An ongoing show looks at the many avatars of artist-poet Adil Jussawalla

Mint

02-07-2025

On the cover of Missing Person by poet Adil Jussawalla, you see a man wearing a double breasted jacket and tie. His face seems to be a blur. The image portrays the fogged state of mind of the book's narrator—trapped as he is between incomprehensible modernity and redundant traditionalism. The cover was designed by poet Arun Kolatkar, who along with Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Gieve Patel founded a poets' cooperative, Clearing House, in Mumbai in 1976. Sometime later, poets Dilip Chitre, H.O. Nazareth and Jayanta Mahapatra too joined in. The cooperative published eight titles in its short lifetime, including Mehrotra's Nine Enclosures, Jussawalla's Missing Person, How Do you Withstand, Body and Jejuri by Kolatkar. Nazareth's Lobo published in 1984 was the imprint's last title.
Covers for all the books were designed by Kolatkar, who insisted that not a single line in a poem be broken, thus resulting in the squarish format of the book. These covers, treasured for their imagery and design aesthetic, are now part of the show, Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla, curated by Deeptha Achar and Chithra KS, on view at The Guild, Alibaug, till 15 July. Through a range of material like manuscripts, letters, magazine articles, scrap books and family albums, we encounter Jussawalla in various avatars: as a photographer, an art writer, a publisher, a magazine editor, and a person fascinated with ships, picnics, Superman and Tarzan. The show is designed thematically in sections like Family, Visual Culture, Bombay, Ships, Cuffe Parade: Milieu, Life and Books.
Born in a privileged Parsi family, Jussawalla was gifted a Kodak Baby Brownie by his aunt at the age of 13. The exhibition offers insights into major events such as these, including his early life in Mumbai with picnics to Elephanta caves and Sinhagad Fort, followed by a stint in London in the late 1950s and return to Mumbai in 1970. But more than anything the show documents the history of the Maximum City, thrumming with creative energy, a sense of community and rebellion. Clearing House was a product of this synergy.
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According to Achar, the setting up of the poets' cooperative ought to be viewed in context of the 'little magazine' movement and the establishment of small and independent presses of the 1960s-70s. Jussawalla's friends, including Kolatkar and Mehrotra, had rallied behind this underground experimental literary scene. In fact,Mehrotra's little magazine, damn you, stood against tired literary strictures. Even Vrischik, the little magazine helmed by artists Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh, was meant to sting. Other literary magazines like Bombay Duck, Dionysus, Blunt, Indian Writing Today, Tornado, Opinion Literary Quarterly, Fulcrum and Keynote were part of the zeitgeist.
'It is instructive to see how Jussawalla's works intersected with the poetic and artistic climate of the 1970s," says Achar. 'That was a time of new energy and when newer styles of modernism were getting consolidated. There were intersections between poetry and art, and many practiced both. It was also marked by a spirit of great generosity, with poets supporting one another. Adil's flat came to be a place where many writers converged."
Milieu: Cuffe Parade features portraits of leading personalities from the literary and artistic world like Kolatkar, Mehrotra, Nissim Ezekiel, Vijay Nambisan, R. Raja Rao, Farrukh Dhondy and Jayanta Mahapatra. In one striking portrait Mehrotra looks at the viewer with a piercing gaze, and in another you encounter a disheveled Kolatkar. Dom Moraes had once compared Chitre and Kolatkar as young writers 'who look exactly like Rimbaud and Verlaine' because of their tramp-like appearance and itinerant lifestyle.
A black-and-white photograph by Horace Ove of Jussawalla sitting in the iconic Wayside Inn, Rampart Row, is part of the archive as well, and reveals the intense and frayed charisma of the cafe as well as the poet.Now shut, this iconic restaurant has also been immortalised by several of Kolatkar's poems including The Rat-Poison Man's Lunch Hour in which he imagines the cafe's walls recalling its various visitors, from Bal Thackeray sitting alone 'with a pot of tea and scribbling notes / dreaming with an audacious pencil/ of a society undivided by caste and creed" to an obscure poet 'munching on Welsh rabbit, and thinking of rats dying in a wet barrel".
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A concern for the subaltern—a defining aspect of this milieu—is evident from the Workers section. It comprises photographs of construction workers, or what Jussawalla calls 'the city's newest and worst paid plastic surgeons', who renovated his Cuffe parade-apartment in 1999-2000. In one poignant image that delineates sharp class differences, he juxtaposes the interior of his book-laden room with an image of a worker staring at a scaffolding in his balcony.
While The Guild received most of the visual material from Jussawalla, his archive has further been divided among two other institutions, Ashoka University, India, and Cornell University, UK. During the digitisation process, gallerist Shalini Sawhney was quick to gauge the repository's historical import. 'What a rich and layered reflection it was of the times, his literary circles, and an intersection of personal and social histories," says Sawhney. 'Historical narratives should be consciously saved and recorded so that they do not slip through the cracks of time."
In 2012 , poet Jerry Pinto was sitting in Jussawalla's house when he pointed to a blue Rexine bag that was lying on the floor. He was informed that it contained all the Clearing House correspondence. In the introduction to Jussawala's Maps to a Mortal Moon (2014), Pinto writes, 'Thus a single blue rexine bag would have a picture of Indian poetry's finest, talking, arguing, and challenging each other as they brought out books, several of which were to be major events in the nation's literary history. That was just one of the many boxes, files, collections of papers and magazines, notebooks, scrapbooks that fill Jussawalla's world with paper."
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According to Achar, the poet never threw away even one piece of paper. Jussawalla's obsession for hoarding paper can be glimpsed in Pablo Bartholomew's photograph of his room, especially procured for this show, in which trunks, newspapers, books, stand cheek by jowl in packed shelves. 'Without archives we shall never know the hidden, submerged stories of the past," says co-curator Chithra K.S. ' An archive is an endless process—it is a portal that keeps on opening up new details, new paths and endless possibilities."
Moreover the dissemination of archives in a gallery reconfigures the white cube and extends its scope. According to Achar, these repositories unsettle the gallery space, disrupt its emphasis on display for sale and establish new possibilities of narratives and contexts which, in more conventional exhibitions, may not come to view. 'For us as curators, the intersection between history and a life offered by the Adil Jussawalla archives provide the possibility of understanding a little about a time period, a city, and a lifetime."
Shweta Upadhyay is an arts journalist and co-author of the photobook 'I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you'.