I live and breathe art and heritage, says Sangita Jindal
Sangita Jindal, chairperson of JSW Foundation, was part of the founding team of KGA that put together the wildly popular nine-day Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, inaugurated in 1999
MUMBAI: Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda district owes some of its celebrity as the city’s premier art destination to Sangita Jindal. From being home to the illustrious Sassoon family in the 1800s to the stomping grounds of the Bombay Progressive Group during the mid-1900s, this crescent-shaped South Mumbai quarter is steeped in history.
Today, Kala Ghoda is the gleaming centre of the city’s most future-forward designer showrooms, cafes and art galleries. This would likely not have been possible without the Kala Ghoda Association (KGA), which was formed in 1998, as a result of the Urban Design Research Institute’s Kala Ghoda Conservation Plan.
Sangita Jindal, chairperson of JSW Foundation, was part of the founding team of KGA that put together the wildly popular nine-day Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, inaugurated in 1999. It won her an Eisenhower fellowship in 2004. Her tireless patronage of the arts has resulted in similar prestigious positions, such as trustee of the World Monuments Fund and membership on the board of the Asia Society.
“I was not a corporate’s wife back then, I was just another woman running around, trying to improve all this,” Sangita says, standing under an arch on the first-floor verandah of the newly-restored David Sassoon Library and Reading Room. Resplendent in a baby pink organza saree with a delicate floral print, her ear lobes touched with diamond and ruby earrings, she is basking in the success of her latest project.
Sangita Jindal has conceptualised and implemented the Victorian Gothic building’s latest restoration (there have been two attempts in the past, in 1995 and 2010). It’s been done on a budget of ₹4 crore, with support from ICICI Foundation, French luxury brand Hermes and others.
On inauguration day, the library is awash with the sound of violins and the scent of expensive perfume. Thirty thousand books have been rehoused inside the new Victorian-design teak wood cupboards. Original Minton tiles and tables dating to the 1880s sit refurbished. In shiny vintage chandeliers, and column capitals painted a lustrous gold, the building’s historic integrity is retained. The clock up in the tower is ticking again.
“My favourite thing about this project is the gable roof,” she says. The reinstallation of the original roof design has been critical, since the David Sassoon Library’s main woe was water leakage, courtesy the reinforced cement concrete slab for a roof that had been installed in 1997.
In the last 25 years, Sangita’s engagement with heritage conservation has only grown deeper. JSW Foundation (the social development arm of the $22 billion conglomerate spearheaded by her husband Sajjan Jindal) led the restoration of the Chandramauleshwar Temple, Hampi (completed in 2003), the JJ School of Art, Mumbai (2008), the SNDT Kanyashala, Mumbai (2015) and the Blue Synagogue, Mumbai (2019). “We are now restoring the Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir, the Kedarnath temple, three or four temples in Hampi and the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai,” she says. “I live and breathe art and heritage.”
Her mother used to run the Kanoria Centre for Arts, Ahmedabad, which was built in the 1980s under the guidance of the late architect BV Doshi. At the time, young Sangita would sit in on meetings and absorb the way Doshi thought of buildings as habitats, of architecture in service of the common man.
After moving to Mumbai in 1984, she worked with Jamshed J Bhabha at the National Centre for Performing Arts and set up the Jindal Arts Centre. In 1996, she set up ART India, a leading art publication from the subcontinent. “Now, we are holding Art India residencies in Hampi and organising exhibitions.”
An avid art collector, she bought her first artwork at age 19—a “small” painting by Anjolie Ela Menon for ₹15,000. Today, her collection, housed at the Jindal Mansion in Mumbai’s tony Peddar Road neighbourhood, includes some truly valuable pieces of Indian art. The mansion’s verandah, meanwhile, was the site for London-based urban artist Filthy Luker’s tentacles in 2014, when JSW Foundation supported the first edition of the St+India Festival in Mumbai.
The Indian art world’s transformation is thrilling to her. “I think artificial intelligence will change the face of art,” she says, “but the machine can never replace the hand. Originality, criticality and the age-old human genius for painting and sculpting will always reign supreme.” For the present, “the infrastructure for art education needs to evolve, to be even more inclusive.”
Any job that is about establishing continuity—between the contemporary and ancient, the analog and the digital—comes with its own set of challenges. And from her point of view, this boils down to maintenance. “At the Blue Synagogue, we did not cut corners. But I visited the other day and… if they don’t maintain it, what’s the point?” she says.
In her address to a packed library minutes earlier, she had called upon her various partners to help sustain this work. “Otherwise, this will all go and there will be another skyscraper. Is that what we want?”
“Money is not the issue, it’s the intent and hard work,” she says. “Because of my past work, a lot of people now reach out to support us. But at the end of the day, I can do one Mughal Garden. I can’t do all five. If we all work together, our country will improve.”
She gazes upon the Spirit of Kala Ghoda, the black horse statue installed in 2017 in place of the original. “People have asked me why I helped restore the synagogue and the library. Are you Jewish, they ask me. I say, no, I am Hindu, but it doesn’t matter what I am. This is for the city.”