There is a dealer of Afghan carpets in Mumbai who would invite affluent ladies home for biryani. While they would be walking around the house with their heaped plates, he would remark, “Be careful about spilling it.” The ladies would automatically look down on the floor, which would conveniently be strewn with his wares. Exclamations of admiration would follow, and by the time lunch was over, he would have sold at least a couple of carpets. That, says Sunil Murthy after narrating the anecdote, is a clever salesman — “and the kind I'm not.”
Murthy too is a dealer but his wares are slightly more unusual — he sells old maps, photographs and other objects that he feels are unique, like cloth made from mud near Timbuctoo in Mali and women’s vests made from tree bark from Borneo. He has just concluded an exhibition-cum-sale of old maps and photographs in the city, for which he collaborated with Simon Hunter, a map dealer based in London. He got into selling maps, he says with a straight face, because it was easy to smuggle a map into the country by rolling it up and tucking it into his sleeve.
Murthy wasn’t always a dealer in old maps and rare objects. During his previous avatar as a journalist in Bangkok in the 1980s (after having dropped out, worked on a strawberry farm in Mahabaleshwar, taught at a school and did time as hack in Mumbai), he would get requests to pick up silver and artefacts when he returned to India. And his wanderings through Mumbai's infamous Chor Bazaar were his primary source. “The Thais are people who do not grudge spending and they were fascinated by kind of the things I used to bring,” says Murthy. His first buy there was a World War II Canadian airman’s jacket. He moved to silver, watches and ikkat and initially functioned as a runner, which in antiquarian parlance is a person who sells objects from one dealer to another, before selling on his own.
The first lot of maps he sold were picked up when he was sent to report from Kabul in 1987, during the war with the Soviet Union. “There is a Chicken Street there which is like Mumbai's Chor Bazaar, where I picked up a pile of maps that had been left by hippies who had come there in the 1970s,” he says, wistfully adding that it was also a time when vodka used to be sold along with chocolates in carts and Afghan women would roam the streets in miniskirts, smoking cigarettes.
Having quit journalism and made Bangalore his home for the last 10 years, Murthy says he is perhaps the only dealer in south India to have regular sales and exhibitions of old maps. “People are generally interested in maps of the region they belong to — for example, there might not be many takers for a map of Siam if I try to sell it here, even if it was rare.” The value of a map, he explains, depends on its age, its cartographer and the number of them originally printed. And maps printed abroad tend to be in good condition because the temperate climate there lends itself to better preservation of paper. Price depends on the these factors, rather than size. The maps at his last exhibition ranged from Rs 5,000 to Rs 17,000 in price and the most expensive map Murthy has sold was one of Siam for Rs 40,000, while Hunter, the London-based dealer he collaborated with, says he has sold one for a few thousand pounds to a British politician (he declined to name the individual, sadly).
The map market here, though, is in its infancy, which Murthy feels is not a bad thing because people tend to buy because they love a particular map and not because they feel it will appreciate in value after a few years. “But this also means that I have to convince them that I buy from legitimate dealers,” he says.
What has helped him in his quest for maps and other objects, he says, is his liberal education — that and the fact that he is not married and is hence “swift of foot.” And while he may he feel the carpet dealer in Mumbai has the advantage of a glib tongue Murthy is not too badly off in that department either, judging by his offer to procure the Holy Grail for me, if I so fancied. “It’s just that it would take me a little time,” he says with a grin.
