Latest news with #Jussawalla
Scroll.in
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
An exhibition of Adil Jussawalla's multilayered oeuvre swings between precision and spontaneity
Adil Jussawalla is primarily known as one of India's preeminent English-language poets. But few realise that there is much more to his work. Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla weaves together his photography, poetry, prose, sketches and scrapbooks to chart a cartography of an artist whose work navigates the interstices of personal history and urban modernity. The exhibition, curated by Deeptha Achar and Chithra KS at The Guild Art Gallery in Alibaug, near Mumbai, emerges as an intellectually exhilarating exploration of Jussawalla's multilayered oeuvre. The title, Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope, is a poetic invocation that captures the serendipitous discovery of meaning in the ephemeral – a hallmark of Jussawalla's aesthetic. Rather than presenting a sanitised or monumentalised narrative, the curators embrace the provisional, fragmented nature of the archive, displaying materials such as dog-eared sketchbook pages, handwritten manuscripts and faded photographs. The curatorial vision ingeniously avoids linear biography, organising the exhibition into thematic constellations such as 'Sinhagad,' 'Ships,' 'Family,' 'Bombay' and 'Life and Books'. Jussawalla's photography, reproduced as archival digital prints on Ilford Smooth Gloss paper, forms the exhibition's core, spanning the 1950s to 1990s. It includes images like 'Kalyan Gate Entrance', 'Sinhagad, 1953' and 'Worker, Mumbai, 1999'. The curators pair these with texts, creating synesthetic dialogues. For instance, Nine Poems on Arrival alongside Sinhagad images captures dislocation and return, while Ships Fastened to Water (Trying to Say Goodbye, 2011) complements 'The 'Sabarmoti' Seen En Route to Elephanta, 1955', reflecting on transience and rootedness. The 'Bombay' section is a conceptual linchpin, offering a portrait of a city that is both muse and crucible for Jussawalla's work. Bombay is not merely a setting but a 'haunting presence' that permeates his photography, poetry, and prose; with works like 'Fire Temple, Bombay, 1967 ' and Castaway City (Shorelines, 2019) depicting decay and resilience. Scrapbook pages, such as 'Comic Characters, 1948 ', reveal Bombay's hybrid visual culture – Bollywood posters, comics – shaping Jussawalla's aesthetic, as noted in his prose on 'The Wall of Illusions,' presenting Bombay as a palimpsest of histories. His photographs from London ('St. Paul's, London, 1957/58'), Switzerland ('Storm, Switzerland '), and Iowa ('Adi Jussawalla, Nirmal Verma, and Bessie Head at IWP, Iowa City, 1977 ') are displayed alongside those from Bombay and Sinhagad, creating a transregional narrative that complicates national boundaries. Jussawalla's reflection on Bessie Head's isolation at the Iowa International Writing Program (1976-'77) is a poignant meditation on marginality, rendered with an unflinching honesty. The use of archival digital prints on Ilford Smooth Gloss paper and digital prints on Sunboard creates a tactile dialogue between the polished and the provisional, mirroring Jussawalla's own oscillation between precision and spontaneity. The layout encourages a peripatetic engagement, with thematic sections arranged as interconnected nodes – a spatial logic that invites viewers to wander, pause, and reflect, much like Jussawalla's own poetic peregrinations. A deeper engagement with Jussawalla's role in shaping Indian English poetry, particularly through his editorial work with The Clearing House and Debonair, could have illuminated his influence on literary networks. On view at The Guild Art Gallery, Alibaug, through till July 15.
Mint
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
An ongoing show looks at the many avatars of artist-poet Adil Jussawalla
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. Also read: Artistic encounters: How animals inspire contemporary artists 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 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". Also read: 'A Show of Hands': Celebrating the generous mentorship of artist Gieve Patel 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." Also read: Zarna Garg's memoir: The super-sad story of an immigrant comedian 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'.
Hindustan Times
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap by Adil Jussawalla
Given its geohistory, Mumbai has attracted the attention of an outrageously large number of chroniclers. Even someone who has never been to the much-mythologised city can experience it through the art it has inspired. Though Mumbaikars may judge this as an inauthentic way of experiencing their metropolis, I too have learnt a lot about the place through its poetry — those ambivalent delights that one turns to, usually in the event of adversity. 85-year-old Adil Jussawalla is one of Mumbai's, or Bombay's, if you will, best-known poets. Wicked, witty, and wondrous, he writes with an ease that signals an internalisation of the city and its people in all their complexity. Much has been written about his journey, which is therefore no longer intriguing. What is definitely intriguing is this Speaking Tiger volume featuring 35 of the poet's prose pieces written between 1980 and 2002. The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay convinces the reader that when poets turn to prose, each word illuminates as nothing is rendered uncalibrated. In his introduction, An Enduring Unease: Adil Jussawalla in the City, poet, novelist and translator Jerry Pinto writes, 'I remember the exhilaration of seeing a Devnagari letter in an English book and thinking, 'Is this allowed?' But then Adil wasn't very interested in what was allowed and what wasn't. He was interested in words, he was interested in where he was, he was interested because that was another habit of mind: the belief that everyone mattered, and hierarchies were there only to be challenged.' This is evident in the first piece, The Bombay Within, which begins with a bitter truth: 'The waiters of the Bombay Gymkhana remain invisible.' Jussawalla follows this up with: 'So, when you think of it, does most of the city, most of the time. Do we ever look at its details?' Notorious for noticing things, the fine print interests him the most. How the protagonists of this piece — the historian Sharada Dwivedi, poet Rahul Mehrotra, and Jussawalla himself — exit the club is quite telling. The reader is compelled to also appreciate the writer's sense of foreseeability. The titular piece exemplifies this, though many may claim that it developed solely out of a mix of journalistic and poetic impulses. In 1962, at an auction of a 'collection of jewellery and antiques', his friend, Sunil, gifted the poet a late 19th-century article, a 'diamond-encrusted rat trap' which contained a 'tightly-rolled scroll'. Jussawalla wondered if this was Sunil's way of jokingly 'calling [him] a rat'. But when he opened the scroll, there was a 'repetition of certain forms, the gaps between each set of designs clearly indicated'; it was some sort of encryption. He sent it to 'Father Schiller of Ootacamund, an expert on Hindu family codes' and received the decoded text 20 years later, which is reproduced in full in this 1984 piece. The story reveals much: the cyclical nature of karma, an obsession with the foreign and the forbidden, a personal account of the Bombay plague of the 1890s, and the tangential story of Waldemar Haffkine, who was brought to India by the Governor of Bombay to create a vaccine for the epidemic. Interestingly, it was the same institute where 'the plague used to kill [Amarendra Chandra Pandey] had come from'. The concluding paragraph signals that Jussawalla reads the city better than most: 'It's a hot month and my wife and daughter have left the city. Looking at its lights from my balcony, I think a lot of the diamond-encrusted rat trap.' In O City, City from 1993, he writes that Bombay, like every megalopolis, is cruel. But cruelties and tragedies play out differently in life and in the arts. Of the latter he states sombrely, 'We may or may not be moved by what we see.' There are moments of hilarity too. In Want to Get Away? Let Others Do It for You (1997), he writes, 'I've come to believe that the best way of taking a holiday is to stay put; let others do the getting away for you. It can be wonderfully relaxing.' Heeling Process, another example of a succinct piece with a clickbaity title, ruminates on how the individual falls apart when their shoes fall apart. 'That's why I've written several poems on shoes,' Jussawalla concludes. In A Change of Light, he writes that he seems 'to attract a lot of attention through no fault of [his]', leaving readers wondering if there's a subtext, something more to the piece than meets the eye. The collection also includes Baby Talk, in which Mulk Raj Anand visits Jussawalla. Mostly, though, these articles are about the poet himself, the lapsed architect, who imagines the city by the sea one word at a time. The period in which these were written witnessed the renaming of Bombay to Mumbai (1995). Somehow, the difference in what Jussawalla noted about the city and its people is telling of the transformation of the place and of himself too. The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay is a pleasant read and, as Pinto notes, these pieces are 'a way of giving witness to the bigness and the strangeness of the city.' Adil Jussawalla, he writes, 'does not provide any potted histories; those are for others to write and to believe in. His city is built of chance encounters, of laughing liftmen, of departed friends and other ghosts.' Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
