Snehanshu Mukherjee is an architect by training, and was connected to the world of Indian Theatre from late 1960s to early 1990s through his illustrious father Sitansu Mukherjea. These pages comprise of his drawings, talks and writings on architecture, urbanism and memories of his early days in New Delhi and Calcutta.
This essay was first published in 2020 by National School of Drama in a volume entitled Rajinder Nath, Edited by D K Basu
Snehanshu Mukherjee
I was probably the youngest person to have observed Rajinder Nathji and Abhiyan on their remarkable journey on stage. If I remember right, I was all of 10 years old when I started identifying Abhiyan’s productions as being different—more sophisticated—from most others that I had the opportunity to see almost every evening at AIFACS. This unique privilege was mine because I used to live on the top floor of the building that housed the theatre in AIFACS, considered to be the best theatre in Delhi and in all probability one of the very best in all of India. AIFACS or the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society was the cultural hub of New Delhi in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It, therefore, attracted the best shows from across India and the world. Visiting troupes such as the Bolshoi Ballet, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bohurupee, People’s Little Theatre Group, and National School of Drama, performed at AIFACS, and it was in this context that I could place Abhiyan’s productions.
My interest in Abhiyan’s productions was also because my father Sitansu Mukherjea (whom I referred to as Baba, but the rest of the theatre world referred to as Dada) was a close friend of Rajinder Nathji. Baba also collaborated with him as the lighting designer for all Abhiyan’s productions and as a set designer for some. I remember seeing Rajinder Nathji sitting quietly in the 7th or 8th row of the auditorium watching the rehearsals on stage. He would intervene at times to discuss how a dialogue could be delivered, or where the actor should take his or her position. I do not remember him climbing on the stage to show the actors “how to act”. Baba used to say “this was Rajinder’s unique method of directing plays!”
In the beginning, my involvement with Abhiyan was primarily as an observer. As a child I was tolerated and allowed in unquestioned the midst of the cast. This afforded me a ringside view of some of their memorable productions. Many of the actors of Abhiyan later became big names in Hindi cinema. I consider myself lucky to have seen the likes of T P Jain, Sudha Chopra, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Kimti Anand, Chetna Jalan, Om Puri, V M Badola, S M Zaheer and Subhash Gupta act on stage before they moved to cinema.
Rajinder Nathji and Abhiyan was known for staging the first Hindi version of many of Badal Sicar’s plays from Bengali. These were often translated by Santwanaji. Vijay Tendulkar was another favourite. Plays such as Ghashiram Kotwal, Curfew, Guinea Pig, were electrifying to watch, especially the ones staged in AIFACS since they often had very distinctive sets and lighting-design to enhance the viewing experience. I remember many small incidents from behind the scene of several of those shows. Badal Sircar’s Saari Raat had a very interesting set by Ashok Bhattacharya constructed by stacking packing boxes. In the play the mention of “khichdi” as a delicious dish was often wondered at by the actors, used to more mundane associations of the dish. To demonstrate the validity of the claim, my mother (Boudi to the group), cooked large quantities of Bengali Khichdi and fries, in our home above the stage. On the last night, after the performance was over, all the actors and the stage staff sat down on the floor of the side stage of AIFACS to find out if khichdi could actually be delicious or not!
After the development of Mandi House as the theatre hub of Delhi, Abhiyan’s productions were staged in Shri Ram Centre, often in the Basement Theatre, which, if I remember correctly, Rajinder Nathji had started during his tenure as the Director of the Centre. The plays performed by Abhiyan in that period were smaller in scale and those that required fewer actors. The more intimate audience seating arrangement in the Basement Theatre was well suited for these productions. Jaat Hi Poocho Sadhu Ka was a very popular production that began in this theatre. This was also the time when I was asked by Rajinder Nathji to design the sets for Hazaar Churasi Ki Maa. This was my only direct involvement with an Abhiyan production. The set was a simple one of three screens, which I had painted over with impressionistic graphics that were meant to represent the iconic political wall-paintings seen on the walls of buildings in Calcutta during the Naxal period. The central panel had an acting area behind it, which was lit during specific scenes when the front acting area lights faded out. This production also got to be well known, and I remember Govind Nihalani coming back stage to meet Rajindr Nathji after the show; it was a few years after this incident that Nihalani made the film version of Hazaar Churasi Ki Maa.
Those were exciting times, and I was happy to be a passive spectator. Today when I look back at Rajinder Nathji’s productions as director of the plays of Abhiyan, I realise that he was one of those who had, in a way, started the Hindi Theatre Movement of Delhi. His hallmark ‘understated’ approach to theatre had a huge impact on both the audience and theatre persons across India, which only a few of his contemporary directors or theatre groups managed. And I remain thankful that he and all the members of Abhiyan tolerated my presence as a small child in their midst when they were so involved in the act of staging important milestones through their plays.
Vasant Kamath passed away this month. For most people who did not know that he had been unwell for over six months, his passing away came as a surprise – he was not necessarily at the age that one expected him to say farewell. My personal regret was not keeping in touch with him and Revathi over the years. Last when I met Vasant, several years ago, was to ask him if I could visit him at his home at Anangpur. I had not met him in a long time and I wanted to experience for myself the house that the two architects had designed for themselves. Needless to say I never did manage to visit him at home or meet him anywhere else after that.
Vasant was our teacher at SPA. And as all his students knew, a teacher who was a kind person, never aggressive or abrasive when he discussed your design in studio or outside. A teacher who spoke little, had an attractive smile and who smiled often at you. A person who dressed like a refined hippie, and was always ready to join in with students during jam sessions. In other words, a teacher you could relate to. Vasant was all of that and even more importantly a “good” architect. His sudden passing away, therefore, brought home to me the fact that in many ways it also marked the passing away of a certain way of doing architecture, which is rare amongst the architects today.
Those days when I was in college (1977 to 1982) there were more architects like Vasant – architects who designed with a belief system, and who were trying through their own work to question the then established way of doing architecture. These ‘thinking architects’ ran offices that were small or large; employed many architects and engineers; and interestingly, such architecture practices were the ones that were greater in number, while only a handful of large firms ran “commercial” offices. Today the situation has reversed, there are a very few offices left that still practice in the older way, while most of the offices have morphed into becoming a “commercial” firm. I suppose the adage “if you can’t beat them, then join them” has proved to be the policy for most architecture practices today. The reason could be the way our country has moved from a socialistic democratic entity to a capitalistic one.
In those days, The GRUP (with two dots above U) was an office that we as students looked up to, as a socially committed practice. The firm was formed by Vasant Kamath, Narendra Dengle and Romi Khosla, after they quit the venerable firm Kanvinde, Rai and Chowdhary (KRC). We had Narendra Dengle as our first year architecture studio director, and I have no hesitation in stating that he was responsible for building a strong foundation in architecture for our entire batch. Vasant taught us climatology and design in our third year. Romi too had taught in SPA but had left by the time our batch had joined. In those days, the teachers at SPA were those who offically could – and did – practice architecture while they taught. My feeling is that they decided to teach because they could bring back to their own work what they taught. and resolve the issues that were raised during class through their practice. Practice was a lot easier then, as projects were not difficult to come across, and access to these projects were not so severely restricted as it has become today. Most of our teachers were therefore not teaching because of reasons of job security.
By the time our batch reached final year at SPA, Vasant had left GRUP, married Revathi, and started his own practice. His subsequent work matured further and continued to reflect the concerns that GRUP had addressed when the triumvirate had worked together – a search for alternative construction methods that would be affordable without sacrificing quality, without sacrificing aesthetics, and without sacrificing the spirit of the place. Our introduction to the works of Laurie Baker at SPA was through Narendra and Vasant. Vasant in his own work shared Baker’s concerns but resolved his designs differently, responding completely and in a nuanced way according to the context of each of his projects. Many of his smaller scale projects were built by hand-crafting his designs through active collaboration with local masons and other crafts-persons. This way of working, for me, defined his architecture. As Ashish Ganju, another architect who also taught at SPA and who continues to work with similar concerns as Vasant, said during Vasant’s memorial meeting – Vasant’s architecture is a reflection of the kind of person he was – which in turn is also a reflection of what he believed in.
Vasant is one of those rare architects, who conceive a project according to a system of beliefs and values that becomes manifest in their architecture, and in the process stands out against the majority of buildings today. Buildings that seem to be without reason or that are plain banal. It has become ever more important today to celebrate such architecture, to remember architects like Vasant, whose works, come what momentary trends in architecture may decide, will remain important as references for a future generation of architects.
Last week we were in Nainital, lake resort town in the Kumaon Himalayas, after a gap of three years. This time I got an opportunity to draw the lake. Last time, in 2014, I had concentrated only in photographing Nainital, both digitally (Sony RX100) and with my old favorite analogue Nikon FE2 on black and white film. This time I carried a digital camera (the remarkable Fuji XM1) as well, and realized, yet again, that photography is essentially an act of an instant and meant for enjoying the moment and the place afterwards. While sketching is about being rooted to a place for some time.
Sketching makes me become mindful, watchful, and makes me really see and admire the view that I am sketching. During the process of sketching I often change the composition as I draw it in – the sketch finally represents what appeals to me aesthetically! I highlight some parts of the scene over others, even suppressing some bits; especially if my vantage point is not entirely to my satisfaction. I eliminate things like ugly lampposts, electric cables or inconvenient shrubs, trees, cars and people …. things that can imbalance the composition. Even digital photography, with magical processing softwares such as Photoshop or Lightroom cannot achieve what a sketch can.
The act of drawing the scene – shading, stubbing, deciding the manner of strokes, and improvising on techniques while sketching is an intense activity, often I do not realize how much time has gone by while I am sketching away. I have found sketching on the ground to be a very rewarding experience – from the point of start to gradually reaching the point of total immersion in the scene or the subject that I am seeing, and of course in the sketch itself.
The sketches above from 1 to 4 were done standing or sitting at convenient spots in Nainital. While the ink drawing (b) was done a little before travelling to Nainital, it’s a fictitious place based upon my memory from previous trips. Interestingly enough I spotted a similar hill this time on the return journey on the Bhimtal/Bhowali route to board the train at Kathgodam. The colour sketch (c) using chalk pastels, aquarelle pastels and aquarelle pencil was after our return from Nainital, inspired by the rain clouds that I saw this time over the lake.
While scanning the sketches from the sketchbook, I found yet another sketch (a) of the lake from an even earlier trip in 2012. The sketch was made from roughly the same position as one of the current sketches (2), therefore I thought of adding it to this lot as a “before and after” view. I have also included a few of the photographs from this time at the bottom of this post to show the way the lake appeared – unaltered by my mind, at that instant when I pressed the shutter.
The problems of our cities are many and have been discussed time and again in countless seminars, books, journals and presentations – and yet, on the ground the situation remains unchanged and more often than not actually worsens as the days go by.
Why does this happen? What can be done?
These are the two primary questions that have been addressed in this talk, delivered at KRVIA, mumbai in August 2015
I remembered Surjya, when I chanced upon a drawer full of memories – Black and White negatives shot on 120mm and 35mm film. There was this one wallet of negs from our Final Year Pushkar trip in 1981 with Prof. Chayya and Prof Shaheer. The negative also had three portraits, one of the best of the three was Surjya’s or Surjya Shankar Dasgupta, to give him his full name.
Surjya was one student amongst the 36 odd who joined SPA’s Architecture Department in 1977. I called him Surjya, while the rest of the class usually called him Das for short. He was our class CR by default, he had opted to be the Class Representative the first time, and after that the class en masse thought he was the best and should carry on for the rest of the years as well! To be honest, he could, at times try your patience, but that was because he was a dreamer, often thinking of something else while you thought he was listening to what was being said. He would foolishly drop his own work to help others finish theirs. We were all young, some of us “full of ourselves” and impatient, sometimes cutting Surjya’s conversations short, just to stop him from making an ass of himself – at least I thought that was what I was doing.
Surjya, Solly, Badri, Kasturi, Elsie and sometimes Madhu were our class minstrels, Surjya, Solly or Badri would usually carry to SPA a large acoustic guitar, which they often played while singing during the class breaks. Once, during lecture period, as our teacher had not appeared, some of us sat on the stairs (because of the special acoustics) and sang Beatles and John Denver as if there was no one else in the building. Within 15 minutes we had our senior batch coming down the stairs smirking, following them was Mrs Rosemary Sachdev, who smiled at us and said, “nice singing” and carried on after her class.
In our 2nd year Manali trip with Prof Chayya, Surjya along with Martin Axe, the exchange student from USA and Shekhar Garud, discovered that Hash grew in bushes around the village we were to study, after which they were generally stoned. One night, Surjya woke the rest of us up at some unearthly hour in the flea ridden rooms of the crummy hotel in Manali and demanded we hand over our bits of the village plan – he said that he had every intention of drawing them all up as the complete village of Alleo. To humour him and to go back to sleep, we gave him our scraps. The next morning we found him fast asleep at the foot of the stairs with a drawing board beside him in which he had actually managed to draw up the entire village plan from our various bits, which in themselves could not possibly have been drawn correctly anyways. Later when I asked him how he managed to make sense of all the parts, he said that it was the Hash that had worked for him!
He had to drop a year after he contacted Hepatitis and was in AIIMS for an extended time. The SPA rules did not allow him to be promoted despite him having completed all his assignments. After we had all graduated as architects and drifted away, I kept in touch with Surjya, though not on a regular basis. My memory is wooly now, but I remember something about Surjya being involved with the art direction of Pradip’s unfinished TV serial Bargad, I think he worked on this along with Hemmady. Hemmady and he worked together in an architecture practice later. I still remember meeting the two of them behind Sagar at Def. Col. Market, when our office was located in the vicinity.
I have still managed to preserve the ceramic pot that he had presented Anisha and me at our wedding reception. The very next year Surjya left this world, along with his wife. He had no choice in the matter as he was probably still sleeping on the ill fated Purushottam Express when it rammed a stationary Kalindi Express at a speed of 100kmph early morning on 20th August 1995. The accident has been termed one of the worst railway accidents ever, with 305 dead and 393 injured, an accident which was caused by the collective negligence on part of the driver of the Kalindi Express and the Switchman on duty.
Surjya therefore was probably the first person from our batch to exit from this world. He was a nice person, big hearted and kind, always ready to drop his own work to help others. I can’t but help feel that one was lucky to have friends like Surjya those days, persons who were different in the way they dealt with this world.
I got to know Mr Stein’s architecture before I got to know him, or for that matter I had even envisaged joining an architecture college. The year was 1975; I was still in high school when my family moved to Babar Road, to a house situated very close to Triveni Kala Sangam. Even as a school boy, the building and the spaces it created drew me to it almost every evening. I would visit the place to see art exhibitions and watch the Manipuri dancers practice on the amphitheatre stage, even Charandas Chor by Habib Tanvir was performed there in those days. Triveni built in 1957 has remained ageless, and even after so many years remains one of my favourite buildings, much later, I was most gratified to hear from Mr Stein himself that it was also his favourite building!
I never knew who had designed Triveni till in 1977 when I joined SPA as a student of architecture. After completing the course in 1982 I joined Stein Doshi Bhalla as a trainee and met Mr Stein for the first time. I worked in his design studio till 1985 – a very short time, but I know that I learnt more about architecture and the art of construction in that office, than in my five years at SPA. A learning that has stood me in good stead in my own architectural practice over the last 31 years.
To me Triveni shows all the attributes of Mr Stein’s personality, his interests and concerns. Like many of his other projects, Triveni is simultaneously “simple” and sophisticated by design – an elegant building, which addresses an apparently contradictory programme – of private teaching spaces and public areas – on a demanding site effortlessly. Mr. Steins’ design is not just elegant, efficient and economical; it is also very much a response to the geographical and cultural context of the place. The building remains “true” right down to the tapered skirting detail where the floor meets the wall. Though distinctly “modern”, when compared to the nearby Sapru House, the building could nevertheless be described as “classical” in its appearance, in the proportion of its façade, the various spaces that the building holds within and without – the understated composition of hues and textures of the different materials used, set in perfect harmony.
At another level Triveni reflects the thoughtful decisions that Mr Stein took on the method of construction that would ensure that it was built economically and would also be easy to maintain over the years of use. The proof is there for all of us to see, even after 59 years most people would find it difficult to put a date as to when it was constructed, a testimony to the creative genius of Mr Stein. The last thing I wish to stress, especially in today’s context is that though Mr Stein was born in USA, none of his work here can be thought of as un-Indian. In my opinion he single handedly defined, through his work, what post 1947 architecture in India could have become – rooted in the ethos of the reality of independent India. Unfortunately this cannot be said for the works of many who build in India today and definitely not for the many non-Indian or foreign architects who have built and are building in the country today – many of whom belong to the elite Western group of architects often branded as “starchitects”.
3 sketches in Shimla; one from the bay window of the Malhan’s house in Chhota Shimla, one of the bay window itself. The wider sketch is of the oldest building on the IIAS Shimla estate – now a guest house where we (Anisha and Treya were there too) stayed during the National seminar on Urban Spaces in Modern India during the month of June 2015
These are a few if the photographs shot with the Yashica Minister III on film. This was the time we had just discovered Hauz Khas Madarassa, when Hauz Khas was not the “happening” pseudo design village of today, but a virtually un-visited peaceful, cleaner, real village with no encroachments.
These are the shots off the first roll of 35mm film that I had shot using a Yashica Minister III rangefinder camera, gifted by my father on joining SPA as a First Year student of Architecture in 1977. These pictures of Fatehpur Sikri and Agra were taken during our first class study trip with the faculty members Prof. C S H Jhabvala, Narendra Dengle and Yogesh Kumar. Needless to say that the shot of the Taj from Agra Fort will probably no longer look like this, for that matter nor would my classmates, some of whom had posed for the camera at Fatehpur Sikri!
Snehanshu Mukherjee 