Celebrating the many avatars of Jussawalla

A new show presents material from Adil Jussawalla's archive to create a portrait of the artist and Mumbai in the 1970s

- Shweta Upadhyay

On the cover of Missing Person by poet Adil Jussawalla, you see a man wearing a double-breasted jacket and tie. His face seems to be a blur—portraying the foggy state of mind of the book's narrator, trapped as he is between incomprehensible modernity and redundant traditionalism.

The cover was designed by poet Arun Kolatkar, who along with Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Gieve Patel founded a poets' cooperative, Clearing House, in Mumbai in 1976. Later, poets Dilip Chitre, H.O. Nazareth and Jayanta Mahapatra also became a part of it.

The cooperative published eight titles in its short lifetime, including Mehrotra's Nine Enclosures, Jussawalla's Missing Person, How do you Withstand, Body and Jejuri by Kolatkar. Nazareth's Lobo, published in 1984, was the imprint's last title.

Covers for all the books were designed by Kolatkar, who insisted that not a single line in a poem be broken, thus resulting in the squarish format of the book. These covers, treasured for their imagery and design aesthetic, are now part of the show, Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla, curated by Deeptha Achar and Chithra K.S., on view at The Guild, Alibaug, till 15 July.

Through a range of material like manuscripts, letters, magazine articles, scrap books and family albums, we encounter Jussawalla in various avatars: as a photographer, an art writer, a publisher, a magazine editor, and a person fascinated with ships, picnics, Superman and Tarzan. The show is designed thematically in sections like Family, Visual Culture, Bombay, Ships, Cuffe Parade: Milieu, Life and Books.