Report: Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope
Adil Jussawalla, an influential Indian writer, is celebrated in a unique exhibition showcasing his poetry, manuscripts, and life.
It is rare for an Indian writer to have a whole exhibition dedicated to their life and work but the volume and quality that 85-year-old Adil Jussawalla has produced deserves no less. As a poet, playwright, essayist, and anthologist, his contribution to literature is immense, with his most recent book The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay published in 2025. He has also mentored younger poets, co-founded a poets’ publishing cooperative called Clearing House, and taught English literature at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai.
The task of presenting all this in a comprehensive and lively manner must have been exciting and daunting in equal measure for Deeptha Achar and Chithra KS, co-curators of the show Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope hosted by The Guild — an art gallery in Alibaug, Maharashtra — from May 4 to July 15. The former is a professor at the Department of English, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The latter is an archivist and art historian.
The exhibition included Jussawalla’s poems, manuscripts, letters, photographs, book covers, paintings and scrapbooks. It invited the audience to explore his multifarious talents and eventful life at a leisurely pace. The impact of the curation was heightened by the gallery’s location on the Mandwa-Alibaug road, with vast expanses of lush greenery to drive though.
The property where the gallery is located has a variety of tree and plant life — mulberry, coconut, gooseberry, pineapple, banana, star fruit, neem, moringa, lime, bayleaf, adulsa, almond, bougainvillea, jasmine, spider lily, hibiscus, gardenia, and more. Shalini Sawhney, the gallery’s founder, who lives in Mumbai, took pride in giving visitors a walkthrough of the exhibition as well as the well-tended garden. The gentle monsoon showers added to the gallery’s charm when this writer attended the exhibition.
One of the letters in the exhibition was written by author EM Forster in 1959 and addressed to author Zeenat Futehally, a patient of Jussawalla’s father Jehangir who was a naturopath. Forster notes, “He (Jussawalla) is giving up Architecture and taking up play-writing and the study of literature. I urged him to go on with architecture, in which there may be a future and to keep literature as a ‘side line’, but he didn’t agree. I’m afraid there is no more I can do.”
Over email, Chithra revealed that, when Sawhney invited her and Achar to go through Jussawalla’s archives and see if they could mount an exhibition using the material, they “jumped at the opportunity” but “with some trepidation”. They were concerned about how “an essentially visual exhibition” could be curated “if the material was largely textual”. Moreover, they were aware that Jussawalla had already given away a significant portion of his archives to Cornell University in the United States and Ashoka University in Haryana.
Their anxieties were put to rest when they immersed themselves in Jussawalla’s work as a photographer and painter, which exists alongside his many avatars as a wordsmith. The curatorial text notes that his ideas of “beauty, joy, morality even” were influenced by the popular visual culture of Mumbai — cinemas, hoardings, advertisements, The exhibition has digital prints of his photographs from Sinhagad, a fort in Maharashtra that holds great significance for Jussawalla because he went there on several occasions as a child.
These prints are juxtaposed against lines from his book The Magic Hand of Chance (2021). He writes, “(Sinhagad) is a disturbing presence, as much of the Sahyadris are. To stand and stare at certain points in the Sahyadris is to be aware, not so much of yourself watching the landscape as of the landscape watching you.” He goes on to contemplate on the changing moods of the mountains. They are “sometimes dark and menacing, sometimes protective”.
His first camera was a gift from his aunt — Gool — at the age of 13. The exhibition featured Jussawalla’s photographs of ships, which became a preoccupation thanks to his fondness for the sea and found their way into his poems too. His poem “Picnic” from the book Shorelines (2019), displayed at the show, captures a quintessential Mumbai moment — of people taking a ferry from Colaba to Elephanta Island. Another poem “Shipbuilder Wadia” from the same book, references the Wadias from Surat who built ships and docks for the British East India Company. Additionally, there were photographs of construction workers and Kathakali dancers — all shot by Jussawalla — bearing witness to the breadth of his interests.
Achar says that she and Chithra wanted to present Jussawalla’s work “in conjunction with wider questions of the time” while also locating him in “the literary and artistic world of Mumbai at a time when new things were happening, and new directions were being forged”.
This explains why photographs of Arun Kolatkar, Ranjit Hoskote, Nancy Adajania, Jerry Pinto, Agha Shahid Ali, R Raj Rao, Ashley Tellis, Tenzin Tsundue, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Kavery and Vijay Nambisan, were included in the exhibition. There was a quick nod to Jussawalla’s association with Loquations, a poetry forum at the National Centre for Performing Arts, using a handwritten list that mentions names like Eunice de Souza, Dilip Chitre, Imtiaz Dharker, Manohar Shetty, Meher Pestonji, Jeet Thayil and Jane Bhandari.
Before Sawhney invited the curators to work with her, neither of them had a personal connection with Jussawalla. They plunged in with curiosity and a willingness to learn. They knew him only through his words until they interviewed him a few times for the exhibition. Sawhney mentioned that Jussawalla has not been able to see the exhibition. He spends most of his time at his home in Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, as he faces challenges related to mobility.
Achar was of the opinion that Jussawala has been widely recognized as a poet (he won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014 for his book Trying to Say Goodbye, and was felicitated as Poet Laureate in 2021 at the Tata Literature Live festival) but his oeuvre as a “prose stylist” has not received enough recognition. She pointed out that he “has written extensively over decades as a sharp literary critic and cultural theorist” and has been deeply invested in theatre and cinema. The exhibition highlighted these under-appreciated aspects of his life, including his time at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa as an Honorary Fellow, and his work as an editor with Debonair — a magazine modelled after Playboy.
READ MORE: Review: The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap by Adil Jussawalla
The exhibition also had much to offer in terms of Jussawalla’s personal life. It revealed, for instance, that the paternal side of Jussawalla’s family “had roots in Rawalpindi and Lahore before finally settling in Poona, and then, Bombay” while his mother Mehera’s side “had connections with Poona and Jalna”. He married the French actor-dancer Veronik, whom he met in London while teaching at the International Language Centre shortly after his stint at Oxford. The exhibition had many photographs of Jussawalla with Veronik — who pursued a career as a ceramic artist in Mumbai — and her daughter Katia from a previous marriage.
Jussawalla’s close connection with his Parsi community also came across in his 1976 letter to industrialist and philanthropist Naval Tata, which is reproduced in the exhibition. Here, Jussawalla makes a request for funds to document the Parsis of Mumbai through a series of photographs. “As I don’t want to depend on my father for this particular venture, it would be a great help if the Ratan Tata Trust were willing to finance it. This would enable me to take photographs more freely than I have been doing and also allow me to travel to certain important Parsi places such as Diu, Sanjan and Udwada.” The inclusion of this letter is a perceptive curatorial choice because it reminds the viewer of the financial precarity and need for patronage associated with a creative life. These challenges continue to exist for artists and writers today. While change is said to be constant, some things do not seem to change at all.
Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist and educator who has been involved in various peace initiatives and advocacy for LGBTQ rights. His prose and poetry have appeared in books like Bent Book: A Queerish Anthology, Fearless Love, Clear Hold Build, Borderlines, and 101 Indian Children’s Books We Love. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
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