In a Bombay state of being

There’s something about Bombay. Let’s for a moment forget about the other name: Mumbai. This city by the Arabian Sea is still being maximised. What makes this metropolis, where old cosmopolitanisms keep bumping into and tripping up the new ones, fire the imaginations of writers, cineastes and artists alike?

The word itself can conjure up a mood, or a spirit. Whether it is shorthand for India or not, Bombay continues to resonate far beyond our shores. Is the name a metaphor for our times? 

Bombay is yet again the focus of an international exhibition. Titled Gateway Bombay, it opens next month at the prestigious Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The show includes works of contemporary Indian art by artists who live in, have lived in or have been inspired by the city. In 2001 the Tate Modern in London had chosen Bombay as one of nine cities across the globe for a major exhibition called Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis. Each city had to epitomise one decade of the last century; for Bombay, it was the eventful ‘90s that followed the communal riots at the beginning of that decade.

The Peabody takes a different, long-distance perspective on Bombay, ostensibly to make sense of the ever-changing kaleidoscope that this city is. Comprised almost entirely of work from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection of contemporary Indian art that spans well over four decades, the exhibition invites the viewer to ‘experience’ the city through the work of 13 artists, including MF Husain, Sudhir Patwardhan, Atul Dodiya, Gieve Patel, Nalani Malani and Bal Chhabda.

The works of photographers Ketaki Sheth and Chirodeep Chaudhuri will also be shown. These artists, according to Susan Bean, curator of South Asian and Korean art, “draw us beyond the surface noise of the city to a reflective encounter with its people and culture”.

The late Chester Herwitz was quite a charismatic figure who ‘discovered’ contemporary Indian art during his initial trips to India to meet the suppliers for his women’s fashion accessories business. So along with glittering handbags went brilliantly coloured canvasses on their passage to America. He collected over 3,000 works of art. Herwitz was, unarguably, the most significant collector of Husains. Peabody Essex Museum acquired the collection in 2001, and two years later it was the first American museum to have a gallery for contemporary Indian art.

The show at the Peabody, however, has been tweaked, with work from outside the Herwitz inventory. Anil Revri, the Washington DC-based artist who has carved quite a niche for himself in New York and DC, is represented with a stunning oil painting done in 1995. Untitled, the work, with its reds and blacks, with thin black lines intimating some sort of high-rises, brings to mind a nightmarish reverie of the future — an imaginary landscape of the mind. Revri has been inducted as a Bombaywallah because he is an alumnus of the JJ School of Arts. And Bombay is a city to which he often returns. 

On until the end of 20008, the exhibition has been aptly named. And the cover of the invitation — and presumably the catalogue — has an appropriate painting by Gieve Patel, titled Gateway. Not only has Patel painted the iconic monument that symbolises the city, he has also included two figures of the downtrodden in the foreground. Thousands throng to Bombay each day in search of a better life. Yet for many, the riches it promises prove illusory.

Perhaps in an attempt to kick off the show with pizzazz, to give it a contemporary buzz, the curator has also borrowed, for part of the duration of the show, Bose Krishnamachari’s mixed-media installation, Ghost/ Transmemoir. The Bombay-based artist’s homage to the dabbawallas is made of 108 metal dabbas mounted on iron scaffolding. The DVDs installed in them project interviews with people from the city — from those on the bottom of the ladder to those sitting pretty on the top. It’s a paean to the energy of this city that never sleeps.

In other words, salaam Bombay.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com