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A glimpse of the fibre artist’s three-decade-long career through images of her historical tapestries, curated by Mumbai’s Chatterjee & Lal gallery.

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Rashid Rana has coined the term ‘EART’ to describe moments of self-expression beyond the arts: ways of thinking, being and acting creatively in real life. In this far-reaching exhibition, the acclaimed Pakistani artist considers how this concept of EART could be applied everywhere from social media to real estate development. And alongside it, Rana will be opening a pop-up shop in the city, stocking products that turn capitalism inside out and consumerism upside down.

This is his first project for MIF.

Commissioned by Manchester International Festival. Produced by Manchester International Festival and Manchester Art Gallery.

ACQUISITIONS

THE BUILDINGS FOR AN ART COLLECTION

The works in the TIFR art collection were acquired either directly from artists or, then, from gallery shows. The inventory charts the course navigated by art coming out of India in the first twenty years after independence: this includes three Ram Kumar works, five by Tyeb Mehta, six by N.S. Bendre, nine by M.F. Husain, twelve by V.S. Gaitonde and an astonishing twenty-one by K. H. Ara. Beyond these, other artists represented in strength include S.H. Raza, A.M. Daviewalla, F.N. Souza, K.K. Hebbar, Krishen Khanna and Jehangir Sabavala.

The artworks are today housed amid the bustling corridors, foyers, offices and classrooms of the institute’s campus. Designed by Chicago based firm Holabird & Root through one of their principal architects, Helmuth Bartsch, it was inaugurated in 1962. The local environment is incorporated into the design program through a long colonnaded walkway and an excess of large windows that offer extraordinary vistas of the Arabian Sea. The entire complex is conceived within a modernist paradigm of the International style of architecture. Bartsch in his entry for the souvenir publication that accompanied the inauguration celebrations explained the design philosophy as follows:

“Expression has been given to each function or separate department by accenting the important individual building masses in an otherwise completely unified development… The architect has attempted to combine an impression of lightness and elegance in the type of architecture selected as these characteristics seem eminently suited to the country.”

Bhabha’s clear interest in a synthesis between art, architecture and, even, landscaped gardens echoes Bartsch’s vision for a completely ‘unified development’ but at the same time departs from the staple modernist conception of form following function. Bhabha was clearly inspired by the great Renaissance gardens of France with their grand geometric designs, the use of symmetry echoing his own mathematically inclined mind. We also need to contend with Bhabha as the patron of the arts in the spirit of a Medici. As such, whilst the architecture of the TIFR complex projected a sensibility in keeping with its times, Bhabha’s own personality ensured a total environment that was as much a blend of cultural movements as his own multi-faceted make-up.

Nehru laid the foundation stone for the new site in 1954 and the first evidence we have of art being acquired on behalf of the TIFR is by way of a ledger that traces acquisitions back to 1952. The assumption is, therefore, that though still housed in the Old Bombay Yacht Club, Bhabha knew from early on in the collection’s history that the artworks were destined to have much grander surroundings than that available to him in the 1950s (an undated photograph in the TIFR archives shows a portion of the art collection hung salon style in the gardens of the Old Yacht Club. The provincial air to proceedings would soon be eclipsed by the opportunities afforded by the new buildings). Though no recorded evidence exists it is safe to assume that the accelerated acquisitions process in the mid-to-late 1950s was very much with the move to a new location in mind.

Photographs taken in 1962 show that artworks were installed from the very moment that the new buildings were opened, and it was the foyer of the A block that saw the main concentration of paintings and sculpture. It would not be until 1964 that this area would also house the Husain mural, perhaps one of the artist’s most significant works of the period. The decision to house the works in the very spaces where faculty and researchers were going about their every day business was a very conscious decision on Bhabha’s part. M.G.K. Menon remembers that this policy even invited active participation with the TIFR community:

“He (Bhabha) also used to have several of them (paintings and sculptures), before he bought them, on display at the institute. I would notice very often he would stand near them and see if people took to them, whether they were talking about them: in some sense to gauge to how they were catching on.”

The artist Jehangir Sabavala recalls a painting of his from the personal collection of Phiroza ‘Pipsy’ Wadia being hung for many years in the institute (indeed until her death in the 1980s). This presumes that some works were actually loaned in order to make specific connections or add weight to the representation of certain artists’ work. The overall impression that the collection makes on a visitor to the TIFR is one of a museum that has got lost and has wandered into an educational establishment.  Encountering a masterpiece by Bendre in a faculty lounge or a 1940s Souza above a photocopying machine constantly reinforces the sheer novelty of Bhabha’s project.

PROGRESSIVELY DISAPPEARING GROUPS

For the student of modern Indian art history the collection allows for a rare and thrilling opportunity. One comes face to face with the choices of two men, Homi Bhabha and his successor M.G.K Menon, both of whom were being offered the finest works from each show and who not only had an eye for quality but had arranged around themselves the most astute connoisseurs of the period to help them in their decision making process.  Moreover, this is a collection that is not concerned with the retrospective analysis of art historians. Instead it is recording live, as it were, the reality of the situation on the ground. Collections such as that at the TIFR teach us that art movements and schools are perennially fluid and that the neat categorizations obsessed over by art historians are rarely, if ever, mirrored by lived experience.

By reflecting on the personality of Bhabha it is clear that the composition of the art collection at the TIFR was always likely to dwell more extensively on new trends rather than a re-excavation of the past. It was fortuitous that at the moment that Bhabha began to collect for the institute, there were marked increases both in the number of artists showing as well as the platforms available to show art. At the same time the stranglehold that the Bombay Art Society had maintained up till this point over the art scene in the city was weakening fast and with it the prestige attached to the academic realist mode of painting of which it was the major proponent. The first signposting of the new directions that art in India was traveling in came with the formation of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) whose manifesto was a strident articulation of its intent:

“We have no pretensions of making vapid revivals of any school or movement in art. We have studied the various schools of painting and sculpture to arrive at a vigorous synthesis.”

The Progressive Artists’ Group held its first exhibition in 1949 and comprised works by M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, S. K. Bakre, K.H. Ara and H. A. Gade. The Mumbai leg of the exhibition lasted all of six days and was never to be repeated again with same composition of artists, since three of the six members were to leave India within one year.  Though new artists were brought in, the foundations of the group were so fragile to begin with that by 1954 the PAG was formally disbanded.

It has come to be believed that the PAG was, somehow, single-handedly responsible for turning the tide away from the conservative stalwarts of the 1940s art scene and that its initial members were firebrands committed to unseating the generation that preceded them. This view has come down to us by several quirks of history. The first is that the key members of the group outlived most of their contemporaries, and were able to influence the manner in which history came to judge that period just after independence. Souza was perhaps the most outspoken of his peers and, apart from writing the original manifesto of the group, was active in reinforcing the mythology of the PAG throughout his long and productive career. A second and equally important factor is that the group emerged at a moment that almost ensured that their every act would, in hindsight, be understood in oppositional terms to that which preceded them. Given the fact that the PAG’s first exhibition was in 1949 the potency of the date, set in the aftermath of Indian independence, suggests implicitly that the artists were involved in a project that could be understood as parallel to the trajectory underway in the political structure of the country.

The TIFR art collection seems to tell a different story about the influence of the Progressive Artists’ Group in the context of developments within the cultural milieu of Bombay at that time. For one thing Souza’s presence in the collection is minimal. This is explained by the fact that he had left the country for England as early as 1949. His artistic voice is therefore not to be heard at the outset of the 1950s when the art scene in post-independence India was still in its infancy. Indeed when he did exhibit next in India, in 1960, the works were roundly denounced by none other than his most loyal supporter from the late 1940s, Rudi Von Leyden. The critic, by this time one of the inner group of Bhabha’s unofficial acquisition committee, contemptuously dismissed the Souza nudes that were to be so much a feature of his later work in the following manner:

“If obsession with oversized and oversexed nudes is a predicament, it can only be that of the artist himself. His many-eyed and many-toothed rakshas who he calls saints and gods have probably as much relation to visions of radiation victims as abstract painting has with visions of the atomic structure of matter. Let the artist paint paintings without attributing more to them than he puts into them in the beginning. The violence in any case is mostly in the artist’s own heart.”

Von Leyden here is condemning both the over-theorizing of Souza as well as his troubling imagery. It is an extraordinary position to take given the central importance of the artist’s worldview in the work that he produced. What the extract reveals is that Von Leyden and the other taste-makers of the late 1940s were more taken with the formal innovations of the PAG than any of the social and political content ascribed to the work either by the artists themselves or by art historians over the next six decades. By formal innovations, it is meant the manner in which the artists in the PAG approached the composition and colouration of their work rather than the subject matter. During his salad days in India Souza was still painting landscapes (albeit filled with the poor and downtrodden) and figure studies, both of which owed a debt to the School of Paris: it is these works rather than the later ‘oversexed’ nudes that are represented in the TIFR collection. It was this break from academic realism, as well as the whimsy of the Bengal School, that Von Leyden was reacting positively to and it is important to understand that the painterly concerns of the PAG artists of the late 1940s were, to a large degree, a result of their interaction with Von Leyden and his fellow emigrees including Walter Langhammer and Emanuelle Schlesinger. Equally by the time many of these artists had found their own feet through the radical act of moving abroad the art scene in India and, by default, the art collection at the TIFR had already moved on to addressing other concerns.

Souza’s departure from the country was followed quickly by Raza’s own emigration to France in 1950 and again it stands to reason why there are only two examples of his work in the TIFR collection. In totality there are seven works by H. A. Gade detailed as being purchased by the TIFR but, more tellingly, the last acquisition was in 1957. Given the availability of the artist’s work to Bhabha and his inner group it is clear that Gade’s work of the late 1950s onwards was just not interesting enough to acquire. Indeed it would be the case that after his efflorescence with the PAG in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the artist would never experience the fame of that moment again.

Of the six artists that formed the original PAG, the TIFR only collected in any depth, and over a substantial period of time, the works of K.H. Ara and M.F. Husain. In the case of Ara, the works in the collection are often but not always still-lifes and nudes.  It is for the same reasons that the tastemakers of the late 1940s reacted to Souza’s formative work that Ara too became a darling of this group. His work eschews the academic realism that was so dominant in the early to mid-1940s Bombay art scene. His colouration surprises the viewer, the articulation of the naked female form is invested with vigour and his manipulation of perspective is sophisticated, most importantly his works are pleasing to the eye. Ara’s style varied little over his career and whilst his lack of stylistic evolution troubles the modern viewer, to encounter his work for the first time one is struck by the boldness with which he uses both colour and the line. Kekoo Gandhy reports that during the visit of the great American art critic Clement Greenburg to the TIFR in 1967, it was only the work of Ara that evinced a response from him. The work by M.F. Husain in the TIFR collection tracks the extraordinary range of interests that occupied the artist from the early 1950s till the 1970s. From intimate and early oils that illustrate his interest in a synthesis of Indian and western styles, through to the immense 45-foot mural of 1964, the TIFR can rightfully claim to be the custodian of one of the great Husain collections. Husain’s personal relationship with Bhabha and the TIFR was close, indeed during the construction of the TIFR (between 1954 and 1962) the artist reports visiting Bhabha’s house once or twice a month. Moreover, once he had won the mural competition the artist spent two years at the institution, more out of the love of the place than the necessity of completing the commission.

If it was not the case that the artists associated with the original Progressive Artists’ Group dominated the Indian art scene in the 1950s and, by extension, the TIFR art collection, then which artists were being shown and collected? The TIFR register of paintings and sculptures that details the artworks bought by the institute between 1952 and 1962 proves instructive in this respect. Though only reaching till the moment the collection moved into the new buildings, the register’s contents are concerned with critical decade of the 1950s when the modern art scene in India grew from an embryonic state to one ready to welcome the first professionally run galleries. In that time the TIFR purchased one hundred and two paintings and sculptures by forty-one artists.  The largest holdings at this time were of those by Ara (thirteen) with seven works each of Husain, Gade, Davierwalla and Gaitonde. There were six works by Sadwelkar, five by Hebbar and four by Rasik Raval and Samant. Beyond the artists collected in some depth the collection incorporated single or, at most, two works by names that are unfamiliar to many today including Mohan Ghisad, Nutan Bala and Elliot Fernandes.

What we must conclude about the nature of the collection and, by extension, the nature of the art scene during the decade after independence is that at no point did any particular school, movement or group come to dominate. Instead the Indian art world was driven by the evolution of individual artistic voices. Of course it is the case that there were significant overlaps in the concerns of artists practicing at that time, but we should ascribe this to spirit of the moment, a zeitgeist, rather than an agenda driven from within. Perhaps it is an opportune moment to look for alternative readings of Modern Indian art history rather than those dominated by the Progressive Artists’ Group.

ARTISTS OF THE THIRD EPOCH

It is clear that ascribing the backbone of the TIFR collection to the formation and work of the Progressive Artists’ Group is shaky, at best. The work simply does not exist in sufficient depth in the collection to justify this claim. This becomes an interesting problem in so far as the collection positions itself as describing the development of the visual arts in India during the very period that contemporary art historians of the period would claim that the PAG came, however briefly, to dominate the field.

Writing in 1965 in the respected journal Lalit Kala Contemporary, the artist and critic Badri Narayan formulated a new term for those artists associated with the Indian art scene between independence and the mid 1960s:

“This paper is a modest effort at understanding the psychology and the initial experiences of the younger generation of painters and sculptors in India, of those who may be called, or will be called, at some future date the practitioners of the Third Epoch, painters and sculptors who came into eminence or emerged after India’s independence.”

It is interesting to note that Narayan does not even mention the PAG as a distinctive school or movement. In the light of the discussion with regard to the TIFR collection, this seems most sensible. Instead Narayan casts the original and later members of the PAG within a broader grouping of artists that he names the Third Epoch. His logic is sound:

“The First epoch in modern Indian art belongs to what is now called the Bengal School led by Abanindranath Tagore; the Second to independent and stylistically divergent painters like Jamini Roy and Amrita Sher-Gil; and the Third to those many painters, too numerous to be named individually, too varied in their outlook, those artists who emerged round about the fiftees of this century turning for inspiration not only to their own primitive, pre-historic and the more archaic and early miniature traditions, but also to the makers of the new patrimony – Klee, Mondrian, Miro, Villon, Brancusi, Moore, Orozco, Marini, Giacometti, and the host of those eclectic masters of the post-impressionist period… The significant painters after 1947 are men like Hebbar, Husain, Bendre, Souza, Padamsee, Gade, Subramanian, Ram Kumar, Sankho Chowdhuri, Davierwalla, Raman Patel, Chavda, Raza, Gaitonde, Ara, Samant, P.T. Reddy, K.S. Kulkarni, Satish Gujral, Chintamoni Kar (sic).”

Here is a definition of a movement that certainly does have a resonance with the TIFR collection. Of the artists mentioned by Narayan nearly all are represented in depth and the reason for particular absences is mostly to do with the fact that the artists did not reside or exhibit their work much in Mumbai where the main focus of collecting for the TIFR was centered. By creating a wide yet coherent basis for the formulation of the Third Epoch artists, Narayan immediately allows for the true nature of the art scene at that time: it was one of a dizzying array of experiments, with individual artists often exhibiting an extraordinary catholicity in their choices of influence and style. It was a period not of manifestos and deep rooted collectives but, rather, of constantly shifting allegiances and strategies. Artists were constantly on the move taking up teaching positions, moving into and out of burgeoning artist colonies, taking short term tenancies of the newly formed art studio communities around the country or, even, moving abroad for good. Soon a myriad of networks and friendships assumed shape, forcing an ever greater sharing of knowledge amongst the younger artists active at that time.

THE TIFR MURAL

The most important single work in the TIFR art collection is the remarkable 45-foot mural executed by M.F.Husain and titled Bharat Bhagya Vidhata.  This work was commissioned by the TIFR and came out of a competition process that ran from the end of 1962 into the first months of 1963.

The mural tradition runs long and deep in Indian art history and in the twentieth century itself there was already a corpus of work from which to draw inspiration and reference. K. G. Subramanyam’s work of the period, in particular, included a number of important murals, often incorporating terracotta as a medium. Looking further afield, European and South American artists had also experimented in the format and indeed Satish Gujral, who himself submitted a competition entry for the TIFR mural, had visited Mexico in 1952 on a fellowship and had been influenced by the great muralists Diego Riviera and David Alvaro Siqueiros.  At this moment a strong relationship was discernable between mural design and a political agenda that sought to draw references from indigenous and, especially, folk traditions.

Bhabha himself had a curious link with the mural tradition through his friendship with Professor J.D. Bernal, the left-leaning British scientist who was one of the most influential academics of the times. There are letters existing between the two that confirms that Bhabha hosted Bernal in Mumbai in 1950. This was the same year in which Pablo Picasso visited Bernal in his apartment in London, the artist and scientist being part of a planned Soviet-sponsored World Peace Congress in the UK. The night that Picasso spent at Bernal’s is now the stuff of legend and whilst it is not entirely clear as to the sequence of events, by the end of the party the Spaniard had executed a mural on the wall of the apartment using a technique of scratching into the surface with a sharp implement. This resulting work, which has become known as Bernal’s Picasso, is now part of the Wellcome Group art collection in London. Bhabha was certainly aware of the work and in November 1962 wrote to Bernal, urging the latter to follow-up on an earlier conversation where, “We talked about the possibility of interesting Picasso in this on special terms”. The special terms were to be a first class air ticket, a month’s stay at the expense of the TIFR, “Together with arrangements for visiting and seeing some of the famous archaeological monuments in India.” The timing of this letter is significant in that it comes at the same moment that letters had already been sent out to Indian artists to submit entries for the mural competition. It is clear that Bhabha was keen to keep his options open and that he was not wedded to the mural being an expression of a nationalist agenda. Sadly we are not privy to any more communication between the two men and ultimately the TIFR never got its own Picasso mural.

The mural competition got underway somewhere in the autumn of 1962. It is a moot point as to whether the 45-foot long space designated for the work had been purposefully constructed with a mural in mind or whether it was a decision made after the buildings were completed. Given the limited space that is afforded a viewer to appreciate the work it is likely to have been the latter. The idea behind the competition was simple, to produce a preliminary design at a scaled down size. Each of the designs submitted by the selected artists would receive Rs.800 and the winner Rs.15,000.

An internal memo of the period lists the artists requested to submit competition entries. It reads as a roll call of the most acclaimed painters from the younger generation: Ara, Bendre, Gaitonde, Gujral, Hebbar, Husain, Padamsee, Prabha, Raval, Raza and Sadwelkar. In addition the names Shanti Dave, Ram Kumar and Jamini Roy were noted in a separate list, probably in case any of the first list were not able to participate. An advertisement was also placed as an open call for applications. From the initial list of invited artists Raza, Padamsee and Gaitonde were not to submit entries and instead Jamini Roy was added.

In the case of Badri Narayan’s submission, the circumstances of his being invited were entirely fortuitous:

“I was in the Jehangir gallery as I had a show there. Bhabha had asked who was responsible for the paintings on display. When I met him he said ‘Why don’t you submit a design for a competition that we are having? But the competition deadline is in two days time’. I went to my Mother-in-law’s house where I was living at the time and got hold of some handmade paper and finished the design in time.”

There exists in the archives communication between Bhabha and Jamini Roy in which the TIFR director explains that whether or not the artist won the competition, or even submitted his design in time for judging, “In view of your eminence in the world of art, we shall consider your design as an end in itself, we shall greatly value.” This superb bit of ego boosting, worthy of an experienced gallerist, did the trick and had the artist geared up for the production of a triptych that was on a scale rarely seen by the Bengali maestro.

The committee set up to help Bhabha decide the winner of the competition was his familiar inner group; Karl Khandalavala, Rudi Von Leyden, Phiroza Wadia and Professor K.S. Chandrasekharan. Chandrasekharan, a leading mathematician of his day, was invited by Bhabha to join the School of Mathematics and gained an interest in the TIFR art collection from an early point.

All the judges seem to have shared Bhabha’s view that Husain’s entry was the most convincing and the Director made his final decision sometime in March 1963. Husain recalls that having heard no feedback from the committee he visited Phiroza Wadia who, “Went inside and phoned Dr. Bhabha. Then she came out and said, ‘You got the mural’.”

Some of the competition entries are worth investigation as through them we come to understand the manner in which artists of that time understood the relationship between the arts and the sciences. Moreover, each of the artists was forced to work on a scale rarely attempted at that time in the Indian visual arts.

The works with the most overt gestures towards a narrative based around the sciences were K.K. Hebbar’s Civilisation and N.S. Bendre’s Cosmos in the Making. Where Bendre takes on the very origins of the universe, with a semi-abstract of hot colours and globular forms, Hebbar takes the viewer through a linear history of India, beginning with hunter-gatherers and ending with an engineer holding (literally) electricity, behind him a hydroelectric dam dominates the landscape. It is to the credit of Bhabha and his judges that they were not swayed by subject matter that was aimed to please. The truth is that both works are unsuccessful as designs and, one is sure, would simply not have worked as murals.

Ara’s Spring Festival intrigues for its use of classical motifs. The scene is Bacchanalian in its depiction of carefree girls and men dancing and singing in a grove. The figures are rendered with quick brush strokes that heighten the energy of the composition. This flight of fantasy has a sensuous joie de vie and suggests itself as working well as a mural. It is debatable as to the reception such a work would have had in the serious environment into which it was being proposed.

Raval’s design, Man Triumphant, was one of the two shortlisted by the judges. As with all the artist’s work it is rendered with an awesome control of the brush, the elongated figures and animals painted with minute detail to attention. The central action of the design depicts a bull being tethered by men on either side of it. The title of the work allows the viewer to interpret the work as suggesting that the bull is a metaphor for the harnessing of nature’s forces through science.

Husain’s fully-realised mural, Bharat Bhagya Vidhata is a tour de force by an artist at the peak of his powers. The degree to which the original design matches the final mural is extraordinary, and much of the assuredness with which he created the competition entry can be attributed to the artist’s apprenticeship as a painter of billboards during the 1940s. This meant he could visualize with ease how a design would look once magnified to a larger scale. Indeed, at the very moment that he was executing the TIFR commission, he was working on an even larger mural (with dimensions10 X 60 feet) for the World Health Organization in Delhi.

Bharat Bhagya Vidhata takes a Rajasthani landscape as the venue for the riot of action that the artist lets loose on the viewer. Husain at this time was in the middle of series of paintings based on Rajasthan and indeed a painting such as Chittore (1962), formerly in a private collection in Vancouver, shows great similarity in the use of motifs to the TIFR mural. Animals, architecture and people jostle with each other for our attention. There is no one leading narrative, rather a plethora of vignettes that play out on their own whilst adhering to an overall compositional structure. The repeated use of the elephant within the work is a clever conceit that further adds to the impression of monumentality that mural naturally evokes.

The mural’s physical presence at the institute is so overwhelming that it can be said to be the collection’s emblematic artwork. It is therefore worth giving pause to consider the message that Bhabha and his judges were sending through to future generations by commissioning this piece.  By choosing Husain they rejected the notion that art should be at the service of the sciences by forcing it to explain or elucidate the core principles of the institute. Instead they valorized the idea that art can inspire through an appeal to an individual’s aesthetic sense.

CONCLUSION

A perusal of the illustrated artworks included in this publication may lead the reader to several conclusions. The first is how stylistically dissimilar the works of an individual artist may look when compared between one and another other, even though the total spread of time the collection allows for is barely twenty years, with a serious concentration of collecting spanning just over a decade. The second are the close resemblances that exist in the work executed by different artists, but within identical pockets of time. It is important to note that these similarities do not always hold between the same groups but tend to shift constantly. If between 1953 and 1956 the work of V.S. Gaitonde share the concerns of those exhibited by B. Prabha, at a later point in the same decade Gaitonde’s work would share many affinities with abstracts of Homi Patel. Equally whilst the early work of B. Prabha and V. S Gaitonde converse with each other, by the beginning of the 1960s Prabha’s work is much more aligned to the abstraction of Satish Gujral.

The period of discussion was defined by the move from figuration to abstraction seen throughout the world’s art centres. In India these shifts took place within a backdrop of increasing interaction between artists both at a local and global level fuelled by the increasing social mobility that an increasingly organised art market brought with it. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that short lived allegiances and fleeting artistic relationships define Indian art in the era between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. The TIFR collection bears witness to these micro convergences amongst the artists that it collected and therefore cautions the student of modern Indian art away from understanding the period as one of grand movements. By putting to rest the mythology surrounding the Progressive Artists’ Movement the point is not to dismiss it. Rather it is to see it in the context of a multiplicity of competing voices that were heard at this time. The cacophonous nature of the art scene shortly after independence is one that should be admired by our generation, tending as it is towards a homogenization of styles. If we lose a grand narrative through demoting the status of the PAG, what we gain is the vibrancy of a scene in constant flux, the perfect grounding for fresh exciting ideas and a perfect ally to an institution such as the TIFR.