Editorial delinquencies apart, says Kishore Singh, this book is a feast for the senses.
Basant Kumar Birla and his wife, Sarala, first began collecting paintings and objets d’art when foreigners leaving India, in the wake of its independence, started to sell their collections, and when the Nizam of Hyderabad rid himself of some of his Western art.
Haresh Chaganlal’s exposure to art as a student in the West ended up in his turning collector with “a keen and almost unerring eye for good quality authentic pictures and this ability has helped me discover and uncover many pictures in the most unlikely spots, including a Hemen Mazumdar and a [Raja] Ravi Varma. I even discovered an Amrita Sher-Gil in a little Shimla bookshop (Mario Bros)”.
Ravi Akhoury started off buying an art critic’s entire collection when he needed the money for his daughter’s marriage, before turning his attention to the masters. Pheroza Jamshyd Godrej might have been an artist herself but for parental opprobrium, so instead she started collecting after buying her first work for “a princely sum of Rs 200”. Shiv Nadar’s wife Kiran became an accidental collector when “I was fairly crackling with enthusiasm to decorate my house in the finest manner possible. That was when I asked [M F] Husain to paint for us in a particular space. He created two paintings to choose from and we have kept both. That is how it all really started.”
Only a few collectors in India are well known (Suresh Neotia, Parmeshwar Godrej, Rajshree Pathy, Tina Ambani, Harsh Goenka, Malvinder Mohan Singh, Sangeeta Jindal, Abhishek Poddar), some are less well known (Rakesh Agarwal, Mahesh Chandra, Mahinder Tak, Ashwani Kakkar, Sanjay Lalbhai, Prashant Tuslyan, Rajiv Jehangir Chaudhuri, Dinesh Thacker), there are some international collectors (Masanori Fukuoka, the late Chester Herwitz) and there are the notable exclusions (the de Boers, Lekha Poddar, Anupam Poddar, Priya Paul, Nitin Bhayana among others), and in this first tome on India’s art collectors, they come together between the handsome covers of a coffee table book that looks better than it reads.
To get the nasty bits out of the way first, then: it is clear that the passion that afflicts art collectors has not been matched by the book’s editors, for the book is full of stodgy writing, ill-formed sentences, spelling howlers (even artists and auction houses are erroneously spelt), and sheer carelessness (“unstained” patronage instead of unstinted patronage). Art, contemporary and modern are used with capital letters, the ampersand “&” is used instead of “and”, and inconsistencies abound.
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If in spite of these the book still works, it is because it allows a glimpse into the collections of some of India’s leading collectors, and their associations with the artists whose works they collect. Haresh Chaganlal, for instance, talks of the time Ganesh Pyne’s wife Mira aborted his project of making a film on that artist. He recalls Manjit Bawa as “a fun guy…ready to eat, drink and make merry” and says, “I also met several of Manjits’ [sic] lady friends who seemed to be thriving on his fame.” Of Subodh Gupta, he says “I was instantly struck by his prodigious talent” and “bought a few large canvases on the spot because they were stunning”.
Chaganlal has never met M F Husain, though he collects his early works, but Parmeshwar Godrej regards him as a friend. “Adi and I were having a romantic diner at the Zodiac Grill for one of our anniversaries many years ago and Hussain [sic] happened to spot us,” she recalls one such incident. “He came and sat down and proceeded to sketch on the table cloth a portrait of us, as a present. We laughed when we realized that he had painted himself into the portrait also!” But the best Husain anecdote in the book comes from travel industry honcho Ashwini Kakkar.
“On one of Bombay’s hot, sultry afternoons, I was driving out of Matthew Road at Opera House when I chanced upon M F Husain walking barefoot on the sweltering black tar pavement. Even though I was headed in a completely different direction, I offered to drop him to Regal Cinema, where he was going. An interesting conversation and twenty-five minutes later I was dropping him off when he ordered me to send him my new white Fiat car so that he could paint it for me. I totally chickened out,” Kakkar says, “which is a decision I rue to this day.”
Rajshree Pathy recalls “intimate evenings of love and laughter with [S H] Raza and [his wife] Janine Mongillat at their Paris atelier”, finds Sakti Burman’s “sense of humour…always refreshing”, and rejoices that she has some of [Anjolie Ela Menon’s] best works that I will never part with”. Pradip Bothra says of his own collection, “I have collected the works of more than 200 artists and printmakers. When I see the span of their work of over 40 years, it gives me an idea of where they started and where they have gone.”
Selected works from their collections show up the masters — Tyeb Mehta, Raza, Husain, Jehangir Sabavala, the Tagores, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Anjolie Ela Menon, Ram Kumar, V S Gaitonde, F N Souza, Akbar Padamsee, N S Bendre, Bhupen Khakar and others, as well as Manjit Bawa, Jogen Chowdhury, Surendran Nair, Arpana Caur and so on, with fewer works of contemporary artists such as Subodh Gupta, Chintan Upadhyay, Shibu Natesan, Jitish and Reena Kallat and their peer group.
This vicarious peek into collections also results in some interesting finds — I was delighted to locate, for instance, that Atul Dodiya’s allegorical work, Three Painters, which shows him and Bhupen Khakhar’s backs as they study a painting of artist Rene Magritte’s back, auctioned by Christie’s in New York in September 2007, now housed in the collection of Religare’s Malvinder Singh. For an art watcher, now that’s a happy find.
ELITE COLLECTORS OF MODERN & CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ART
Author: Purrshottam Bhaggeria and Pavan Malhotra
Publisher: Elite Media
Pages: 333
Price: Rs 15,000 for a limited edition of 2,000 numbered copies
