The tenants of history : Bombay Art Society and the hysterias that surround Café Samovar
Borders are often a site of contests that make history. Café Samovar was born 43 year ago on the border, and continues to stay there: on the narrow passage between the Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastusangrahalaya ( previously Prince of Wales Museum) and Jehangir Art Gallery. Displeasures are not as old. They started when the Museum fenced its area with a barbed wire. By that time, the late seventies, Café Samovar was a name associated with film and art personalities. These and more well-wishers of Café Samovar protested the ugly barbed wire fence. The displeasures further grew when Jehangir Art Gallery asked its tenants, including Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar, to vacate the place. People like me, who have been visiting Jehangir, Samovar and Chemould, have chatted over the last decade about this great tenancy dispute.
‘When the Gallery was growing up, when the art scene was nascent, they almost invited us. Now they want us to go! Why?’, was the irate lament you’d hear from Kekoo Gandhy of Chemould or Usha Khanna of Samovar. Chemould gave in, and moved out of the Jehangir premises this month ‘for good’. Even before, the dinghy ‘Terrace Art Gallery’ moved out, when many of us came to know it was there… ‘Yes, for thirty years that Chetan did business with bad art’, somebody would say, and we all laughed and smoked. We all knew Chemould or Samovar could not be equated with Terrace Gallery, and when Chemould decided to move out, most of us seemed to know what loss it was to the Jehangir building, the Kala Ghoda locale. One was also happy, anyways, that the Chemould shifted to a much larger, contemporary space at Prescott Road.
Samovar now fights the lone battle of preserving the tenancy. The issue is already in court, and is sub-judice. To put things straight, the land belongs to Government of Maharashtra and who gave the occupancy rights to Prince of Wales Museum. Jehangir Art Gallery is a tenant of the Museum, and Samovar a sub-tenant. The Bombay Art Society has its very small office in the Jehangir premises, but the legislation about the inception of Jehangir Art Gallery makes special arrangements for the Society. The same legislation also states that the Society will use the Jehangir Art Gallery space for its annual exhibitions.
Things have changed since the legislations were passed some 54 years ago. Given the government’s understanding of cultural agenda that time, the Bombay Art Society under the leadership of (then young) people like K. K. Hebbar was the only trustworthy agency of change and betterment in visual art scene of the city.
Yet, last fortnight, the Bombay Art Society members had a public gathering that proclaimed ‘Samovar must vacate the space’. ‘Samovar started at a time when there was no restaurants and eating joints nearby. Now there are kiosks around the Gallery that feed the struggling artists. If Usha Khanna of Samovar boasts of having fed the stugglers way back in the 1970s, I would like to ask why are todays’ strugglers away from Café Samovar? What keeps only celebrities stand up for the Café?’ asked the speakers to a gathering of about 250 people, while the Bombay Art Society Secretary Gayatri Mehta declared, ‘the historical task of Café Samovar is over now. There is no point in still using the same space for a restaurant’. These protestors against Samovar had a so-called positive agenda: they wanted the Samovar space reclaimed for art exhibitions.
The same logic of ‘the end of historical task’ can fit the Bombay Art Society itself! The Society is no longer representative of the ‘talents in art’, nor does it command an undisputed trust in the art fraternity. To be sure, the Society cannot be stamped as retrograde, but it has, been unable to keep pace with the newer definitions of art. Issues of propriety, of ‘who asks whom to go and in what pitch’ assume an even greater importance when the matter is under the consideration of a court of law. The public meeting devised by the Society in mid-August 2007 can, at best, be called a display of hysteria. The hysteria stems from the fear of loosing one’s voice in the changing situation.
The situation changed because somebody toiled to do so. It was undoubtedly Café Samovar that valued the presence of eminent personalities. It did not discourage the ‘struggling artist’, until such artists could hardly cope with a rate-card that is not cheap by the city standards and leaves a chance only to order for an apparently lousy ‘ready tea’ to the struggling artist. Yet, Café Samovar now attracts a varied clientele that includes tourists and NRIs, lawyers and chartered accountants, the laptop-savvy yuppies and yes, some young artists and critics, too.
It became the talk of the metropolis on August 6, when some ‘noted personalities from art, media and cultural fraternity’ (read : celebrities) met the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to save the tenancy of Café Samovar, even as the tenancy dispute is sub judice. Some noted personalities went to the extent of demanding a ‘Heritage Status’ for the Café from the state government, which in its rightful capacity has duly refused to do so. The celebrities - CM meeting was so well covered by the media that the Bombay Art Society action may be seen rather as a reaction to it. The issues of ego between the Society and the Café are there, but they can be sorted out with a proper dialogue. In fact, such a dialogue has started at the informal levels. September 2007 will go further with the process. This is the juncture when people like the octogenarian Kekoo Gandhy, who happens to be a patron of Bombay Art Society, is not averse to the idea of being a negotiator between the two sides, but this remains his wish.
The court judgments notwithstanding, the hysteria is about getting a chunk out of the history. Any history of the ‘Kala Ghoda Art District’ of Mumbai would have a place for the Bombay Art Society, Jehangir Art Gallery, Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar (in chronological order). Nobody ever owns history. At present, it seems as if all these institutions that ploughed Kala Ghoda to be an Art District, are fighting it out for their place and want to reap from history here and now. These tenants of history vie for a self-contained future. And, it seems, nothing is going to stop them doing that.
- Abhijeet Tamhane
‘When the Gallery was growing up, when the art scene was nascent, they almost invited us. Now they want us to go! Why?’, was the irate lament you’d hear from Kekoo Gandhy of Chemould or Usha Khanna of Samovar. Chemould gave in, and moved out of the Jehangir premises this month ‘for good’. Even before, the dinghy ‘Terrace Art Gallery’ moved out, when many of us came to know it was there… ‘Yes, for thirty years that Chetan did business with bad art’, somebody would say, and we all laughed and smoked. We all knew Chemould or Samovar could not be equated with Terrace Gallery, and when Chemould decided to move out, most of us seemed to know what loss it was to the Jehangir building, the Kala Ghoda locale. One was also happy, anyways, that the Chemould shifted to a much larger, contemporary space at Prescott Road.
Samovar now fights the lone battle of preserving the tenancy. The issue is already in court, and is sub-judice. To put things straight, the land belongs to Government of Maharashtra and who gave the occupancy rights to Prince of Wales Museum. Jehangir Art Gallery is a tenant of the Museum, and Samovar a sub-tenant. The Bombay Art Society has its very small office in the Jehangir premises, but the legislation about the inception of Jehangir Art Gallery makes special arrangements for the Society. The same legislation also states that the Society will use the Jehangir Art Gallery space for its annual exhibitions.
Things have changed since the legislations were passed some 54 years ago. Given the government’s understanding of cultural agenda that time, the Bombay Art Society under the leadership of (then young) people like K. K. Hebbar was the only trustworthy agency of change and betterment in visual art scene of the city.
Yet, last fortnight, the Bombay Art Society members had a public gathering that proclaimed ‘Samovar must vacate the space’. ‘Samovar started at a time when there was no restaurants and eating joints nearby. Now there are kiosks around the Gallery that feed the struggling artists. If Usha Khanna of Samovar boasts of having fed the stugglers way back in the 1970s, I would like to ask why are todays’ strugglers away from Café Samovar? What keeps only celebrities stand up for the Café?’ asked the speakers to a gathering of about 250 people, while the Bombay Art Society Secretary Gayatri Mehta declared, ‘the historical task of Café Samovar is over now. There is no point in still using the same space for a restaurant’. These protestors against Samovar had a so-called positive agenda: they wanted the Samovar space reclaimed for art exhibitions.
The same logic of ‘the end of historical task’ can fit the Bombay Art Society itself! The Society is no longer representative of the ‘talents in art’, nor does it command an undisputed trust in the art fraternity. To be sure, the Society cannot be stamped as retrograde, but it has, been unable to keep pace with the newer definitions of art. Issues of propriety, of ‘who asks whom to go and in what pitch’ assume an even greater importance when the matter is under the consideration of a court of law. The public meeting devised by the Society in mid-August 2007 can, at best, be called a display of hysteria. The hysteria stems from the fear of loosing one’s voice in the changing situation.
The situation changed because somebody toiled to do so. It was undoubtedly Café Samovar that valued the presence of eminent personalities. It did not discourage the ‘struggling artist’, until such artists could hardly cope with a rate-card that is not cheap by the city standards and leaves a chance only to order for an apparently lousy ‘ready tea’ to the struggling artist. Yet, Café Samovar now attracts a varied clientele that includes tourists and NRIs, lawyers and chartered accountants, the laptop-savvy yuppies and yes, some young artists and critics, too.
It became the talk of the metropolis on August 6, when some ‘noted personalities from art, media and cultural fraternity’ (read : celebrities) met the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to save the tenancy of Café Samovar, even as the tenancy dispute is sub judice. Some noted personalities went to the extent of demanding a ‘Heritage Status’ for the Café from the state government, which in its rightful capacity has duly refused to do so. The celebrities - CM meeting was so well covered by the media that the Bombay Art Society action may be seen rather as a reaction to it. The issues of ego between the Society and the Café are there, but they can be sorted out with a proper dialogue. In fact, such a dialogue has started at the informal levels. September 2007 will go further with the process. This is the juncture when people like the octogenarian Kekoo Gandhy, who happens to be a patron of Bombay Art Society, is not averse to the idea of being a negotiator between the two sides, but this remains his wish.
The court judgments notwithstanding, the hysteria is about getting a chunk out of the history. Any history of the ‘Kala Ghoda Art District’ of Mumbai would have a place for the Bombay Art Society, Jehangir Art Gallery, Gallery Chemould and Café Samovar (in chronological order). Nobody ever owns history. At present, it seems as if all these institutions that ploughed Kala Ghoda to be an Art District, are fighting it out for their place and want to reap from history here and now. These tenants of history vie for a self-contained future. And, it seems, nothing is going to stop them doing that.
- Abhijeet Tamhane
posted by abhi at 12:07 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Abhijeet
rather its late comment, but as I tumbled upon this now while searching net, I wish to correct few points. First of all Gayatri Mehta is neither a secretary/ president of Bombay Art society nor she is any office bearer of Bombay Art society. She is not even on the society's committee. Second correction-Kekoo Gandhi is not a patron of Bombay art society. He was never a patron in the past also. Thats is.
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