Not by design: How Saryu Doshi came to champion India's artistic heritage

Doshi tells how she never envisioned a career for herself and why even children should be taught to respect their heritage

She’s taught Indian miniature art to students at Michigan and Berkeley, edited one of India’s best known art magazines for many years, set up and run the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Mumbai, chaired the Lalit Kala Academy for years, is vice-chairman of INTACH, written over a dozen books on various aspects of Indian art and is on innumerable committees relating to the arts in the country. She has a Padma Shri (awarded in 1999) to boot.

None of this happened by design or plan, she tells me quite categorically. At no point did Saryu Doshi — wife of late industrialist and former chairman of Premier Automobiles Vinod Doshi — envision “any kind of career” for herself. She just stumbled into things and one thing led to the next.

Why don’t the rest of us rely a bit more on fortuitousness, I think to myself. Without much planning and thought, the 87-year-old lady sitting before me — a picture of grace — at Mumbai’s hip eatery, The Table, has managed to contribute more than most do in a lifetime.

We’re meeting after a long exchange of emails. I have, over email, politely declined her suggestion of her first taking me for lunch to the Willingdon Sports Club at Race Course to “get to know each other”, before we do the actual “Lunch with BS”, a disarmingly charming old world proposition and one that I’m almost tempted to agree to. A practice lunch before the actual lunch? Such a lovely thought! But, of course, my hectic Mumbai schedule doesn’t permit such luxuries.

We order a soba salad, an avocado toast and a zucchini spaghetti and decide to share all. It’s a frugal lunch with no drinks — we stick to mineral water.

A product of Mumbai’s Elphinstone College (a bored economics student), Doshi joined the Sir JJ School of Art, one of the few students with a bachelor’s degree already, and found that the arts were where her passion lay. Soon after, she was married and accompanied her husband to the University of Michigan where he was doing his master’s and she decided to pursue another bachelor’s in art history. At Michigan, she was a bit of an exotic creature. Back in 1956, they hadn’t seen many Indian women — let alone an Indian woman in a sari, studying art history.

At Michigan, Doshi tasted blood. “I took to it like a duck to water,” she says. This metamorphosed into what would be a 60-year love affair with the arts. She returned to India and found herself in a remote village in Maharashtra (one of her husband’s factories was located here) with more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. That’s when she decided to pursue her doctorate in Jain miniature art from Mumbai University with the Prince of Wales museum as her guide. Jain miniature art was a relatively unexplored subject then so her work entailed original research.

Soon after, she won the Rockefeller fellowship and decided to go for a year to the United States. Indian miniature art was something the rest of the world was quite unfamiliar with so she was one of the few authorities on the subject back then. As a result, she ended up teaching courses at her alma mater Michigan, Berkeley and even at Pune University.

But teaching was not really for her — she was focused on her hearth and home and that was proving too disruptive — so when she was approached to edit Marg, a magazine set up by writer Mulk Raj Anand, one of the only publications on art at the time, she went for it. The fact that she never considered herself a career person meant that she could experiment, and was unafraid of failure. She thoroughly enjoyed editing Marg, coming in close contact with Pupul Jayakar and working with her on Festival of India. There was very little that happened in India’s art scene that she didn’t touch in some way. As we chat, I realise this holds true even now when she’s well past 80. She’s currently involved with IGNCA, INTACH, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Lalit Kala academy, a host of art related committees… the list is long.

It was in 1995 that she was asked to set up the NGMA in Mumbai — again a first for her as she’d neither run, let alone set up, a gallery or a museum, nor was an expert on contemporary art. It was there that Doshi experimented with many new thoughts and ideas. To draw in the Mumbai crowds, she requested Amitabh Bachchan to come and recite his father’s poetry — a session that was so successful that he took it as a show to many cities subsequently. She also used the space in the gallery innovatively, once hosting a fashion show by Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla there — again a first as fashion shows were rarely held at such venues. She held unique and innovative exhibitions at the NGMA, making it a spot that art lovers from the rest of the country and the globe flocked to.

Our food arrives: The soba salad is excellent as is the bread basket. The avocado toast is good but the zucchini spaghetti is a disappointment (we tell the maître d'hôtel and I notice later when I pay the bill that he hasn’t charged us for it) and effectively wasted.

We are interrupted by the Asia Society group of ladies, who know her well. Indeed, Doshi is well known in Mumbai for the work done through the Vinod & Saryu Doshi Foundation. The foundation funds deserving students’ post graduate studies overseas in arts and humanities, supports community projects and works with emerging talent in the fields of visual art. The couple and what they stood for represent a fast disappearing breed that used its money wisely and towards good purpose.

I ask her what she thinks of the Adopt A Heritage scheme. She says she is totally in favour of it as long as someone — a body like the INTACH or even a new body set up for the purpose — monitors the private efforts to ensure that nothing is lost for lack of awareness. She doesn’t have the mistrust many people seem to have for corporates. She believes they would not destroy anything intentionally but only due to lack of knowledge. She goes into some detail of one site near Viramgam in Gujarat — the Munsar lake and the shrines that surround it, where we are losing invaluable heritage. “I’d be very happy if the Lodhas or some other group takes charge and revamps the entire place,” she adds.

A second thing that worries her is the Indian mindset that if something is no longer perfect it is worthless. She cites the story of a dhobi in one of the Indian villages who was apparently using a big black stone to beat his clothes with; it turned out to be a discarded but very old and valuable statue, something she’s described in one of her books. Since the statue was no longer complete, it was considered useless. The same holds true for manuscripts or even bronze figures. A slight tarnish and no one wants to pay attention to them. The rest of the world values and preserves its heritage and museums exhibit imperfect pieces with equal pride.

She argues that love for one’s culture, monuments and history needs to be inculcated from the very beginning and that’s why she is strongly in favour of school trips to such places. “If we can explain to children why we need to preserve and take pride in our history, we will have solved half our problems,” she says adding that children saying no to crackers has led adults to be more sensitive about their effect on environment. This resonates strongly with me since that’s how I grew up — dragged from monument to monument.

We’ve moved to coffee as our meeting is coming to an end. I ask her how she evaluates the direction her life has taken, albeit inadvertently. “If you had asked me when I was 20, what I’d be doing, I would have said I’d be a fat married gujju lady with three children like many of my aunts,” she says jokingly. But the arts gave her life a delightful and rich hue that she never imagined, planned or designed. And the lack of pressure to perform ensured that she did.