How the BDL keeps itself current
Last week, two excellent exhibitions at the Bhau Daji Lad (BDL) Museum reminded me of why Mumbai’s oldest museum remains my favourite in the city. One was ‘Silver Magic: Vintage Photographs of the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema’, portraits by J.H. Thakker, curated by Ram Rahman, who recently put together a retrospective from Sunil Janah’s formidable body of work for the National Gallery of Modern Art. While Janah was toasted as the chronicler of India — his prolific pictures are an inventory of political events and anthropological exercises from the post-Independence era — Thakker’s photographic record of an important period in Indian film history might almost have landed in oblivion.
Many of India’s beloved Bollywood stars were born in Thakker’s India Photo Studio, which specialised in portraiture and film publicity stills that were staged on their premises in Dadar. The results are large, familiar portraits of heroes like Dev Anand and Raj Kumar, villains, including Pran and KN Singh, and several arresting photos of Nargis.
The other exhibition was ‘Chamba Rumal: Life to a Dying Art’, curated in collaboration with the Delhi Crafts Council. Prior to this, I’d only heard of this craft of needlework that brought alive Pahari miniature paintings on muslin or silken cloth. You might still encounter a rumal embroidered with floral or paisley motifs at an emporium, but the exhibits at the BDL, mirrored complex scenes, including Rukmini Haran and a Raas Leela.
Both the exhibitions are admirable examples of how the BDL attempts to remain a current, live museum. Part of the vision of Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, the museum’s managing trustee and honorary director, who also oversaw its dramatic and award-winning restoration, was to host contemporary exhibitions that interacted with the museum’s permanent collection. In the past, some of our brightest and best artists, including Atul Dodiya, Ranjini Shettar, and the collective CAMP, have exhibited there.
For me, though, the greatest advantage of going to the BDL is the chance to observe a different profile of visitors than the ones I am used to seeing at any art-related gathering in the city. The museum abuts Veermata Jijabai Udyaan, considered one of the oldest zoos in the country, so I often find myself in the company of raucous schoolchildren and their parents who have sauntered in. And that’s a refreshing change, especially to hear the kind of fresh perspectives (and levelling critiques) that only children can offer. It’s a bit embarrassing for me to admit this, but I always try to eavesdrop on their conversations.
I’ve frequently noticed kids on the museum’s first level point to dioramas of “village scenes”, samples of which were once sent to Queen Victoria to illustrate life in the colonies under her reign, and yell, “Aquarium!” My favourite takeaway though, is from Reena Saini Kallat’s giant cobweb installation that covered the building’s façade more than two years ago. The cobweb was a complex network of rubber stamps — a motif Kallat has repeatedly used — and juxtaposed the original names of Mumbai’s streets with their Anglicised counterparts. But two children transfixed by the exhibit, made up their own mind about it. After contemplating the web for several minutes, the older child concluded with a finality that was sufficient for both of them: “It’s Spiderman,” she said.