Anish Kapoor in India

Anish Kapoor ‘s fame is belied by a somewhat shy and self-effacing manner that suggests he would be more comfortable by far back in his studio creating his extraordinary works than discussing them with his public – let alone making speeches on the subject. These days ‘though an artist of Kapoor’s stature is expected to share himself and to be a star, prepared to sell the man as well as his art, however consistently, as in his case, the art sells itself. So, at the opening of his retrospective exhibition in Mumbai last week, the artist did the proper thing: briefly greeting his audience partying in the garden outside the exhibition studio, thanking all those who had helped to create the show and leaving it to the spokespeople from the British Council and Louis Vuitton, the sponsors, further to interpret its importance and that of the return of the artist to his birthplace.

This year I have seen Kapoor’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, a bizarre juxtaposition of monumental contemporary sculpture and great 18th century rooms that often seemed overcrowded by the works on show. The most memorable pieces there, the great mass of silver spheres in the courtyard called ‘Tall tree and the eye’ that endlessly reflected the moving queues of people heading for the show; the bright pigmented pieces, disciplined bursts of colour reminiscent of Indian temple precincts with their stalls of carefully crafted pyramids of coloured mandala powders – the colours of the festival of holi and of India in general; the crowded room of ‘hive’ pieces, great piles of petrified writhing clay, seen out of the corner of the eye, almost to be living.

For me, the press grabbing red wax works, aside from the shock of the blast of the cannon firing wax balls at a wall, were of curiosity value only in this setting – how much mess could be made on a white wall or a great arched doorway? The impact of the cannon was clearer in the better fitting contemporary space of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao this summer where different mirrored pieces demanded the attention of the viewer and where we were lucky to arrive early to an almost empty museum space – a rare luxury and almost unheard of at a highly publicised and must see exhibition in London these days.

So my fascination in the Kapoor’s work has grown and has also become an inspiration for my daughter’s art ‘A’ level projects involving backdrops of the Guggenheim and Kapoor pieces for photographs of giant bright coloured jellies and heaps of insoluble food colour powder. It took, the Mumbai opening, however, to confirm me as a fully fledged Kapoor groupie, queuing to shake hands with the diffident and somewhat exhausted great artist at his second Indian opening in a week. Sonia Gandhi had already inaugurated the first part of the exhibition in Delhi saying ‘Few artists of our time have captured the imagination of the World as Anish Kapoor’.

In the Mehboob film studios in Bandra, Mumbai, Kapoor’s works showed at their most remarkable in a huge space with high roughcast walls and enough room for most of Bombay and Bollywood high society to meet and greet and show off, high fashion and sparkly images reflected endlessly in the artist’s curving mirrored walls, concave or convex panels and dishes, that reveal, change and consume the viewer; one minutely fractured to create a massive and magical kaleidoscope of its surroundings.

For the first time, unimpeded by the habitual barriers and health and safety hurdles of European galleries, the wax firing cannon not only had its audience jumping but also made sense – for some reason firing wax at roughcast walls is more effective than at smooth paint ‘though why, I cannot tell. The lack of barriers too, just a few polite young people watching out for the unwary or the clumsy backing into a shining surface, allowed a far more personal interaction with every piece and, one imagines, a closer view of the artist’s concept.

For me, overwhelmed by the richesse on show, the most desirable piece was the great spike or spire of polished mirrored steel, apparently pouring endlessly, mercury like, into the floor surface and drawing the eye magnetically from all corners of the room. Irresistible.

A Rajasthan Wedding

‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
the brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
and monarchs to behold the swelling scene’

Not in fact a battle but a royal wedding in Rajasthan; attended by former princes galore, at least one monarch and and another ex king, Gyanendra of Nepal. A scene swelling with the fabled colours of the Rajasthan desert and its peoples; gilded by the stars of Bollywood and international rock; a feast of images worthy of the muse and quite other worldly to those more used to lower key European weddings.

The marriage of the Yuvraj Shivraj, son of the Maharajah of Jodhpur, to Rajkumari Gayatri of Askote-Raj, may be one of the last great traditional weddings among the former royal families and was celebrated as such in a state where ‘Bapji’ Jodhpur, is still respected to a degree in keeping with his lifetime of work for Jodhpur and the state of Rajasthan. Noblesse oblige.
This wedding was a celebration too of the bridegroom’s astonishing recovery from an almost mortal injury in a polo match six years ago and an auspicious augury for a continuance in the status quo that few of the population of Jodhpur deeply invested in their historical traditions had dared hope for. Jodhpur was en fete.

For foreign guests, Indian weddings are always spectacular events requiring an unusual degree of stamina and, when among the warrior Rajputs at least, on whom whisky has no more obvious effect than mother’s milk, a hard head and a good liver. A wardrobe is required that extends far beyond the usual and re-usable wedding clothes lurking in the recesses of the spare room cupboard. This wedding, in two cities and multiple venues involved as many changes of clothes in a day as an Edwardian house party, with jewellery and baggage to match. O for a lady’s maid and a Louis Vuitton cabin trunk or two.

In truth, while the Edwardian women of the Raj may, like Lady Curzon in her peacock dress, have competed to some extent with the satins, silks, chiffons and brocades of formal Indian attire, contemporary western style clothing in its poverty of colour and embellishment is hard pressed to shine next to a myriad coloured nine yard turban or a shimmering sherwani with diamond buttons, costume that makes the most undistinguished suddenly regal, let alone a woman’s swirling traditional tinselled and bejewelled ghagra and odhni .

Better then for the foreigner just to relax and revel in a spectacular repast for all the senses. The cheerful discord of the pipes of the Rajputana Rifles combined with folk singers belting out their best known songs from the roof top alcoves of the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur heralding the evening arrival of the barat procession led by a painted elephant, tusks streaming with tinsel and unmoved by red carpet style banks of flash photographers, bringing the bridegroom from Jodhpur to his bride. The bridegroom himself arriving at the last, straight and beautiful, sitting in an antique carriage drawn by Marwari horses who struggled against ruts in ground made marshy by heavy unseasonable rain.

Private family and religious wedding ceremonies morphed into drinks and dinner, guests drifting like petals in the evening breeze, stopping to greet old and new friends or gawp at the world famous such as Mick Jagger and Sting or, and more covetously, the spectacular jewels adorning both men and women; groups ebbing and flowing around the green acres of the Rambagh lawns; the bharat followers remarkably fresh after an all night party on a special train from Jodhpur and an early morning breakfast at a desert tented camp.

A return train trip to Jodhpur the following day gathered up new guests from Jaipur and reunited the men’s bharat party with the women of the bridegroom’s family and their friends, who remained in Jodhpur in keeping with tradition. Any idea that the women had been other than enjoying themselves as hard as the men was dispelled the next day by the improbable sight of kitsch plastic palm trees adorning the Umaid Bhavan Palace gardens as a backdrop, from all accounts, to some serious female partying.

For foreigners, serious shopping too had to be fitted in somewhere and well oiled expeditions to the narrow lanes of the old city encouraged abandonment to the seduction of salesmen luring customers with soft as butter Kashmiri shawls, myriad coloured silks and embroideries reputedly designed for the great fashion houses of the World and being sold, naturally, at a snip of their real price.

The romantic tour de force of the festivities, a dinner and dancing in the Mehrengarh Fort that evening, transported us all to an earlier era. The steep, carefully lit, walk up to the Fort in full evening dress and for safety’s sake on the cobbles, discarded heels, rewarded by a mesmerised sense of timelessness induced by Zilla Khan’s exquisite sufi singing. More temporal desires finally overtaking the crowds in a determined post trance search for the bar at the end of the crowded ramparts as a wave of thirsty people flowed onwards and upwards, the blue city unfolding far below them. The magic was restored by dinner in the courtyard of the ancient and lately restored Zenana building, a fitting setting for a post prandial nautch performance and where the crowds, however many hundred, were dwarfed by the surrounding impenetrable walls. The Nautch was followed by rather less lithe performances on the discotheque floor where we danced or swayed about until dawn.

A sustaining breakfast at Raas, the latest jewel in the hospitality chain in Jodhpur, was followed next morning by much needed mid-morning trays of bloody marys passing generously round the vast halls of the Umaid Bhavan Palace to rejuvenate the jaded and over partied for the culmination of the wedding festivities, the grah pravesh, the arrival of the bride at her new home. The assembled company, once more in their most colourful and traditional costumes with cameras at the ready, watched a procession led by the horses of the Jodhpur Lancers, the bride, more mundanely, bringing up the rear in a white 4x4, to be greeted by her new family. The ceremonial followed swiftly and inevitably by a large and delicious lunch before the bump back to earth began for most of us with thought of trains and planes to catch and the whole greyer reality of daily life, outside this happy, rainbow bubble, to face once again.

The place to stay in Jodhpur

For a change I have been so far off my cockroach scale of hotels, staying in such blissful surroundings that I am still, back in freezing England, basking in the warm glow of remembered comforts. I have a photograph of the former Ras haveli in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, from 1907; the great Mehrengarh fort on its rocky hill, one of the most distinctive backgrounds in India; the cow in the foreground of the picture, one imagines, an ancestor of those that still cluster close to the gate of the erstwhile haveli, now the Raas hotel and one of the newest jewels in Rajasthan hospitality.

The hotel is both contemporary in architecture and wholly sympathetic to its 18th century shell and its surroundings next to an ancient step well, amongst the crowded streets and lanes of the old city. An almost aerial view looking down at Raas from the ramparts of the fort shows an oasis with moghul style ponds and cascades, a cerulean infinity pool picking up on the colours of the blue city and cooling patches of green in decorative and kitchen gardens. Green themes of a different variety are clear from above in the banks of solar panels supporting a steady supply of power for air cooling and winter warming and reliable gushing hot water.

‘There’s a place in Rajputana with a fort of old renown
And a liberal-hearted fine old king.
And the traveller who visits that most hospitable town
Hears a lot about Sir Pratap Singh’
(from Rhymes of Rajputana, GH Trevor, 1894)

Nikhilendra Singh, the great grandson of Sir Pratap Singh, Regent of Jodhpur in the late 19th and early 20th century and inspired proprietor of Raas, has left little to chance in this ideal hotel – there are few if any rough edges. The pavilion like dining room with roof top bar offers Indian and European menus of an elegant simplicity to match the carefully spaced linen covered tables, laid with regiments of perfect wine glasses, the better to taste the ever growing numbers of quality Indian wines. Stuffed owls, situated in high alcoves above the tables are one of the few signal failures at Raas, their theoretical object to scare off importunate pigeons whose cooing vibrates regardless through conversation, adding, as they perch cheerfully next to their glassy eyed predators, to the arcadian atmosphere.

Monsoon in Rajasthan has lately continued into the winter, making surprising changes in the Jodhpur desert and adding an unexpected element to high season travel in Rajasthan – gum boots may be required packing. Raas caters for those disinclined to get mud to the knees on shopping trips in the Jodhpur markets with indoor comforts, flat screen televisions in the rooms and a long list of available dvds. There are verandahs attached to rooms that overlook the inner courtyard for reading and relaxing or you can just lounge on your huge bed waiting for room service to keep up the steady supplies of drink and food to your room. Beauty treatments are available or a local tailor will create a new wardrobe or make well fitting jodhpur trousers to be shipped later to your home. There is a spa and a shop selling unusual jewellery, objets d’art and handcrafts a few steps into the courtyard – an umbrella and someone to carry it over you will be available on wet days for those with permeable hairstyles.

The streets of the City are endlessly fascinating, a photographer’s and, of course, a shopper’s paradise. At Raas you are cocooned from the bustle and noise outside by old walls and from the business of the hotel, should you so wish, by movable slatted stone jali screens that concertina shut across the verandahs. At the same time you remain part of the City and only yards away from the life of the market and the hurly burly round the old Jodhpur clock tower. Tuk tuk rickshaws are the best transport, weaving most easily between larger vehicles stuck in a morass of cows, motorcycles and a wedding procession or two – the hotel has its own decorated in Jodhpur blue - cars are best used only for longer journeys and need time to work their way through the streets to the hotel entrance to sweep you up to the Mehrengarh or to other parts of remarkable Rajasthan.

Like the state and perhaps Jodhpur in particular, Raas has a unique character created not only by its bricks and mortar, however beautifully designed, but most of all by its people. The colours of the state may be more muted in the uniforms and calming neutral colours in Raas accoutrements but the charm and flashing smiles of the staff are in keeping with its surroundings and make staying there as easy and friendly experience as staying in a private house whilst knowing full well that professionals are in charge and doing all to make your stay as close to perfection as possible.