For me, collaborations don’t begin with the idea of the project. Almost all the projects I have worked on have come out of friendships. Now common sense tells us that we should keep our friendships and our work worlds separate. When Naresh Fernandes and I began to work on Bombay meri jaan; writings on Mumbai, an anthology suggested by Ravi Singh when he was at Penguin India, many people warned us that we might risk our friendship over the book. I am happy to report that we are still friends. And I am still friends with the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam, the academic Rachel Dwyer, the urbanologist Rahul Srivastava and the photographer Ashima Narain, all of whom I have collaborated with, at different times, on different projects.
A BEST ticket in The Earth and Animated Nature by Oliver Goldsmith.
I met Chirodeep Chaudhuri when I was editing the content of a travel website in 2000AD. When he joined the team as photography editor, we began to travel together, across the length and breadth of India over hundreds of hours of train, plane, automobile and ferry travel. Two years ago when I was asked to become a trustee of one of my city’s oldest libraries, the People’s Free Reading Room & Library, I made it my mission to bring all my friends to the library, to show them its beauty and to discuss with them its many problems.
Romances of the French Revolution by Frederic Lees.
Chiro was one of the many who came but he was one who began to come back again and again. About a month later, he wrote that something was beginning to move inside his head, that he was seeing the lineaments of a project. I was very excited by this because I know that we have a certain philosophic and aesthetic alignment that would make working together easy and soon, he was a regular feature at the library. I tried to photograph him standing on a chair and making a picture but all he said about that one was: “Once in a while, try and focus properly.”
Sketches of Rulers of India (Vol. III): The Governors-General and Dupleix by G.D. Oswell.
Over the next six or eight months, as Chiro tried to figure out what he wanted to do with all the pictures he was shooting, I would play the Golden Retriever, diving into the stacks and bringing back another book that I thought should be photographed. Some of these are among the pictures you see here, others not. This is one of the secrets of collaboration: you have to know that many ideas will arise and many thoughts will flow but not all of these will be viable. Some are will-o’-the-wisps that will waste a huge amount of time. Others will have to be abandoned when you see that they simply will take up more money and time than you have at hand. This is what you must be prepared for. This is the risk you must take: there are no magic wands and never any unlimited budgets. At least, not on any of the projects I have worked on. What we should have done, of course, is written a proposal and gone looking for money; but that I have found often takes all the energy you have and leaves very little for the project.
Nearly a year into the work, Chiro asked me if I could point out a student from the Sophia Social Communications Media programme where I teach journalism. Vedika Singhania joined the team and proved even better at foraging in the stacks. (That she was also interested in photography means we actually have some pictures of Chiro at work, and those are in focus.)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
For Chiro, I know one of the most pressing problems was the notion of the rectangular form that the book-as-codex has taken after the Gutenberg revolution. This required a re-seeing of the book and a series of experiments with light, with position, all the while trying not to disturb the many young persons who use the reading room to study for the examinations.
For me, a moving away from the book as fetish object (to be craved, coveted and collected) to seeing the inherent fragility of the book; how time could turn its paper from white to a variety of shades between yellow and brown; how insects could turn its pages into lacework and filigree; how even the act of opening a book could release a tiny sirocco of dust and ink.
Time travel: The Great Controversy Between Christ & Satan during the Christian Dispensation by Mrs E.G. White.
This, I had to read against the power and persistence of the ideas inside a book; how they have shaped the faiths and the philosophies of not just the People of the Book (the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims) but all people after the Gutenberg Revolution. Consider this. The three great revolutions that decentred the human species came in the form of books. Newton took the Earth out of the centre of the universe with Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo); Charles Darwin then took Man and put him in his place in the great tree of life in Origin of Species; and Freud, in a number of works, showed us how we had named ourselves Homo sapiens (man who thinks) in a moment of customary self-congratulation. We invented books, yes; but we have been re-invented by The Book, in more ways than one.
Till I End My Song by Robert Gibbings.
But then I can’t say I wasn’t prepared. I have been reading Tukaram for a long time now, reading an abhang at a time. And this was the first miracle of the book in India. For Tukaram is made to throw his books into the river by the Brahmins who are aghast at a Kunbi singing the praise of God; and they are then returned to him, intact; wet but intact.
We do not hope for miracles with this show but we do hope to raise some money to stem the effects of the river of time running through the People’s Free Reading Room & Library.
