A version of art deco in the background and partly on the left. (MC)
In the 1980s, I worked for nearly a decade in an area of Bombay/Mumbai saturated with art deco buildings. The Marine Drive, Colaba, Flora Fountain area of the city is replete with some remarkable art deco buildings almost unknown to even the inhabitants of those buildings.
One often interviewed grandees of the city, including former prime minister Morarji Desai and former chief minister Abdur Rehman Antulay in their lovely art deco apartments. So it is heartening to note that a movement to chronicle, preserve and popularize this unique heritage of Mumbai, second only to the famed Miami strictures, has risen. Called Art Deco Mumbai, the movement by its citizens has the potential to turn this extraordinary concentration into heritage tourism.
Led by Atul Kumar, a passionate advocate of this heritage, Art Deco Mumbai is beginning to generate interest among its citizens about close to 200 such buildings. The art deco design movement dates back to the 1920s in the west making its way to the Bombay of the 1930s. By the 1950s South Bombay’s Marine Drive area had become a hub of art deco. Movie theaters such as Eros, Liberty and Regal are among the best known examples of this style of architecture. It so happens that I used to frequent all three as part my assignment to review movies.
As the Britannica points out, the name art deco is a derivative of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925. It describes the features of art deco thus: “The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially Bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely mass-produced, the characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements).”
I could be wrong about this but I suspect that the newspaper/news agency’s office where I worked on Nagindas Master Road in Fountain area in 1985-86 was in fact an art deco building. Its sweeping wide, cylindrical staircase sure felt like that. Like a majority of these buildings, this one too was in some desperate need of upkeep. Even with its corners mucked up with the gunk of tobacco-betel nut-laden spit the staircase had a certain majesty about it that is so characteristic of art deco.
Art Deco Mumbai is a modest effort which deserves to be patronized by the city’s residents as much as by those who have the good fortune of living in them. I intend to meet the Art Deco Mumbai team on my next visit to Mumbai.
Incidentally, I have written this piece partly to be able to use this punny headline. Although the original Anglicized expression is “have a dekko”, the correct word is of course “dekho” which in Hindi means have a look. Hence, I have used the original.