The Grandest Cultural Statement

Around five years ago, Nita Ambani, the wife of the business tycoon Mukesh Ambani and the chairperson of Reliance Foundation, ap­proached the well-known English fashion journalist Hamish Bowles with the idea of an exhibition that would track the influ­ence of India on global fashion through the years. That idea might have sounded simple enough. But as the Indian architect Rooshad Shroff, who designed the show, along with the Anglo-Irish opera director and designer Patrick Kinmonth, recounts, it was anything but simple.

The exhibition—titled India in Fashion: The Impact of Indian Dress and Textiles on the Fashionable Imagination and now showing at the recently launched Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)—traces this influence from the 18th to the 21st century through over 140 garments. Each of these pieces (ranging from historical costumes to iconic pieces from the world’s leading couture houses) as Shroff says, were mini celebrities in their own right. They had their own dressers and conservationists who were the only ones permitted to handle the products. Many of them belonged to prestig­ious museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (MET), which had reservations about the Indian weather and were reluctant to loan them out for non-museum exhibitions. So not only were state-of-the-art humidity and temperature control systems built, through three months last year, constant readings were taken to ensure that no fluctua­tions occurred. When the crates finally arrived, Shroff describes, they needed to be acclimatised for 24 to 48 hours, be­fore they were opened. “And only they [the conservators] could open the crate, and touch and put them in the window [vitrine],” Shroff says. “We had to be mindful of all these things to ensure that each garment was well-respected and treated in a way like any other museum of high quality would.” There were many other restrictions too, from what kind of lighting could be used (as a result of which the show is minimally lit), to the kind of material that could be used inside and outside the vitrines where these pieces were displayed.

“It was a mammoth task,” Shroff says. “And it was the first time some­thing of this nature was being tried here in India.”

You can extend Shroff’s comment to the rest of the newly launched centre too. There is nothing quite like the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) elsewhere in the country too.

The opening of NMACC on March 31 was also unlike anything seen before, with A-list celebrities from across Bollywood and Hollywood walking the red carpet.

As Nita Ambani says, “An ode to our nation, the Cultural Centre aims to preserve and promote Indian arts. I hope our spaces nurture and inspire talent, bringing together communities from across India and the globe.”

It is not yet noon, and a quiet murmur grows from the ground floor of the NMACC. A soothing music plays. A posse of women has climbed atop a buggy that drives them from one end, where India in Fashion is taking place, to the other, where an art show is being held. Nearby, there is what has been listed as the world’s largest passenger elevator, which appears no smaller than the average size of a house in Mumbai. At the entrance of India in Fashion, a group of girls scurries to shoot Instagram reels. And away at some dis­tance, I find the source of the murmur. A group of students stand examining a vast painting, NS Harsha’s Seekers Paradise. And when some of these students raise their heads to take in the size of the painting, they mimic the hundreds of faces in the painting itself staring into the sky. There are, in fact, art pieces scattered throughout the centre, from Harsha’s Seekers Paradise, the celebrated Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama’s Clouds made of stainless steel, to what is being billed as one of the largest Pichwai paintings ever made, at 56 feet.

“The Cultural Centre aims to preserve and promote Indian arts. I hope our spaces nurture and inspire talent, bringing together communities from across India and the globe,” says Nita Ambani, founder of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre

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“I am sorry, I hope this hasn’t been too much of a walk for you,” asks a represent­ative from the centre, who is showing me around the space. We are marching through the concourse of the centre, having just finished the vast India in Fashion show, zipping by the many handicraft stores, and then, making our way through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors into the awe-inspiring Grand Theatre, and the other two smaller performing arts spaces, before finally reaching the art show.  I swat her questions away with my hand and lie. My watch has already logged 8,000 steps.

he NMACC is unlike any cultural space Mumbai, or perhaps any Indian city, has ever seen. It has the scale of an international airport terminal and the artwork of a world-class museum. It is, in fact, part of the larger Jio World Centre, where apart from the cultural centre, a convention centre already exists. In the works at the same space are serviced residences, restaurants and cafes, a modern-day business complex with a helipad, an exclusive private members’ club, and what many expect will be the country’s grandest luxury shopping mall.  The cultural centre consists of three performance art and one visual arts venues, apart from the pavilions. But the most stately of their facilities is the Grand Theatre. This 2,000-seater, with a sweeping stage can be adapted for a live orchestra and is said to be the most tech­nologically advanced theatre built in In­dia. And as I look up to the ceiling, upon the instruction of the representative, my eyes fill with the gleam of crystals. “The whole ceiling,” she says, pointing to the lotus motifs above, “is studded with over 8,400 Swarovski crystals.” There is more luxury and ostentation at every nook. Each of the 18 exclusive boxes comes with its own private lounge and a personal butler service.

To Feroz Abbas Khan, the acclaimed theatre director whose The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation is currently running at the Grand Theatre, a space such as this is where a director’s imag­ination ‘explodes’. “When you have something like The Grand Theatre, you are faced not with limitations, but with infinite possibilities,” he says.

According to him, until now, India has not had the infrastructure to host or create world-class theatre shows. “Small­er countries with smaller resources have far better infrastructure. What we had were auditoriums that are multi­purpose—they host plays, farewells, birthday parties and all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a dedicated theatre of the kind that can actually host interna­tional-standard performances,” he says. “With the spaces in the Cultural Centre, especially The Grand Theatre, what will happen is that performers who would stop at Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Dubai but skip India, will now be en­couraged to come here as well, as India becomes an important destination for all the world productions.”

Khan’s The Great Indian Musical, which has been running to packed shows ever since it opened, is an am­bitious show. As he says, “The genesis of the idea was with the thought that we were opening a cultural centre, so naturally, we had to represent and showcase the distinct Indian traditions of performing arts with the opening shows,” he says. “It is called Civilization to Nation because ours is a continuous civilisation. Why is ours a continuous civilisation? Because as they say at the beginning of the show, people were not just seeking the truth, they were living it. For instance, every time you perform a dance piece or a musical, as we do in theatre, we dedicate it to divinity. So, I thought if we can trace that, and also look at the various influences that have happened to our civilisation, then maybe through this show, we can tell an important story of who we are.”

The shows that will be put up at The Grand Theatre will be ambitious opulent pieces that will draw audi­ences to the venue. A Broadway show, The Sound of Music is scheduled next. In comparison, the two other theatres, the Cube and the Studio Theatre, at 125 and 250 seats respectively, are smaller and more intimate venues. To Khan, these two smaller theatres will be the driving force, in many ways, because while the Cube will be about discov­ering, incubating, and supporting new talent, the Studio Theatre will be meant for cutting-edge shows where anyone with talent can come perform. “These two theatres also have infra­structure of world standards—that’s the whole idea. These places will become a platform for artists not just from big cities but from different parts of the country,” he says.

The art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote, who has co-curated the show Sangam/Confluence for the centre’s equally impressive Art House, has similar expectations from its art space. Spread out across four floors, he believes, this new space will become an important cultural venue in India. “Because of the level it [Art House] is at, in terms of the climate control, con­servation and infrastructure standards that are endorsed here, we can bring in exhibitions from museums across the world. We have the possibility of initiating projects that can put this centre on the international map,” he says. He also believes it will reshape the city’s cultural milieu. “The BKC [Bandra Kurla Complex where the centre is located] is the gateway to the [city’s western] suburbs. It marks a big shift in the cultural ecology of Mumbai. For a whole new audience in the suburbs, this will become a focal point,” he says.

The idea behind the show Sangam, which Hoskote co-curated along with the American curator Jeffrey Deitch, was in creating a dialogue—not unlike the one the two curators were having, Hoskote says—between Indian and international art, and to see points of contact and possibilities of conversation between currents in Indi­an art and art made by artists elsewhere. Ten artists were selected for the group show. The five international artists — Anselm Kiefer, Cecily Brown, Frances­co Clemente, Lynda Benglis and Raqib Shaw—have links to India, either personally or professionally. With the Indian artists—Bharti Kher, Bhupen Khakhar, Ranjani Shettar, Ratheesh T and Shantibai—Hoskote says he want­ed to present a spectrum of the diverse locations and milieux from where contemporary art in India emerges. “We have not confined ourselves to artists who live and work in metropol­itan centres. We have invited artists like Ratheesh who has chosen to live in Trivandrum. And Shantibai who lives in Bastar, in the village of Kondagaon in Chhattisgarh,” he says.

The show is an absorbing experi­ence of both visually spectacular and imposing pieces like Kher’s imagi­nation of a blue whale’s heart (The Whale) or Kiefer’s massive and sombre painting The Fertile Crescent. But there are also little delights like Shantibai’s small paintings that almost function like a journal of her routine in the village. There is also a complete series of an experimental format of books that were inspired by the pocket-sized Indian prayer books such as those of the Hanuman Chalisa and published through the late 1980s from New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Called the Hanuman Books, these were printed by a printer in Chennai, and, as Hoskote says, have never been exhibited in India before.

Some of the installations are so large that one wonders how they were fit into the gallery. Hoskote recounts, “If you had seen this space while we were preparing the exhibition, you would have seen this huge metal gantry that was set up; there was a crane, and heroic crews to manage the process to a degree of precision,” he adds, “These were feats of engineering.”

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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