Ranjit
Hoskote
To run into Kekoo Gandhy, whether
at the old Gallery Chemould on the first floor of the Jehangir Art Gallery,
Bombay—or more recently, at its successor institution, Chemould Prescott Road,
directed by his daughter Shireen—was to be drawn instantly into his latest
scheme for civic improvement or his latest proposal for sweeping reform in the
nation’s art infrastructure. When Kekoo passed away on Saturday morning, he
took with him a nation-sized archive, an intimate knowledge of the epic debates
as well as the invisible micro-politics that had shaped the field in which many
of us, his younger contemporaries, have chosen to plough our paths:
postcolonial Indian art.
Kekoo was a pioneer who
helped formulate the contours of the postcolonial Indian art world. He was one
of independent India’s earliest gallerists; his creation, Gallery Chemould,
evolved organically in 1964 from his frame-making establishment, which had
itself been born as a result of his collaboration with a set of connoisseurs
and entrepreneurs who had foreseen the rise of a class of viewers and
collectors of Indian art in the aftermath of World War II. Indeed,
the name of the gallery carries, within itself, an echo of those distant
origins: Chemould is a compound formed from its parent company’s name, Che(mical)
Mould(ings). But Kekoo was not simply a gallerist devoted to the refinement and
expansion of his own practice and its economic
contexts. Rather, his historic contribution lies in the public-spiritedness and
generosity with which he identified, helped create, and worked to sustain the
cultural and infrastructural contexts in which modern Indian art could live,
breathe and grow.
Kekoo was a committed supporter of institutions
and an advocate of institution-building in the domain of the arts as well as in
civil society, whether in relation to the Bombay Arts Society, the Jehangir Art
Gallery, the National Gallery of Modern Art’s Bombay branch, the Lalit Kala
Akademi, or Triennale India. Always ready to sit on a committee, never tired of
making representations or lobbying politicians and bureaucrats, he worked always
from an intelligent and precise awareness of the necessary connections between
art practice, enlightened patronage, responsive governmental institutions, and
a liberal public sphere. He understood the importance of creating
national-level bodies to present modern Indian art to the new republic’s
citizens at a time when certain mandarins in Delhi thought culture to be
synonymous with the subcontinent’s ancient sculpture. He saw merit in touring
Indian art internationally, in an age when developmentalist dogma tended to derogate
the claims of culture in favour of the mandate of economic growth.
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As an early champion of Indian
modernism, an associate of the Moral Rearmament movement (MRA), an opponent of
the Emergency (1975-1977), and a friend of SAHMAT (the Safdar Hashmi Memorial
Trust), Kekoo put his money, energy, time and considerable network of contacts
where his mouth was. He was a man who acted fearlessly on his beliefs and
convictions, with untarnished optimism and uncompromising idealism. During the
Emergency, this meant offering shelter to dissidents on the run from a State
that had suspended civil freedoms; between 1996 and 2004, this meant supporting
the activities of vocal critics of the right-wing government of the time. In
the summer of 2007, when a number of us, galvanised by the artist and activist Tushar
Joag, came together to organise the ‘Free Chandramohan Committee’ to demand the
release of a Baroda art student brazenly arrested by the police on grounds of
obscenity and communal provocation, it was Kekoo who addressed the assembly
from the steps of the Jehangir Art Gallery, calling in his characteristic
ringing tones for the defence of cultural freedoms. And at all times, he would
urge those of us whose destinies were linked to the NGMA Bombay to re-dedicate
ourselves to that institution, whose unconstrained efflorescence remained one
of his cherished dreams.
In
consonance with the core beliefs of the MRA, Kekoo did his best to practise the
‘Four Absolutes’: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness,
and absolute love. While the pursuit of honesty often meant that he spoke truth
bluntly to power and unhesitatingly rebuked those he felt to be responsible for
a decline in standards, the pursuit of love meant that he extended his
legendary generosity towards a large number of interlocutors, whether callow
art students, artists from small towns showing for the first time in Bombay,
civil-society activists, young writers, or activists against communitarian
violence. And if the mandate of absolute purity meant that he was often as
autobiographically transparent and self-critical as his near-namesake and
admired icon, Mahatma Gandhi, his belief in absolute unselfishness could lead
him to forsake the pragmatics necessary to the unruffled working of a business
enterprise.
Kekoo and his wife Khorshed
ran Gallery Chemould. Or rather, Khorshed ran it while Kekoo dreamt, talked,
shared his infectious enthusiasms, and formed coalitions and platforms. Through
the nearly seven decades of their marriage, and their close partnership in the gallery,
they came across as a portrait of beautifully wedded opposites. With her
practicality and eye for the details of contracts and execution, Khorshed
provided a bracing and productive counterpoint to her husband, with his
preference for high-altitude navigation in the realms of vision and policy. Chemould’s
programme was inclusive, taking in a wide spectrum of the manifestations of
modern Indian art between the 1950s and the 1990s, embracing practices that
were variously abstractionist, figurative, narrative, allegorical, minimalist
and conceptualist in their orientation.
Chemould’s gallery
practice helped define the main currents of postcolonial Indian art. But it
could also be an adventurous and unpredictable practice: it could be counterintuitive,
defiant of received wisdom, sometimes anticipating turns in curatorial and
art-historical practice. For instance, Kekoo and Khorshed chose to show the
work of the Warli artist Jivya Soma Mashe, and to work with the Hazaribagh-based
environmental activist and convenor of tribal women artists, Bulu Imam, at a
time when so-called ‘tribal’ art was met with condescension if not outright
derision in metropolitan art circles. In 1987, the Gandhys conceived and sponsored
the Bombay Arts Festival, held at the Nehru Centre in Worli, with a special
focus on emerging tendencies in Indian sculpture curated by the cultural
theorist and film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha (I remember this event with
affection; it was where I gave a public reading of my poems for the first time).
In conversation with writers through the generations, such as the distinguished
poet and critic Nissim Ezekiel (who briefly worked as manager at Chemould’s
framing factory, in the course of a long and variegated life), the Gandhys also
extended their hospitality to the other arts, especially literature, theatre and
cinema. In 1990, Chemould hosted a festival of literature, ‘Gadyaparva’, and helped build a nucleus
fund for the eponymous journal of contemporary writing in Gujarati, edited by
Geeta and Bharat Naik.
Looking back at the stellar
contribution of the Gandhys between the 1950s and the 1990s, including a series
of memorable exhibitions by a dazzling array of artists—among them, to name
only a few, Bhupen Khakhar, J. Swaminathan, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Atul
Dodiya, Anju Dodiya, Gieve Patel, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Mehlli
Gobhai, Sudhir Patwardhan, Rummana Hussain, N. Pushpamala, Subodh Gupta, Jitish
Kallat, Bharti Kher, Reena Kallat, Shilpa Gupta—it seems improbable that they
could have staged all these achievements in the cramped, kidney-shaped
environment of the old Gallery Chemould. Looking further back, we see, in the
mind’s eye, the Gandhy family warehouse on Princess
Street that Kekoo turned into Chemould Frames, which was not only a shop for frames but also an early meeting place for the
Bombay artists of the 1950s, the Progressives among them. Indeed, these spaces seem
already to be distant memories, when we walk through the elegant,
high-ceilinged, expansive spaces of Chemould Prescott Road; but their energies
continue to circulate through the successor establishment.
A large number of relatives, friends,
colleagues, associates and fellow pilgrims from the diverse theatres of his
life came to pay Kekoo Gandhy homage at his funeral on Saturday, 10 November
2012. To many of us, he was a warm and affectionate mentor figure, a crusader
for diverse important causes who acted as a reference point for responsible
citizenship, and a vital bridge to an earlier and formative period in our
collective life as a society and an art world. His memory will be cherished,
and will live on in the institutions, initiatives and impulses that his
children, Adil, Rashna, Behroz and Shireen Gandhy have inherited.
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