Dream comeback for Vivan Sundaram’s Kasauli Art Centre

R Umamaheshwari

Simultaneous conversations and multiple dialogues run across generations, it seems, at the Ivy Lodge in Kasauli. Be it in the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil or the art of her nephew, Vivan Sundaram, signifying political expressions with objects, sound and space. Vivan passed away in 2023. Art critic Geeta Kapur, his wife, had written this of him in her book ‘When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India’: “Fortunately, Vivan is one of those artists who is not hostile to the operations of the intellect, believing with me that critical writing supports the body of art, allows it mortality and retrieves it from a premature condition of hypostasis.”

From this kind of perspective, the Kasauli Art Centre (KAC), which was housed at Ivy Lodge, created a circle of art which brought forth ideas. A brainchild of Vivan, from 1976 to 1991, KAC hosted artist workshops, seminars, theatre shows, film screenings and other arts-related events with Indian and international artists in residencies and workshops that were among the first of their kind in the country. Today, the ideas seem to be returning — across different artistic expressions. Mangai (aka V Padma), a feminist academic-theatre practitioner from Chennai, is the pilot for the first Writer-in-Residence being organised by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), established in 2016 to carry forward the legacy of the Sher-Gil-Sundaram family.

Theatre director Anuradha Kapur, sister of Geeta Kapur and one of the trustees of SSAF, says Mangai was an apt choice to pilot the writer residency, considering her long association with feminist theatre arts. Mangai’s theatre group, Marappachi, is known for its radical feminist-humanist subjects. Some of her critically acclaimed plays include ‘Stree Parvam’, ‘Auvvai’, ‘Penn’ and ‘Manimegalai’. She has authored books such as ‘Our Lives, Our Words’, ‘Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India’ and translated the Buddhist text ‘Theri Gatha’ into Tamil.

Mangai shares that back in 1989, feminist scholar Kumkum Sangari had organised a workshop here and two productions had been planned by Anuradha Kapur. One was an adaptation of Tagore’s ‘Home and the World’ (‘Ghare Baire’), in which Usha Ganguly acted. The other was ‘Nayika Bhed’ by Geetanjali Shree. Mangai says: “Geetanjali is recalled today as the Booker Prize winner, but her writing took a new shape after attending Kumkum Sangari’s workshop. Initially, she was to adapt Tagore, but she ended up with the text of ‘Nayika Bhed’, which was devised on Kumkum’s concept note regarding representations of women such as Mira, Akka Mahadevi, and the participants’ own lives, in myth and reality.” Mangai says that as of now, her own work is just “a germination of a concept (note) of sorts; continuing from that workshop, which had brought together several people for five weeks”.

The late Navina Sundaram’s film, ‘A Story Behind Every Curtain’, documented Kumkum’s workshop. Mangai says it opened her eyes. “Earlier, we usually referred to 1979 as the beginning of a cultural/theatre movement along with the women’s movement, when productions such as ‘Om Swaha’ (against dowry), put together by Anuradha, Maya Rao and others, along with Stree Shakti Sanghatana; ‘Aurat’, ‘Mulgi Zali Ho’, in Bombay; besides similar cultural movements in Calcutta, and the South emerged.”

“In 1990, I had attended a festival called Expressions organised by Flavia Agnes and Madhushree Dutta. Personally, that was the turning point for me. But I now realise that Expressions could not have happened had it not been for KAC’s 1989 workshop, which was a culmination of art and activism. Kumkum helmed the workshop and participants included people like Madhushree, Anamika Haksar, Maya Rao, Sheba Chhachhi and Nilima Sheikh, some of whom continue to be collaborators. Anuradha, Geetanjali and Nilima, too, work together.”

Sharing her perspective on the space and her idea, Mangai says, “I feel extremely happy because it is like following a trail of a huge legacy. Just the space, the atmosphere and the scenic view of this place is very inspiring… There was no saying no to Anuradha, who has been my mentor since the early 1990s and I have great regard for her work. I am sure this place will buzz with activity as it used to.” She also wants to explore the afterlives of that Kasauli workshop and document whether those participants branched off separately, or stayed together, and what it means for today’s practitioners, especially with similar kinds of feminist leanings. “Hopefully, we will have a workshop in Kasauli with these conversations. I am also using the time to translate into Tamil Leftword’s new edition of Rahul Sankrityayan’s ‘Volga to Ganga’,” she says.

Anuradha Kapur recalls how in September 2016, Vivan conceptualised an art work called the ‘Fall of the Slab’, involving breaking of the roof of the lower outhouse which has now been replaced by a red roof and iron planks. “That was once a concrete roof. But in 2017, the cantonment said that houses in vicinity should only have tin roofs. So, Vivan decided to make it an art work and he broke it in front of an audience and it crashed. We thought about it as a starting point of a new project, which Vivan named as Sher-Gil Sundaram Kasauli Art Project. In that sense, we moved from the Kasauli Art Centre workshops to the Kasauli Art Project.” She says this revival offers another “future-looking possibility in repeating the older workshops of Kasauli, trying different modes of collectivity and as a space for reflection and writing. That is the kind of pilot project that Mangai will work on”.

The SSAF also plans to have a series of seminars. “From March to October, we get six to seven working months in Kasauli. We wish to explore various possibilities, such as writer residencies and seminars. We are also exploring the idea of a three-week summer school, looking at ways to supplement both practice-oriented work and critical thinking, and theatre and visual arts workshops, which may or may not be mentor-led. The summer school will be for three weeks, with young participants meeting a year later to see what work they have done. Our hope is to have a pedagogical space, a summer school, as well as a space for working and viewing films, visual art, rehearsing projects of theatre, just as Vivan had envisioned…”