A City Remembered, A Poet Revealed: Tracing Jussawalla In Archive And Dream

In the early hours of the morning after my visit to the fascinating exhibition Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope; Archives of Adil Jussawalla, at the picturesque rain-dappled gallery “The Guild”, on the still-green Mandwa Alibaug Road, I woke up with a smile on my lips. I didn’t want the dream to end, the one where I was, by some twist of whimsical destiny, meeting Adil Jussawalla, in person, for the first time.

In the dream, I was taken back to the Chembur of my childhood. Jussawalla was as old as he is now, as old as the most recent picture of the poet, editor, translator, photographer, illustrator, essayist, and all-round literary megalith that he is. There was some sort of event celebrating the legendary figure, whose persistent presence and characteristic kindness of spirit and scholarship had quietly transformed the landscape of “Bombay Literature”.

For some reason, my hyper-realistic imagination had conjured up a grand spectacle, with a voice booming reverent exaltations to the entire neighbourhood, amplified hundredfold by the microphone. The eloquent persona belonged to a woman (who I could not place in the dream) in an indigo sari, with salt and pepper hair held together in a bun. Jussawalla was, for some reason, standing just outside the hall, walking purposefully in the other direction, at a slow but intentional pace, as if to attend to something more important, perhaps a cigarette, or a phone call. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, and, in the dream, he and I were headed on a collision course, I was walking in a stupor towards the voice, somewhat unaware of my surroundings, as the words of his iconic poem “Sea Breeze, Bombay” made their way through the playground adjacent to the hall in which the event was taking place.

A few metres from Jussawalla, the dream-me caught his eye, and he looked at me, confused: “Who are you?” he asked. I blushed, before shamelessly venturing, “I’m a poet”. His eyes narrowed for a moment, and then grew large—“Oh Oh Ooooh,” he exclaimed, as his pupils dilated, and both his hands stopped me from moving any further (else I would have bumped straight into him). The dream French-cut to the two of us walking around the playground, seemingly engaged in conversation, about things poetic and mundane, mostly me paying close attention to his energetic presence, hoping to catch some of that brilliance. I woke up from that comforting and thrilling vision as a horn blared (perhaps it was 6 PM in theevening in Dreamtime, school-closing traffic at the Chembur Street that happened to be the peculiar site of my pre-dawn imaginarium).

Aubrey F. G. Bell describes saudade as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future” (In Portugal, 1912). Saudade is what I felt when I walked through the Art Deco façade of Jussawalla’s ever-curious, but meticulous mind at The Guild. The exhibition, curated by Deeptha Achar and Chithra K. S., consolidates the poet’s voluminous personal archives that include his photographs, scribbled notes from scrapbooks, poem-drafts, illustrations and other published/unpublished material, including some of the books he owned, and various correspondence materials.

The collection brings together these various forms of writing in a poetics of biographical breadth and depth, rather than length, that might have otherwise been measured through a straightforward chronological listing, a timeline of sorts, perhaps. While there is a temporal logic to the collection, the exhibition is curated thematically, and through significant phases of “Place” and “Milieu”. Human relationships and an architectural fascination with “making”, “landscape”, and the creative act permeate through the various displays. I spent the longest time at the “Milieu” section, my nostalgia for a time that I had never inhabited (except through written and narrated accounts) reached its peak here. The entire gamut of “Bombay Literature” and culture was showcased on that single wall.

Disarmingly honest portraits of the illustrious Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and the reserved, but mischievous Arun Kolatkar who were Jussawalla’s comrades-in-poetry, sat alongside captures of Jerry Pinto (in various poses of revelry), Ranjit Hoskote (laughing uninhibitedly), Nancy Adajania and Vijay and Kavery Nambisan (among others). Pictures from the celebration of Nissim Ezekiel’s 70th birthday (1994) at the PEN All-India Centre office at Theosophy Hall made me acutely aware of the multi-generational span of the curation. Jussawalla’s camera and pen were witness to three transformative generations of Bombay Poets! (As well as some images captured by others in which he featured). He is still going strong at a ripe 85, quietly regaling us all with stories of the past, and providing rasik-like annotations to a politically fraught present.

I’d encountered Jussawalla’s poetry, along with the other Bombay poets, while studying literature at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. His Trying to Say Goodbye, published by Almost Island Books (2011), was a treasured part of my slowly growing collection of important contemporary poetic works at the time. I was pleasantly intrigued by the pensive, lyrical style of that work, and the ways in which it deftly dovetailed remembrance and place into an array of intimate, ordinary objects. The quiet wisdom of those poems infused in me the value of slowness and attention, forming a bridge from the Wordsworthian “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” to, perhaps, his indication towards “emotions recollected in tranquillity”.

Those poems offset what I later read as Jussawalla’s socio-cultural and politicohistorical commentary, especially in his prose. Armed with my copy of his recent publication with Speaking Tiger, The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay, I hoped to embark on a deeper exploration of his engagement with the city, through the exhibition. However, the precise and multi-faceted curation threw light on creative work and artistic interests that grew from his formative childhood years, engagements that I had not paid much attention to, in the past. I was quite taken by his work as a student of architecture.

Apart from architectural drawings, sketches, and photographs, perhaps the most cherished part of the exhibition for me was the facsimile of a correspondence—a letter written by the English novelist E. M. Forster to a Zeenuth Futehally. Jussawalla annotates this precious archival fragment with the context of having met Forster at King’s College: “ZF was one of father’s patients and to try and allay his fears about my future she thought Forster might set me on the right path, to not give up studying architecture.” (From the handwritten note accompanying a copy of the letter). Forster reports on Jussawalla’s decision to give up architecture as a career choice, in lieu of “play-writing” and the “study of Literature”.

He writes that he “urged him [Jussawalla] to go on with architecture, in which there may be a future, and to keep literature as a “side-line”, but he didn’t agree and I’m afraid there is no more [he, Forster] can do”. It was a poignant moment for me. Reading that correspondence, I remembered my own father’s reaction to my stated decision to take up arts in undergraduate college, and pursue writing (instead of science, as he might have preferred, then)—“You will be on the streets!”, he cautioned.

Perhaps you, dear reader, could understand what this kind of archival collection meant to a young person whose “poetic education” and conditioning was heavily nurtured by the mythology of the “Bombay Poets” and their community of practice. This feeling of the “urban”, and Jussawalla’s engagement with its changing contours, was beautifully captured by one of the plaques that showcased an extract of a poem: “Parallel Buildings crowd together,/ The lonely grip a bridge of crowds,/ Drifts of winter half-forgotten,/ Fused to the railing like scraps of lead” (from ‘A Letter in April’ Land’s End, 1962).

Other highlights of the exhibition included, for me, a note by Ezekiel endorsing and marking Jussawalla’s many literary achievements, and his cultural sensibility. There were photographs and illustrations that accompanied articles from various magazines, including Debonair, and a special fiction issue of Bombay: the City Magazine, that featured Jussawalla’s A Big-Headed Boy, “illustrated by M.F. Husain”. A facsimile of a collage of illustration and photography for Debonair (1990) accompanying an article by Yogi Aggarwal (“who was there on October 30th …”) entitled “To Ayodhya and Back”, particularly caught my eye. One section was dedicated to the “The Clearing House”, a well-known poetry publishing collective started by Jussawalla, Kolatkar, Mehrotra and Gieve Patel.

While narratives about this endeavour have been variously described in scholarly publications by Anjali Nerlekar, Laetitia Zecchini, and Pinto, seeing all the covers in one place gives one a proper picture of the organised impact of the entire initiative. While all the covers were designed by Kolatkar, in a unique square format, a host of other writers, designers and figures from Bombay’s creative production sphere were involved.

The exhibition also contained pictures from ‘The Clearing House’ stall at The Frankfurt Book Fair (October 1986). I smiled when I saw a diary entry from April 6, 2024, that read “Books in the making”. It listed various projects, some of which were still in the pipeline, including a work tentatively titled “Parsi Geet” (about 12 verses in Gujarati, 80 per cent done). A notebook entry called “Some Parsis” brought together his interest in ships, as well as the Parsi community—the first entry reads, “The Wadias were ship-builders for 150 years (1735-1885)” (along with a reference “E.K.” and a page number). The curators note that “Ships and the sea were always an aspect of Adil Jussawalla’s Life”.

Another section called “visual cultures” includes colourful pages from his sketchbooks highlighting cinematic influences and pop cultural references of the post-independence “Bombay Modern” (a term I borrow from Nerlekar). There is also a scrapbook/diary page that documents “films seen by family or mentioned in family conversations—Bombay and Poona”; I quickly compared notes. I list these various sections for no other reason than to highlight the polymath-like voracious creative curiosity and collectorly archival impulse of the personage that is Jussawalla. Explanatory curatorial notes, and fragments from his poetry, prose, or other writings, frame the entire collection, and are particularly useful in forming a detailed and granular picture of his life and works.

In fact, it is important to mark the economy with which the curation has been undertaken, and the careful selection of pieces that finally “made the cut”. This must, no doubt, have emerged from days and days of poring through, and parsing Jussawalla’s voluminous archives and publications, as well as archives from other connected people and institutions. This framing, along with some of the subtle curatorial choices, makes an important argument for the living archive as an aesthetic form, especially in the space of the art gallery.

While it would be untrue to say that this kind of “exhibition” has not occurred before, one must acknowledge the role of the curators, Deeptha Achar and Chithra K. S. in bringing this rare collection to the public gaze, in collaboration with Jussawalla, in an informed and creative manner.

It seems apt to end this musing with a quote from Jussawalla, from as recently as this year—a quotation that directly impresses itself upon the young student of art, and a spectator to the panorama:

So Listen, Apprentice

If you find yourself high and dry,

staring at nothing, no longer free

to haunt the dumps you once raked

for throwaways, trinkets, to use in your art,

look down, man, from where you decided to cast yourself

prone on the ground, to snivel, to sob.

There in your hand, still wet with the sweat

Of hard labour, is the diamond you cut,

Its arrowheads found.

‘Art’

It Remains To Be Said: in Time, in Wilderness, 2025

Aranya is a poet, currently based in Delhi, a place to which he doesn't belong.