Heritage, after a fashion

Relative Value: The youngest of the Kotwara royalty weaves her way into the family business. 

(My first-ever 'fashion' story, and one that allowed me to meet a director whose work I have admired: Muzaffar Ali. Published in the Mumbai Mirror's 'Relative Value' slot last Sunday.)

The home shared by Muzaffar Ali, his wife Meera and their daughter Sama is very much a reflection of them. Kotwara Farm lies at the end of Rumi Lane, just off the Gurgaon-Faridabad Road, a graceful amalgam of the contemporary and traditional — much like the clothes that emerge from the Kotwara fashion label that Muzaffar and Meera created in 1990, with Sama joining in 2014. Their latest collection at the recently concluded Lakme Fashion Week (Aditi Rao Hydari walked for them) was well received by critics and fashionistas alike. The line was what some described as “Indian with modern touches”.

We meet the family in their plush but comfortable drawing room, off an arched courtyard that would be stately if it weren’t for a slender stone frog that rises, as if to welcome you, one leg raised off the ground. Muzaffar’s quirky artistic touch (paintbrushes embedded in glass doors, leftover tiles crafted into a striking floor) combines with a studied elegance — yet the farm is a relaxed domestic space, with space for a cow called Gomti and Rough Collies called Drogo and Sansa (Sama is a Game of Thrones fan). The house was designed by Meera, who trained as an architect before she accepted a small role in a film Muzaffar was making — and ended up marrying him, six weeks after they met. Muzaffar, a painter, poet and acclaimed director of films such as Gaman, Umrao Jaan and Anjuman, had been married twice already: to art historian Geeti Sen, and then to CPM politician Subhashini Ali (director Shaad Ali, of Bunty Aur Babli and OK Jaanu fame, is their son.)

“My parents had no formal training in fashion. But I guess destiny finds you,” says Sama. In 1989-90, dealing with the setback of an aborted film project in Kashmir (the unreleased 1989 Zooni), Muzaffar moved back to his ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh with Meera. Even as a filmmaker, Muzaffar had been fascinated by how clothes and textiles can constitute a milieu, whether it was the khaki he foisted upon Farooq Sheikh’s taxi driver in Gaman, or the attention he lavished on Rekha’s clothes in Umrao Jaan. “For me, soft furnishings were a tactile experience, a layer which preceded the making of any film. Costume was the outer expression of a character, a situation, a mood,” says Muzaffar.

That interest, honed by his work with American couturier Mary Mcfadden exploring Kashmiri craft traditions during Zooni, now combined with his desire to give something back to the place his ancestors had ruled for centuries. Meera and he decided to develop Kotwara as a centre for handicraft. Since 1990, they have been training local artisans under their Dwar pe Rozi (‘employment at your doorstep’) initiative. Producing jobs for people where they are, the foundation ties into Muzaffar’s early concern with the travails of migration (think Gaman), producing exceptionally skilled embroiderers who give Kotwara clothes their distinctive quality.

“A mechanisation process had set into zardozi and chikan after 1947: cheap patterns, cheap markets, saris with big-big bootas, being sold in Punjab and Delhi,” says Muzaffar. “When we started, in 1990, chikan was at its lowest ebb in workmanship and aesthetics,” Meera agrees. “It took us 7-8 years to improve the quality of work, and to bring the buyer back.” The Alis are in agreement that the contemporary rich need to be educated into being patrons who recognise quality and are willing to pay for it. “Historically, art has always bloomed under the patronage of rulers,” says Sama.

Meera points out that Kotwara has been a trendsetter with silhouettes and reviving South Asian fashions. “In 1990, we brought in angarakhas and peshwas, which people now call anarkalis. When people only wore churidars and salwars, we brought back the chauda pyjama, the wide loose pants which everyone now wears as palazzos. Culottes have come back to India, where it is now called the Pakistani pyjama. But it were the Awadh Nawabs who took the Mughal style of dressing to the highest level: the gharara, sharara, big farshi pyjamas,” she says. Kotwara ventured into zardozi with thread work, creating “evening wear that’s elegant but not blingy”. “How chikan and zardozi have come together through us is itself a new form: let’s call it Kotwara craft,” smiles Muzaffar. “When you’re working with artisans with a regional legacy, your innovations become organic.”

The Alis are justifiably confident of the quality of their work, and between their aristocratic past (Meera just published a coffee-table book called Dining with the Nawabs) and Muzaffar’s association with Bollywood, Kotwara lacks neither for glamour nor cultural capital. The UP Tourism Department is co-sponsoring Muzaffar’s current pet project — reviving Lucknawi thumri and kathak as part of his Wajid Ali Shah festival, whose fourth edition opens on 14 February in Lucknow.

But they seem concerned about not being cutthroat enough for the present. “I’m hoping that Sama can learn the business end of things, because we get taken for a ride very easily,” Meera smiles ruefully. “My mother didn’t want me to get into this. She said, ‘fashion is beautiful, everything around it is ugly’,” laughs Sama.

“I want to add my own touch to their brand. Right now my focus is making Kotwara more contemporary, [to cater to] the many independent young people with well-paying jobs, who can buy a 30,000 rupee item without asking mothers or mothers-in-law. Papa’s too nice. I’m very open. But being nice doesn’t mean being stepped over,” says Sama resolutely. Muzaffar is accepting of his daughter’s vision for their brand and changing times. “Today’s reality is very harsh,” he agrees. “But we agree on being exacting and being human.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Feb 2017.

Living by the loom: Shyam Benegal's Susman

My column in Mumbai Mirror today: 

Shyam Benegal's Susman offers a portrait of the handloom weaver's predicament, sadly relevant even today.

Om Puri and Shabana Azmi, in Susman (1987)

At one point in Shyam Benegal's Susman (1987), two ikat weavers are walking back from a meeting with an agent and a city-based buyer. “Why didn't you ask the buyer for an advance?” says the younger brother Laxmayya (Annu Kapoor). “Apne munh se paisa maang ke kaahe apne ko chhota banayein? (Should I have demeaned myself by asking for money with my own mouth?)” responds the elder brother Ramulu (Om Puri). “Would have been better not to take the order.”

Susman is one of Shyam Benegal's less-watched films. It is part of his clutch of issue-defined films commissioned by government bodies or cooperatives. It has its limitations: Benegal's regular stable of 'alternative' actors can feel a little too starry. Watching Shabana Azmi and Om Puri and Pankaj Kapur play impoverished Pochampally weavers speaking in Dakkhani, can feel like a stretch – Azmi, in particular, looks and acts far too urbane. But Benegal has always had the ability to craft fictions that offer a nuanced, thoughtful picture of the situation he has chosen to depict, and Susman is a good example.

It is a film that deserves to be watched this week, as the central government contemplates a policy shift that might endanger the very existence of the handloom weaving sector. Scroll.in reported on Friday that “the Ministry of Textiles is looking into a memorandum submitted by power loom owners to ease provisions in the Handloom Reservation Act of 1985 that allow only handloom weavers to make certain textile products.” Over the years, the 22 handloom-only items originally listed by the Act has already been reduced to 11. Also, it is well-known that power loom weavers manufacture these reserved products, passing them off as handloom. Further de-reservation is likely to price handloom goods out of the market, and threaten the survival of what is the world's most stunningly diverse, skilled range of hand-crafted textiles.

Benegal seeks to draw in the middle class viewer with a display of handloom weaves, each sari covering the screen as we hear the unmistakeable voice of Neena Gupta applaud the particular finesse of each to a less-knowledgeable but terribly opinionated man. When we finally cut away from the saris to Gupta, she turns out to be a designer called Mandira: the handloom sari-wearing, big-bindi-ed figure we all know, directing some sort of sari-based fashion show.

Mandira is hard to please, and when she clicks her tongue at some of the work that master weaver Narasimha (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) brings her from Pochampally, Narasimha suggests that she explain her demands to the weavers herself. So it is that our English-speaking designer, accompanied by her even more English-speaking boyfriend, Jayant Kripalani, encounters Ramulu and his household.

It is after this slightly ham-handed beginning that the film comes into its own. Benegal cleverly uses the household's particular situation as illustrative of a larger socio-economic reality. In Ramulu's perfectionism as a craftsman, in his inability to bargain with agents, in his silent resentment of his situation but his fatalistic approach to dealing with it, we see the tragic predicament of the handloom weaver who doesn't have a head for the market. And while Ramulu is profoundly attached to the work he does, he displays what little realism he has in refusing to let his little son sit at the loom.

Because the financial pressures upon him are such that Ramulu has begun to see his attachment to his work as a form of bondage. “Ukhaad ke phenk doonga isko ek din. Yeh kargha nahi jail hai jail. Ismein bandh karke daal diya hum ko,” shouts Om Puri in one moving scene. And as we watch him, framed behind the long horizontal bar of his loom, it feels as if he is indeed boxed into a corner of the world. 

“Roti deti so cheez ko aisa nahi bolte (Don't say such things about the thing that feeds you),” says his wife Gouramma (Azmi) worriedly. But the film makes clear that weaving is failing to fill stomachs. The cooperative societies set up to save weavers from the clutches of agents and touts have quickly been corrupted from within, beholden to the powerful. Big orders don't come to the co-op because they require deposition of advance monies, funds the co-op can't risk. The co-op secretary loans the Society's supply of silk thread to Narasimha on the sly, and is bribed to sell off discounted saris in bulk to Laxmayya, who intends to resell them in Hyderabad and set up as an agent.

Through Ramulu's prospective son-in-law Nageshwar, we also see the new workspaces created by the powerloom. The village of individual homes in which weavers work at their own pace, often in conjunction with other family members, is replaced by a cramped all-male factory space, and the regular thak-thak of the handloom by the raging sound of the powerloom. In the factory, warns Nageshwar, a man cannot leave his machine. Benegal doesn't say it, but it's clear why: because the machine isn't his any more. It owns him, rather than the other way around.

But while Benegal's leanings are apparent, he is clear-eyed about how unsustainable handloom has become for even its most skilled practitioners. The tragic irony of a weaver having to steal thread in order to weave a silk sari for a daughter's wedding is a powerful one, one which recurs in Priyadarshan's Tamil film Kanchivaram (2008). Kripalani's computer-type boyfriend also represents the view against handloom, demanding of Mandira how long the artificial “sahara” of government loans and the “sentimentality” of people like her will keep it alive.

The film manages to end on an upbeat note. But the government's answers to these questions, asked nearly twenty years ago, remain as tragically short-sighted as ever. Handloom can thrive and grow, if we only do right by it. As Ashoke Chatterjee, ex-head of the Crafts Council of India, asked recently: “Why are powerloom lobbyists so eager for their fabric to appear handmade if demand is falling?”

Post Facto - Chandigarh Diary: notes from the fringes of a litfest

The Rock Garden in Chandigarh My Sunday Guardian column today:  I have just returned from my second visit to Chandigarh. The Chandigarh Literature Festival (CLF), organised by the Adab Foundation, has a unique format which places critics — and books — ahead of authors' and publishers' pitches. Each critic is invited to nominate, in advance, a book they think should be more widely read. At the fest, she or he introduces the book and conducts a conversation about it with the author. As a critic, it's a real pleasure to choose a book I think is worth discussing, rather than having to be part of a "panel" of someone else's design. If you want to spend a relaxed weekend hearing books being discussed, without any queues, I recommend a trip to Chandigarh this time next year. Last year, I was too caught up with the festival to see anything of the city, except to note that it was cleaner and greener — and emptier — than any Indian urban space I've seen. This year, my hotel was further out: a rather lonely bit of Panchkula opulence, ringed by fields and the dusty outcrop of the Morni Hills. (A taxi driver told one co-delegate that it was owned by the outgoing CM, though I have no evidence for whether this is true.) I'm quite unused to spending all my time in a new place holed up in some building. And hanging out only with other non-locals always seems a bit of a cop-out. So I was thrilled that on the last day, the festival organisers offered us a spot of sightseeing. Escorted by three schoolteachers — among the CLF's shiny, happy volunteers — we went first to Sukhna Lake. It was a Sunday morning, and families were out in full strength. As were the geese. A whole gaggle of geese waddled up the ghat-like steps, honking loudly, and surrounded a father and son offering bits of roti. As soon as we climbed back up to the promenade, I saw a sign: "Do not feed migratory birds." I don't know if the geese were migratory or local, but I did see some brown-headed ducks keeping a dignified distance from the handouts. The obligatory visit to the Rock Garden followed. We lined up behind a huge crowd of visitors: two school groups, plus a set of tourists from Maharashtra in royal blue caps. Expecting a vast expanse of parkland, I was surprised by the tightly-wound paths, often with high walls on either side. The average walker can squeeze through the narrow entrances if she stops and stoops — but only just. The crowd made it hard to get a sense of the space. But it revealed its contours in other ways: the ebb and flow of people forming little eddies and occasional blockages. As each passage opened out into a courtyard, pavilions, bridges, flowing water and, slowly, vast armies of figures began to appear — human, animal, bird. The garden has an incredible history. In the early 1950s, a Roads Inspector for the Public Works Division started gathering debris from the villages that were being demolished to create Le Corbusier's planned city. Working alone, he transported these materials — cement, sand, iron slag and other waste, like broken crockery, ceramic tiles, and glass bangles — to a gorge within what was then a forest buffer zone, and began creating his strange secret wonderland. It took 18 years for Nek Chand's illegal creation to come to the notice of the city authorities. Officials considered demolishing the complex, but the garden soon gathered popular support and was opened to the public in 1976. The bureaucratic establishment even named Nek Chand "Sub-divisional Engineer, Rock Garden", giving him a team of 50 labourers to help finish the garden. In a city that is the poster-child of high modernist planning, Nek Chand’s vision feels like a necessary corrective. A maze-like space in a city of straight lines, it is a marvellously surreal response to the symmetry imposed upon the city by Le Corbusier.  It didn't last. In 1990, a plan to bulldoze a VIP road through the garden was thwarted only by public demonstrations. Funding began to dry up, and in 1996, when Nek Chand was away on a tour of the U.S., the city withdrew its staff, resulting in acts of vandalism. Since then, the garden has been run by the Nek Chand Foundation, receiving some 5,000 visitors a day. In a city that is the poster-child of high modernist planning, Nek Chand's vision feels like a necessary corrective. A maze-like space in a city of straight lines, it is a marvellously surreal response to the symmetry imposed upon the city by Le Corbusier. And the sculptures made from construction waste offer an eloquent comment on the process of creation — how the new demands the destruction of the old, and yet how the old can find unexpected new form. The litfest had opened with a discussion of "30 years of Operation Blue Star", the only session filled with non-literary speakers: editors, journalists and bureaucrats. Several retired local bureaucrats grabbed the mike, angrily providing alternative versions of events. I was glad the litfest hadn't shied away from an important political commemoration, but it did seem clear that that the conversation had barely begun. On my last day, I met a respected Chandigarh historian who said he had considered attending the festival, but hadn't for two reasons. One, he felt, it ought to be in the university or the museum, not in the Chandigarh Club, "where people only go to drink and play cards". And two, why was a litfest discussing Operation Blue Star? Clearly the new must try harder to work with the old. The city needs to channel the spirit of Nek Chand. Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Post Facto - Blind Spot: distilling the essence of middle class aesthetics

My Sunday Guardian column for 27th October:

	he label "middle class" is frequently deemed sufficient as a descriptor for many things in India – neighbourhoods, morality, home decor. An ongoing exhibition called Blind Spot seeks to simultaneously challenge and concretise that descriptor as far as the home decor goes. Not only is there a middle class home decor, the show argues, but there are seven subsets of it. Based on a research project conducted between 2011 and 2012, the exhibition organised by Outset India and Weiden & Kennedy describes itself as using "photographs, cultural references and interactive data to bring to life seven contemporary sensibilities, each complete with their visual and verbal vocabularies." Researchers apparently drew on conversations with designers and design bloggers as well as visits to private residences in 13 Indian cities including Madurai, Lucknow, Bhopal, Kolkata and Ahmedabad to come up with these seven sensibilities: 'Natural', 'Cute', 'Decent', 'Traditional', 'Royal', 'Jazzy' and 'Executive'. Each of these characterises a room (sometimes two rooms) in the independent New Delhi bungalow where Blind Spot is on show: House No. 24, Jor Bagh. "The study concentrates on the universal threads that run through the home decor choices of middle class families with household income between 3 and 8 lakhs across India," says the Blind Spot website. Even in its current dilapidated state, though, House No. 24, Jor Bagh is grander than all the houses that the exhibition draws on. Its size, its garden, its very location on leafy Lodhi Road, in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi and practically across the road from Lodhi Garden, makes it anything but middle class. This fact gives the whole exhibition an oddly displaced quality, so that the objects, whether they've been placed in the 'Cute', 'Royal', 'Executive' or any other bracket, begin to seem less like embodiments of those sensibilities and more like a large and diverse gathering of 'Slightly Pitiable'. Perhaps I am being too hasty. There are things here to be noticed. Especially if you have grown up middle class in India, the show is full of deeply familiar things, many of them stylistic tics that only emerge noticeably as such when someone – the outsider — draws attention to them. 'Natural', for instance, contains both a real potted cactus and several kinds of artificial flowers, both real cane moodas and a fake plastic-woven durrie. There are even flowers painted on little ceramic achaar pots and a clock with a landscape as the background to the dial. Is this a scathing comment on Indian middle class ideas of the natural, a suggestion that its members are so distant from the natural world that they cannot even distinguish any more between that and manmade approximations of it?
	djoining the 'Natural' room is the 'Cute' room, and clearly this is a deliberate decision, because there is much that makes the two categories hard to separate from each other. Between the two rooms hangs a plastic toy eagle flapping its wings. Other exhibits that are 'Cute' but seem on the border of 'Natural' are a coffee mug with an anthropomorphic zebra on it and a mini-dustbin with 'Smiley Flowers' printed on it. Each category also has a wall inscribed with words that have emered from conversations about that central idea and what it signifies to informants. Worryingly, "being in love" and "romantic" are descriptors that appear in the list of words under 'Cute'. The association of teddy bears (of which there are several in this room) with romance is clearly not exclusive to the Indian middle classes, but there is something faintly eerie about an aesthetic dominated by teddies and babies being the only one of the seven categories here that contains the word "romantic". 'Royal' is perhaps the most easy to classify – heavy sofas almost always upholstered in rich reds and deep maroons, gilt carved furniture, ornate mirrors. "This is about being ostentatious. It aims to demonstrate prosperity to the world at large. It is articulated through pieces that are grand, heavy and delicately detailed," reads the exhibition handout. 'Jazzy' is possibly the most fictitious category here. Though it is described as an "individualistic expression that is a loud and proud proclamation of status", the stuff placed under 'jazzy' seems to me to be united only by its multicoloured-ness. Having a multicoloured rubber bathroom wiper does not seem to me to erase the profound unjazziness of owning a rubber bathroom wiper at all. An interesting category is 'Decent'. The white and blue rubber chappals, the Nataraj pencils, the black plastic-covered diary and the clipboard on which so many of us wrote exams work perfectly to evoke this category, as does the Godrej almirah and the tube of Colgate in the bathroom. I've almost always thought of the Indian obsession with brands as a post-liberalisation thing, so I was struck by the fact that so many of these objects were actually branded. But these brands express a lack of choice. 'Decent' is described as "sober, respectable, yet welcoming" — but what the rooms feels like is the opposite of 'Royal' and 'Jazzy'. In contemporary India, it seems, to be merely 'Decent' expresses a lack of prosperity, and certainly a lack of status.

Post Delhi Modern

Published in the Business Standard last Saturday.

Tucked away in a corridor at Madan Mahatta’s magnificent show of photographs of Delhi’s modernist architecture from the 1950s to the 1980s is a small image of Sapru House. Taken in 1957, the photograph records — in black and white — a building whose red-and-white sandstone façade and stupa-like dome is an unmistakeable echo of the stately architecture of British New Delhi, though with the pillared verandah becoming a column-embedded wall, and the chhatris more extreme than anything Lutyens might have done. And yet this was a post-independence construction, built to house the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and inaugurated by Nehru.

From the colonnaded exterior and stupa-dome of B L Doctor’s Sapru House to the stark horizontals of Habib Rahman’s World Health House building seems a huge leap. But the gap between them is a mere nine years: Sapru House is 1955, the WHO building 1964.

Delhi Modern — curated by photographer Ram Rahman, Habib Rahman’s son — contains very few buildings like Sapru House, many more like WHO. Rahman’s grid-like Hindustan Times Building, the sweeping curved exterior of Kuldip Singh’s NDMC tower, the rolling roofs of Joseph Stein’s American School — what the Delhi-based Mahatta documented was the work of a new generation of modernist architects.

In the modernist dream, the Indian city was an empty space in which the future could be literally inscribed, in architectural form. It was a dream voiced by Nehru in 1949 when he visited the site for Chandigarh, declaring it “free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions” and enthusiastically calling for Le Corbusier’s city to be “the first large expression of our creative genius flowering on our newly earned freedom”. A decade later, inaugurating a conference in Delhi on the future of Indian urban form, Nehru’s speech was a characteristic melding of the personal with the epochal. He proclaimed his distaste for the “dark corridors” of older South Indian temples (“they suppress my spirit”), declared his love of “sun and air”, and asserted that function must govern form.

I cannot help wondering if Nehru’s rather un-Indian desire for sun was the result of a gray English childhood. But psychobabble aside, India’s modernist intellectuals could not have had a better advocate. If MARG magazine’s 1946 founding issue (on ‘Planning and Dreaming’) announced the need to start “on a clean slate and… build our industrial civilisation”, Nehru was no less programmatic: “The past was good when it was the present,” he said, “but you cannot bring it forward when the entire world has changed into a technological period.”

Their manifesto may have been all about minimalism and functionality and a refusal to kowtow to previous traditions, but modernists had their own desire for monumentality. Kuldip Singh’s impressive National Cooperation Development Corporation Building (1981) on Khel Gaon Marg (which I grew up calling “the bell-shaped building”) has what looks like a gigantic pillar drilled through its core. The technological splendour of Raj Rewal’s pyramidical grid for Asia 72 at Pragati Maidan, the massive concrete bulk of the Shriram Centre: these were meant to awe the population of a developing country — and they did.

The open circulatory spaces Nehru saw as anti-“oppression”, urbanist Ravi Sundaram suggests, was crucial to modernity’s disciplinary regime. Visibility, as Michel Foucault famously argued, is a way to manage and govern populations: the deliberately external staircases of JK Chowdhury’s IIT buildings might bear thinking about this way.

Staircase of a teaching block with the main building in the background, IIT-Delhi, c.1968
Architect: J.K. Chowdhury. (Photograph Courtesy: Madan Mahatta/Photoink)

The most extreme modernist fantasies — like Brasilia, where Le Corbusier’s disciple Oscar Niemeyer did away with the plazas of Latin American urban tradition — displayed a hostility to everyday forms of community, estranging people from the spaces they were in. Chandigarh had its problems. Delhi suffered the consequences of an imported Master Plan, where Albert Mayer’s team put in place a segregated land-use policy whose alienness has led to decades of inevitable ‘non-conforming’ developments.

Reams have been written about the dullness of Delhi’s sarkari architecture, but Mahatta’s ’50s and ’60s images document an island of genteel elegance: hotels (Claridges), intellectual-cultural spaces (Stein’s India International Centre, Rahman’s Rabindra Bhavan, IIT), international institutions (the WHO, the American School, the Ford Foundation, the International Trade Fair buildings), and the homes of modernist architects themselves, all furnished with Taaru furniture, Riten Mozumdar wall-hangings and John Bissell’s Fab India linens. “Almost every Delhi home in those days was outfitted by these three designers,” writes Ram Rahman. Even as I balk at the elitist obliviousness of that “every”, I can see why he would wax nostalgic about a moment “when India’s design confidence…was truly internationalist”.

John Bissell, Shona Ray and Bharati Sharma, 1975, Furniture designer: Mini Boga

But the pictures that give me most joy are those of Rahman’s RK Puram (1965); Kuldip Singh’s 1975 DDA flats (Malviya Nagar/Saket); Ranjit Sabikhi’s Yamuna Apartments. Delhi’s modernists — elite though they were — had a vision of middle class urban living in which privacy did not yet mean a withdrawal from the world. Balconies were staggered for privacy, but still open; brick tower blocks have badminton courts in their shadow. Boys lean on cycles outside their building, others sit on a low boundary wall. Workmen walk through. One wishes in vain to be back in this world, where Gurgaon’s gated condominiums were not yet the inevitable future.