujral doesn’t waste time. “Sometimes I get delayed in my things because I am doing so much. But it is what it is.”