Mandai Nostalgia

Mandai 26 Jan 2021

Yesterday at Mandai was so very different from what it has been for the past five years. 

Since 2016, the first half of Republic Day at Mandai, Pune’s iconic vegetable market, has been a scene of festive crowds enjoying an art event. For the sake of continuity, I took a cautious break from isolation yesterday, and went to attend the flag hoisting.  Hanging out for a bit with Anuradhabai, my neighbour and colleague, felt good too. 

Mandai 26 Jan 2020

The world had changed after the pandemic, and naturally Mandai had too - it was a lonely morning, quite different to the crowded, bustling time we had last year with people pouring in to participate in the very exciting event that Gauri Gandhi, a professor at Flame University, started planning in late 2015. 

I'm grateful to Kunal Ray for suggesting my name to Gauri, and to Gauri for her wonderful idea and all her efforts in establishing it. Her idea of integrating with public spaces and local communities was very attractive. Mandai is a beautiful, historic building, not just a place to buy veggies but an icon of public art where art lovers and art students visit, and the Aggarwal nashta is pretty ok too! 

Each of the five events I took part in were great fun. You can read about some of them here and here. Mandai was a wonderful opportunity for me because it took me out of my comfort zone and I suddenly found myself free to use absolutely any material and let it speak for itself. One of the purposes of Mandai was affordable art and I thought it would be good to use a low-cost material, so started off with roadside stones, offering them in the kind of baskets that the vegetable and fruit vendors of Mandai use.

Today's Catch Pune Biennale 2016

Some of what I have made over the years has been with things given to me by friends who did not have the heart to throw them away - like cassette collections and saris, once precious, now too old to be used.  It has been so very gratifying when people visited my stall, thronged around, and purchased. These are some of my favourite photos, surrounded by happy customers, money in my hands and glee on my face!

In 2020, when Gauri announced 'Harvest' as the theme of Art Mandai, I went a bit berserk with ideas, making collages on tiny canvas boards and turning them into magnets. There were harvests of corn and rice, of course; there were also harvests of fish (some lay dead in seas of plastic), eggs, flowers - and lice, snakes and even blessings. Unable to conceive of harvest without some kind of tribute to the Indian farmer, I did a series of 'farmer-suicide' magnets too, little expecting that anyone would buy - and was surprised when most were purchased. You can see some of them in the image below - I was sticking them on my heirloom Godrej cupboards as they got done, and this was taken a few days before the Jan 2020 show.

Mandai 2020 was also special for me in quite a few different ways! For the past four years, my business partner was my husband, Ajay, who always came along, dressed for the part, and took the wonderful transactional photos you saw above!
 

But in 2020, we had a family wedding in Delhi (I rushed to the airport to join them as soon as the Mandai event ended!) and I had two good friends, Ruve Narang and Dhananjay Kale come and sit with me instead, attending to customers, and keeping the collection safe!

Ruve was a member of Art Mandai in the early years, and she is the one who designed the group's lovely logo.

In 2020, I was also quite gratified to find that the Art Mandai PR team had made me an icon of the event! My photo appeared in all the media clips announcing it, you can see the Times of India clipping at the end of this post. Over the years, I found a lot of validation in seeing that I and my work were regularly featured in newspaper articles that covered Mandai. My basket of stone faces can be seen in the first article about it on this link and here are a few of the other clippings too!  

The Monet's waterlilies you can see in one of the images above are made from the old cassette boxes from my friend Candy's precious music collection, stuffed with pieces of chiffon torn out from a gorgeous sari that my friend Gita gave me as it could no longer be worn. And the inspiration came from Musée de l'Orangerie which I visited while in Paris to present a paper at a conference on Sindh Studies in ECSAS in July 2018. It's not like I knew I was going to do this, but after I saw what was emerging, I knew where it was coming from.

If you'd like one of my magnets - email me on saaz@seacomindia.com!

 

For lovely M on a special birthday

Jewellery made with precious metals and stones is one of the most popular traditions of India. In my father’s community, the Kanara Saraswat Brahmins, it was a custom for married women to wear diamond earrings set in gold in a traditional pattern with seven diamonds each. Those earrings, like other jewellery given to a young woman who was getting married, were family heirlooms. As time went by, the world changed and so did family structures and traditions. In the early 1980s, I inherited eight of my grandmother’s diamonds. Since they were special, I had them set in a four-diamond pattern so that I could wear them all together. However, it turned out that I didn’t care much for the way the pattern sat on my ears. So for years they lay in my cupboard, unused. One day in 2005, my jewellery was burgled. I lost a lot of precious pieces, each of which had special memories. I felt sad and decided to give up wearing jewellery. Then one day I saw my grandmother’s diamonds lying neglected in the corner of a shelf and realised that I should give them the respect and affection they deserved! I had four set into a bangle for myself which I began to wear all the time, and continue to do. And I decided that when the time came I would pass them on to the girls in the family on special occasions.

Smt Shantabai Savur

As one such occasion approached, I began thinking about the box I would gift the solitaire nose-pin in and came across this picture of my grandmother in which she is wearing the seven-diamond earrings. I got it printed and set into a gift box. The box looked so beautiful that I made a few extra boxes and took one as a present (but with no diamonds in it!) for my aunt Sushila.
Sushilakka was born on 8 March 1928; I went to see her a few days after her 89th birthday. When she saw the box she was overwhelmed with emotion and kissed the photo, gazed at it lovingly, and could not speak for a while. Then she told me that the photograph had been taken in Masulipatnam when her father, an officer of the government’s revenue service, had been posted there.
It was 1938, and a ‘famous’ photographer from Baroda visited Masulipatnam. The Collector, the Chief of Police, and many of the other important people of Masulipatnam sat for family photographs and portraits. Naturally my grandfather did too, and this is a portrait of him and his family taken then.

Bhavani Shankar Rao Savur (1900-1961) and Smt Shantabai
Bab (Ramanand), Gopal (later Dr Gopal Rao Savur),
Sushila (later Mrs Tirkannad Sushila Amrit Rao
Gul (later Mrs Gul Raghuvir Dhareshwar)

The photographer then told my grandfather that his wife had the most beautiful profile he had ever seen; there was only one other woman whose profile was as beautiful and that was of the film star Sadhana! He asked my grandfather for permission to take her photograph, saying he would be happy to give him copies with no charge. “Of course Papa agreed!” Sushilakka said. This is the family photograph taken on that occasion: Bhavani Shankar Savur and Shanta Savur are standing and their children Bab (Ramanand, my father), Gopal, Sushila and Gool are sitting.
Sushilakka could not remember the name of the photographer but promised to think and phone to tell me later, when she remembered. She did tell me that years later, in the 1960s, she was living in Baroda with her husband and two young children and her father wrote to her, reminding her about the photographer and suggesting that she pay him a visit, which she did. She and her family received a courteous welcome and he remembered her well. In fact, he even mentioned her mother’s perfect profile and spoke of it admiringly all those years later.
I was moved by the story, and eager to find out more. It turned out that Masulipatnam is a place of historical importance, a trading port on the east coast of India used by the Dutch, the British and French. This engraving is from wiki: “View of Masulipatam. Anonymous. From Philip Baldaeus, A True and Exact Description of the most Celebrated East-India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel”.
Masulipatinam is still a port and fishing harbour, but it is now called Machalipatnam. It is still famous for the Kalamkari block-prints on textile. A blogger, NP Prasad, writes that this was the place from where the Golconda diamonds were exported for centuries, along with other interesting facts about the place when he/she visited. Read more here. There are also photographs of the place, which make it look very interesting, on this link. They made me want to find a way to ask my grandfather about the place he lived in in 1938, the people he knew, the work he did, and his ideas about various things and his aspirations for his life.

Art in a Pune veggie market, again

Art Mandai 2017

Last year, Gauri Gandhi called some Pune artists together to sit in Mandai, Pune’s historic vegetable market, and exhibit our wares along with the vendors there. The event went well and it was a great experience.
In January 2017, the Art Mandai Group participated in the Pune Biennale at Let Art Work Gallery, with the theme Gauri suggested: Merawala Blue. We worked on a piece each, in our particular shade of blue. I had a terrible time, and painted a series which turned out to look so unappealing that I was in despair. At the last minute I went fishing … and, repetitive but true … up came Today’s Catch. I was away, interviewing for Ability Foundation, and missed the launch of the show and a spectacular performance by the inimitable Ruve Narang who is not just a writer and painter but a dancer too. Just a few days later it was time for Art Mandai again.
Art Mandai has two main purposes:

• to integrate with local spaces and local communities, and 
• to bring art into the mainstream, to people who avoid museums and galleries as restrictive or intimidating. 

Ours is a diverse group, with painters, sculptors, ceramic artists, masters of large installation, graphic wizards and more. One of my most favourites is Prabhakar Singh, who works with pieces of scrap metal and turns out evocative, lifelike figures (such as the ones seen here to the left and right).

One principle the Art Mandai Group follows is low pricing, so this year one of my products was a series of limited-edition plastic placemats incorporating an image of previous work along with a poem written for it.
I realised later that this was the first time my art and my writing had come together. Until then they had been quite separate, with the process of naming the pieces as the only point of contact. 

Back in Mid-day, after a long while ...

Out of the blue, Dipanjan Sinha called a few days ago with questions about my paintings for Mid-day. I haven't shown for a while and it's gratifying to be remembered even after such a long gap.
1 Tell us about what inspired the series Bombay Clichés.
The idea was to use simple line strokes to portray the complexity that makes Mumbai an alluring symbol of the realities of the universe: constant movement, relentless expansion, predictable patterns, extremes of all kinds, seemingly precarious but perfectly reliable balance – and continuous change.
2 How long did it take to for the images accumulate and become the collection?
I started working in June 2005 and had my first exhibition of Bombay Clichés water colours at Bajaj Art Gallery, Nariman Point, in November the same year.  In February 2006 I had another exhibition, Love in Mumbai, acrylics on canvas, at the Oberoi Hotel gallery, Art Walk. This was a collection of devoted Mumbai couples working and living together oblivious of Valentine’s Day. My website came up in 2007 and I had a show every year in Mumbai till 2010. Now I paint mostly on commission, though when I see something intriguing I tend to rush home and pick up the paints.

Eyebrow-upperlip
Acrylic on canvas board 12"x12"
Collection of Shanth Mannige

Rainbow City
Acrylic on canvas board 12"x12"

3 What is the thought behind using the Madhubani style?
Decades ago I saw a British Library calendar with Madhubani drawings depicting London and thought how nice it would be to have something like that for Mumbai. I eventually realised that if I really wanted them I’d better get on with it and make some myself.

4 Tell us about your journey as an artist
As a child, my drawing was so bad that my Biology teacher sometimes held up my diagrams, which invariably provoked great hilarity in the class. I was more into stitch-craft, designing and executing needlework art, something I still do.
I can’t remember when my lines started flowing confidently but as an adult I doodled Ganpatis and they were quite popular. When I decided to do the Mumbai scenes, I planned black-and-white pictures on similar lines.
In those days, my three children were exceptional artists. Their early exposure came from Marina Dutta, who runs classes in her home in Colaba, supplemented by books about great artists visits to art galleries. When they grew older I invited art teacher Mahendra Damle to spend two or three days at a time at our home in Pune during the holidays and give them art workshops. It was Mahendra who brought me a book about Madhubani art in June 2005, explained the difference in fundamental concept between Western art and traditional Indian folk art, and then insisted I paint what I had drawn. About two weeks after I started, I went to see Mahendra at the JJ School of Art staff room, with my portfolio. He sat quietly for a while, looking at each painting carefully and then said, “Saaz, what you have done in these two weeks, people try their whole lives and can’t do.” This gave me the confidence to approach a gallery.

Tell me what you're thinking
Acrylic on roadside stone

Over the years, my writing has taken precedence over the painting. A few months ago, I got a call from Gauri Gandhi, a teacher at Flame University, asking if I’d participate in an event at Mandai, a beautiful old market in Pune. On 26 January 2016, a group of us sat with the vegetable vendors at Mandai at sold our wares – I did a basket of faces on roadside stones.

5 A lot of your work is on Mumbai. What about the city moves you?
For the first three years after I came to live in Bombay, from a privileged and cloistered childhood in the Nilgiris, I was in culture shock. Then a time came when I thought I would never live anywhere else. Now, nearly twenty-five years after defecting to more space and leisurely lifestyle in Pune, Mumbai is still the city to which for many reasons I feel most connected.
Part of the fascination is the complexity of so many different communities inextricably and often incongruously intertwined, coexisting in a fast-moving flux held together by the simple Mumbai parameters of goal-orientation, action-orientation, tolerance for discomfort, and straight talk.

Female education
Acrylic on canvas board 12"x12"

When I started working on my Bombay Clichés, I saw that my characters were turning out to be calm and self-contained, so caught up in their private worlds that the viewer was quite shut out. It reminded me of the feeling I’d had when I first arrived, of being an outsider. 

Art Mandai

monsterdotcom (an installation by Saaz Aggarwal)

Kunal Ray, a professor at Flame University, wrote this descriptive article, Art in the Bazaar, and I was happy that The Hindu picked my piece monsterdotcom as an illustration (but not so happy that, in their wisdom, did not credit me for it).

The project began in December when Gauri Gandhi, who also teaches at Flame, called to ask if I would be part of an art initiative to integrate with public spaces in our city and show work with a group of other artists. The place she chose was Mandai, a market built in what would then have been the centre of Pune's 'native town' during the British administration. It is a beautiful place and very well organized for vendors to sit on platforms with their wares and storage cells under them. 

I felt that this was a fabulous initiative to integrate people from different walks of life and give us a more meaningful connection with our hometown, and was just delighted that she had considered inviting me to be part of it.

I have lived in Pune for twenty-three years and I love it for its pace of life (more leisurely than Bombay where I used to live); its beautiful trees that transform the skies with brilliant colours in summer; its fresh fruit and vegetables; its warm, smart and cultured people … and various other reasons! However, in the past several years, it has become terribly congested, the municipality and other administrative systems have been unable to cope, and the traffic is just terrible. There is also a huge and continuing influx of migrants from other parts of the country which has changed the fabric of the city and made it more interesting. 

We went to explore the mandai, a word which means market in Marathi, and were absolutely charmed. I had planned to exhibit my paintings at the event but after spending time at Mandai, decided to create installations which would blend with the character of the place. I bought small baskets and planned to paint little roadside stones for display and sale, a process which might fall under the category of 'Found Art’. In the end, when I picked up each stone and looked at it, brush in the other hand, I could see faces looking back at me and they somehow came to life. 

Ajay and I sold stones for Rs500 and Rs1000 each, having dressed the part of traditional vendor couple and which probably attracted visitors to the event as much as the faces themselves. 

Happy Birthday Mumma

Bombay Clichés at Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery

Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery is a pristine space – beautifully maintained and managed. As someone without training or experience or even artist friends, I am so very fortunate to have had my first show in this classical and highly-regarded gallery, from 6 to 12 November this year.

By another stroke of great good fortune, the show was covered by many publications – including every major newspaper in Bombay and Pune. Partly this was because of its theme – Bombay. But the real reason for the huge publicity was because it was the prominent art critic Ranjit Hoskote himself who gave me the names and phone numbers of all the art correspondents. I know Ranjit because for some years we worked in the same office (Times of India, Bombay) and I’m very grateful to him for sparing the time to view my portfolio and for his generosity in sharing the names and numbers.

The biggest coverage was in Sunday Mid-day (seen alongside) which does not have a particular art correspondent, but when I called the desk to ask if they would cover my show, the person who picked up the phone happened to be Alpana Lath. When I introduced myself, she told me that she used to make the pages when I wrote a column for the paper in the mid to late 1990s. She was now the editor, loved the images I sent her, and when the paper appeared with a full page devoted to them I was absolutely ecstatic. 

I’ve posted quite a few of the press clippings here, as I am very proud of them! Some were phone interviews, since I live in Pune. However, I visited the Time Out Mumbai office where editor Naresh Fernandes – whom I also know from my days with the Times. It was in the early 1990s, and he had just started his career; I enjoyed his writing style (as he did mine), and I made an effort to stay in touch, including during his stint with Washington Post. Naresh too found my work interesting, and it was a real thrill for me to be featured in Time Out!

All this press coverage, interestingly, did not bring a huge crowd of visitors to the show! Very few people actually came off the street and most of those who did were art students or people on a lunch break from nearby Nariman Point offices. It was a pleasure to interact with them and a spiritual learning experience to observe different reactions.

My first buyer came in on the second day of the show. I had brought around fifty paintings to exhibit – how and why so many were made in such a short time is described in these press interview clippings – and I spent that first long buyer-less day, 11am to 7pm, in the anxiety that I was going to have to take them all back home. The first buyer was an art collector, Sidharth Bhatia, who had read about the show in Sunday Mid-day. In fact we were acquainted, as he used to work with the Independent when I was with TOI ; they were owned by the same company as the Times and had their offices in the same building.

Not surprisingly, there were quite a few paintings left at the end of the show. But I was lucky again, as they were all packed and taken on commission by Niloufer Kapadia of the elegant Fourth Floor gallery at Kitab Mahal. She had read about the exhibition on the alumni network of The Lawrence School, Lovedale, where we both had the great good fortune of having studied at.

When I read what I’ve written above, it strikes me that the success of my show was much more about being in the right place at the right time than any particular artistic talent. And I think that sentiment is also reflected in the welcome note I wrote for visitors to the gallery, which I displayed on its notice board:

WELCOME

And thank you for visiting this exhibition of Bombay Clichés!

I lived in a city called Bombay for many years. 

All that while, I never forgot the feeling I’d had, when I first came here as a teenager (an extremely awkward teenager from a rather cloistered, privileged background) of being an outsider. The feeling came back to me very strongly when I started working on these paintings and I noticed that my characters had turned out (quite unwittingly) to be rather calm and self-contained, so caught up in their own private worlds that they cut the viewer out completely. This reminded me of how I felt back then.

Today, nearly 3 decades later, and having lived away for 12 years, Mumbai is still the city to which for various reasons I feel most connected. When I started working on this collection, my idea was to use simple line strokes to portray the complexity that makes Mumbai an alluring symbol of the realities of the universe: constant movement, relentless expansion, predictable patterns, extremes of all kinds, seemingly precarious but perfectly reliable balance – and continuous change. I added the pen embellishments partly to represent the frolic and bustle, partly because I was trying to create an innocent, folk art effect - but in the end because, really, I’m a writer and not a painter at all.

The paintings are priced at Rs. 5000 each.

In case you want one which you can’t see here – any particular scene, colour combination, design – I’ll be happy to make it for you!

Here, then, is my outsider’s view of “my” Bombay. I hope that you, visitor or native, will feel the warmth and humour of these scenes as I do.

Saaz Aggarwal

Crawford Market

For a few weeks each year, mangoes hit the ceiling at Crawford Market.
Higher and higher they pile, their prices swinging in inverse proportion, until the competition arrives – first lychees, then cherries, plums, and peaches, and then the most luscious, irresistible pears. They are scattered on stalls and wooden crates in the area, some even obscuring the brilliant fountain in the centre of what was once courtyard to this rotund Norman-Gothic building.
With the floor strewn with hay turned slimy by fruit peel and other unnamed substance, this section of the market is reminiscent of Covent Garden – not as it is now with its naked aborigines and painted performers, but back in the My Fair Lady days. The fountain was designed circa the same period, by Lockwood Kipling – father of the inimitable Rudyard, who was born nearby at what is now the Dean’s residence at the JJ School of Art, in 1865 – and some of his bas reliefs adorn the exterior.
In later years, the foreign influence would be represented by products of diverse nationality. Alongside stalls vending standard Indian market produce, tubs filled with soaps of Chinese and Thai make sell for Rs10 onwards. Bottles of French shampoo jostle for space with tubes of Swiss face scrub, and shelves groan under the burden of Taiwanese Black Bean Sauce and Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
A few days ago, I walked the slippery, narrow lanes leading into Crawford Market with my mother-in-law, soaking in the heady aromas of rotting flesh from the meat market and decaying dung from the caged animals – pet dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, goldfish and more – that lined the route. For me, Crawford Market had been a familiar haunt long before it was named Mahatma Phule Market; for her, it was the first time, and the most special treat I could think up for her brief visit to Mumbai.
As children, gawking the bustling metro on our annual visits, a high point would be the visit to the nearby Badshah Cold Drink house, where we would guzzle mango juice, marvelling its availability in December, and scrape every last bit of kulfi off the plate. Those were the days before ice-cream came to the hill resort near which we lived – and the parking lot outside Crawford Market could still manage a space or so for shoppers.
In later years, when I lived and worked nearby, Crawford Market was where I went to buy inexpensive return gifts and decorations for kiddy birthday parties; faux-silk Diwali saris for the bai; and fruit of the utmost variety and quality. Nowadays, I still undertake the four-hour drive from Pune every few months to stock up on essentials, and revel in the distinctive population of the place: the canny vendors; the throng of memsaabs in their tight t-shirts and clip-clopping stiletto heels, haughtily pointing to that, that and that, at first one shop and then another, followed at a respectful distance by a coolie balancing a wide, shallow strip-bamboo basket on the head; and, of course, the coolies who come in a wide permutation of size,  nutritional intake, regional mix, and gender.
Where else but at Crawford Market could I buy the half-kilo of active dry yeast and the litre of vanilla essence which ensure that home-made bread and cake are economically viable? And where else could I buy several months supply of paper napkins, toilet paper, aluminium foil, garbage bags and more at one shot without destabilizing my budget?
Proudly showing my mum-in-law around my favourite shopping complex, it irritated me that she was initially unimpressed, but gratified as she struck good bargains on aam papad, jelly, and pasta.
The pasta at Crawford Market comes in every shape and size of traditional pasta, some in brilliant, unorthodox colours. It’s sold in sackfuls, like any other grocery product, labelled ‘Italian pasta’, and one of the stall keepers offered us a packet of ‘pasta masala’ to go with it. Intrigued, I asked what it contained but the boy was vague. Masala, he repeated: “salt, garam masala … it’s masala for Italian Pasta.” I politely declined.
Sated, fully-laden coolie in tow, we headed for the exit and my mother-in-law, with the practice born of long years of pure-vegetarianism in this barbaric non-veg world, gently steered us out by a less aromatic route.