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Is our city's culture stagnating? Judging by the furious reactions prompted by this article we published last week on Mumbai losing its cultural groove to Delhi, it would appear that whatever the reality, we certainly don't want it to. Whether either city can lay claim to the crown will perhaps always be up for debate (what would be the fun in settling it for good?), but one thing was evident: the piece touched a nerve. Here in Mumbai, we like to believe that we're better than our northern cousins when it comes to most things. But whether either city is truly a world-class culture capital when examined independent of the other leads to some less than encouraging conclusions.
We have no world-class museums, a handful of galleries that cater to the elite, two or three performance venues, just one prominent arts festival, almost no architectural initiatives, and a design sensibility that rarely extends beyond wedding mandaps and flower bouquets. In creating or even bolstering an infrastructure for the arts to flourish, the state and city government has failed almost spectacularly. We haven't built a significant public institution since the National Centre for Performing Arts was completed in 1969 and not coincidentally, South Mumbai continues to remain the sole cultural hub for a population of nearly 20 million.
What the people of Mumbai have always been exceptionally good at however is creating subcultures of our own. When the state fails us, in this regard, we have more than compensated. The NCPA, the National Gallery of Modern Art and CSMVS (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) were all built at the behest of private citizens of Bombay. Today, in face of this woeful lack, some good has similarly emerged. The city's citizens-from longtime residents to more recent arrivals-have begun creating hubs of our own. Some like the Bombay Elektrik Project are fledgling, just addas and makeshift organisations that move as fluidly as our city limits; while others, like Blue Frog, are more ambitious in scale. What they all share however is this: a commitment, however tenuous, to fostering some kind of creative discussion and platform.
Examples of our can-do make-do canniness abound. Last year, performance artist Nikhil Chopra was dispatched by Chatterjee & Lal to become a walking exhibit himself when he traversed from Bandra to Colaba in February, drawing along the way; cafes like Yellow Tree Cafe and Kala Ghoda Cafe have turned themselves into impromptu exhibition and performance spaces; a growing number of individuals and organisations have begun hosting talks and salons, which they hope to bring to a wider audience. We've even found ways to create new performing spaces; it was the discovery of a little known clause in the will of Mehboob Khan that has finally allowed the doors of Mehboob Studios to be flung open to cultural events. Since then, it has already hosted Anish Kapoor's gleaming sculptures (which unlike the Delhi retrospective was free); and the Mahindra Blues Festival. And for every Jazz By the Bay that caves and becomes primarily a food joint (now re-branded as Pizza by the Bay), there's a Grime Riot Disco, or a Microgroove, where menu prices are slashed with the aim of increasing affordability and thereby accessibility. In this city, we may not have a history of culture like Delhi, but more importantly, and interestingly, we create it.
There are people like former journalist Saloni Doshi, who has opened Space 118, a studio space for young, emerging artists unable to afford rents; and Parmesh Shahani has been roped in to head the Godrej Culture Lab, a TED—like initiative to bring together disparate minds through lectures and events. Speaking of TEDs, did we mention that we had three alone last year? Café Goa, the unofficial headquarters for the Bombay Eletrik Project (who organise everything from poetry slams to stand-up comedy nights) has re-opened. Some galleries, like Gallery Maskara, are wondrously non-commercial, just about ekeing out a life and still able to bring down international artists like Ruben Bellinx and and Peter Buggenhout. And then of course, there's the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, the Mehli Mehta Foundation and the NCPA, which whatever their faults and set-backs, continue, endearingly, to plug forth. Only in Mumbai could a prominent conductor perform on the same day as one of the biggest sporting events the country had ever seen, and still draw a packed auditorium. While Blue Frog, Bonobo and B69, have made Mumbai, Mumbai, not Delhi, a beacon for indie musicians.
All of this scattered but frenetic activity has perhaps explained why Soho House, a members-only club from London for people from the arts, entertainment and media (which incidentally takes in people from all socio-economic backgrounds and subsidizes their membership fee), has chosen Mumbai and not Delhi, or even Shanghai for its first Asian location. It will open sometime next year. Which is not to say of course that we don't have challenges. Culture in Mumbai is an expensive proposition, where prohibitive entertainment tax laws have made it near impossible to hold events (Zubin Mehta has vowed not to return because of it); and when we do, ticket prices are usually stratospheric. Secondly, we no longer have coffee shops where artists, writers, poets gather and discuss-for the most part we've moved these discussions to living rooms, cutting off a vital link in the creative chain. It's also worth noting that in the last few decades, we've built no cultural institutions-and in this regard Delhi has more than trumped us. It might be a space crunch problem, but if we can find the funds and land to build this and plan this, then we have no excuses for not having a second suburban NCPA or a contemporary art museum along the lines of the Devi Art Foundation in New Delhi.
The closest we've come to any kind of large-scale initiative is Lodha's drawing for the Museum of Mumbai, which will be housed inside a Rs 21 billion private development ironically titled World One. So much for inclusiveness. A good place to start might be the NGMA–-there's a reason it languishes. No one wants the directorial post even though it's been offered to many; it's a reflection as much of the bureaucratic nightmare that comes bundled with the title as it is of our general unwillingness to step up. The time has come, and Mumbai is teetering on the edge of either remaining a big city with small town ambitions, or becoming a world class cultural capital on par with New York or Shanghai, to whom we're always being compared. So, what's it going to be?