‘Bhanu Athaiya made India cool 60 years ago’

At a time when the conversation in the country is all about design, craft, textile and art, Prinseps’ new exhibition in Goa spotlights a creator who had nailed the brief decades ago

In a corner of The Aguad, Goa, stands a black velvet female mannequin, on which is draped a metallic bikini-armour — a helmet with bison horns on its head, a curtain of chain mail covering the crotch. Behind it is a large poster showing a model wearing the same costume, with the addition of bat-wings splayed out from her spine.

At the ongoing Prinseps exhibition, Bharat Through the Lens of Bhanu Athaiya, we realise this too is the great artist and costume designer’s creation. But for what project could she have made it? Intrigue dissolves into laughter as curator Brijeshwari Kumar Gohil reveals that Athaiya put the costume together as part of the iconic JVC Onida “devil” ad campaign in 1996.

Iconic is a word that has followed Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya for years now. Born in 1920 in Kolhapur into the family of the royal priest, she demonstrated an affinity for the arts and crafts, spurred on by her father who practised carpentry and painting; and after his death, her mother who would send her to Mumbai to pursue her talent. She studied art and art history at the J.J. School of Arts, and was the first woman to be invited to be part of the Bombay Progressive Arts Group — she had a seat at the table along with Modern Indian art’s greatest luminaries like F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza.

For decades, Athaiya has been relegated to little more than a footnote in Indian art history — the answer to “who was the first ever Oscar-winner from India” in general knowledge books. A reckoning with her legacy has been long overdue, if you ask her daughter Radhika Gupta, who has been hard at the task of salvaging and preserving what’s left of her legacy — worn down by time and a white ant infestation — for over four years.

“My mother had trunks full of archival material and wanted to bequeath it to someone,” Gupta says. “Unfortunately, she found nobody who was interested. One person from a ministry did tell us, ‘Aap yahan chhod jao, hum dekhenge kya kar sakte hain [you can leave it here, we’ll see what we can do].’ My mother very firmly told me, ‘I will set fire to it rather than give it away like this.’”

At The Aguad, a museum housed in the Port and Jail complex, you can see the results of this painstaking work, which has been enthusiastically encouraged by Prinseps owner Indrajit Chatterji, and to whom Gupta has signed over Athaiya’s estate. You also walk past display cases with silk saris from her own collection and leaves of a short-lived fashion magazine from Bombay called Eve’s Weekly, with her hand-drawn sketches.

You witness carefully-preserved costumes on mannequins, such as the iconic orange sari for Mumtaz from Brahmachari — the prototype of the now-popular concept sari, and a technological marvel for incorporating the zip for a performer’s comfort.