A painter, a ceramist and a filmmaker walk into a chawl

“The fifth stage of life,” jokes filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, standing outside his office after a photo shoot, “after vanaprastha and sanyasa, comes redevelopment.” It’s the afternoon of the Maharashtra legislative assembly election, and redevelopment has been a hot topic. We are also standing in the sunlit corridor of a 100-year-old building which, if all goes according to plan, will soon be acquired by a developer. The terracotta tiles and vaulted ceilings we are swooning over, will go, making way for another luxury mall or gated residential high-rise. Banerjee’s joke is a response to photographer Hashim Badani, who rents the studio right across from his on this very corridor, and has just finished telling us a story about a man whose greatest wish in life was for a developer to acquire his property. Like hitting a gold mine, redevelopment is an Indian property owner’s surest shot at wealth creation. Once, we dreamed of fame and fortune; now, Mumbai dreams of redevelopment.

But the case of Ravji Sojpal Compound, in Mumbai’s Sewri area, is a curious one. The building is a chawl by design, set within the ordered sprawl of a locality that was once an 18th century military stronghold and later an industrial area. The first floor is as colourful and chaotic as you’d imagine: children running, mothers shouting, clothes hanging, pots clanging. On the second floor is a corridor so white and quiet, it feels a world away from the floor below. For many years, the corridor fluttered with school children and functioned as a BMC school, but eventually, the school moved out and the rooms remained empty. Slowly, they started to fill up again—Banerjee rented a room for his accounting office. A tuition class took up some other spaces. An interior design firm took up another. And then, one by one, came the artists.

Designer Pooja Jain Bansal, who specialises in hand-painted furniture, and goes by the name House of Curations (HOC), got here first. “Because I paint on such big pieces of furniture, I had initially been looking for something on the ground floor,” she admits, “But when the broker brought me to this space, it was so beautiful with its high ceilings and big windows. I said, I’ll adjust to being on the second floor, but I have to have this space.” For about a year, Bansal was alone, secretly hoping that more artists would join her hideout. She was right—eventually, the quiet corridor would indeed transform into a thriving creative community.

Bansal invited Reena Naik, a self-taught artist whose practice had just taken off, to open her painting studio here. Meanwhile Banerjee, whose company had gone remote during Covid, started using the accounting office as his personal workspace. Then, about a year ago, ceramicist Tosha Jagad took up three rooms, combined to form a single studio, and moved in with her wheel and kiln. Jagad brought in visual artist Poorva Shingre, who in turn roped in her old college buddy from Sir JJ School of Art, comic book artist Anand Radhakrishnan, to make this the creative quarter it is today.

Generationally, the creative group in Sewri ranges from peak-millennial to liberalisation-era Gen X, and the representation of artistic disciplines is so diverse it feels intentionally curated. The most recent addition is photographer Hashim Badani, who discovered the studio via Jagad’s Instagram account, and took up two rooms as an office and photo studio. “I’m always amused when I have to give directions to people,” says the photographer, who recently shot a campaign for Jaipur Rugs out of his studio. “I send them a Google Maps link to Pappu Tailor, and when they reach, I tell them to look for the sauchalay, and then enter through a chawl… after all this, you’re really not expecting to find the place that you eventually land up in.”

As far as the landlord was concerned, any paying tenant was as good as another, but the architecture seemed to be calling out to the nostalgia-stricken, silence-starved artists of urban India. Where else will you find corridors like this one, drenched in sunlight, with a cross-ventilation that cools you down the minute you enter? 

Inside the rooms, each artist has made their studio their own—Banerjee’s is overflowing with books, Badani’s is furnished sparingly with antiques and artwork, Shingre’s is full of surprising little pieces she’s created—but for every one of them, the bones of the building are the hero.

“It’s as if you’re straddling Bombay’s history down two or three flights of stairs,” describes Banerjee, whose corner office has a panoramic view of the chawl, the city street, and the high rises beyond. “This chawl is probably a hundred years old. These neighbourhoods are actually ones in which the urban history of Bombay has come up—the cotton mills, the fabric mills, the trade unions, the local theatre, and now, the DJ parties with non-stop music that are financed by local political parties to secure a vote bank.”

Indeed, for many of the artists, this proximity to “real” Mumbai is an added bonus—a filter, if you will, that gives the architecture that extra pop of character. Shingre, whose studio overlooks a row of houses in the chawl below, spends hours people-watching. “Today I saw a kid bring home a toy seller, to ask his mom, and his mom said no, and the kid threw a tantrum—I was just watching,” says the graphic designer. “One thing I really like is the smell of food here—everyone is always making chapati or bhakri. During Ganpati, a lady gave me prasad and a whole lot of mithai to distribute to the other artists.” Maybe these little interactions will find their way into her work someday, but even if they don’t—what matters to Shingre is that, when she wants a break away from her laptop or spray paint, she has a full, rich view of the world to turn to. “Being around people, understanding people, and just seeing things, it changes you,” she adds, “Even if I was a banker or a CA working here, it would still change my perspective on life, but yeah, for artists, this feeling is especially important.”

It's difficult to say whether the artists are drawn in by the architecture (or the very affordable rent that I’m requested to not reveal), or the strange dichotomy it shares with the chawl, but what they all stay for is the community that they have unintentionally created. Already, some creative collaborations are starting to take shape: Banerjee has been picking Radhakrishnan’s brain for a comic book he’s currently working on (more on this in good time); Jagad has roped in Radhakrishnan and Shingre to paint on her ceramics; and Shingre, who had previously worked with air-drying clay, is experimenting with Jagad’s kiln these days.

Still, it’s the imperceptible interactions that mean the most to these artists, even if they don’t manifest directly in their work. “My practice has definitely evolved after coming here,” admits Jagad whose studio is packed with hot-from-the-kiln pieces jostling for space. “Maybe not as directly as ‘I saw this and so I made this’, but when I look at Anand for example, and actually see him working, it’s so inspiring.” Radhakrishnan, a self-professed introvert who is prone to isolating himself for weeks at a stretch while working, appreciates the little interactions that happen around him. “It’s interesting to think about how a physical space changes how people behave. My studio is one of the first in the corridor, so everyone has to walk past it to get to theirs, and everyone says ‘hi’. Sometimes, that’s the only social interaction I get in the day, because I like to be on my own.”

For introverts, there’s always silence, and space, and time, but for those who want to socialise, the opportunities are a doorstep away. Banerjee often invites people over to his office at the end of the day, for coffee or a drink; Jagad’s studio is a crowd favourite to pop in and see her experiments with clay; Badani, who is always happy to lend out photo books, even keeps a lockbox outside so others can use his space when he’s travelling on assignments. Here, conversations like the one about redevelopment are par for the course—maybe they’ll sow the seed of an idea, maybe they won’t, but they’re a sign of an artist community that’s inspired, engaged and alive.

“It’s like a synergy, a connection, at a very creative level,” shares Naik, “Everyone is trying to make ends meet, and you see that when you meet artists who are facing the same issues; it’s very different from those working in corporate. And this is an environment in which people are very open to share career opportunities, or new connections. Those of us who are older learn a lot from the younger artists, because they’re a part of art communities we weren’t aware of before, and participating in exhibitions we wouldn’t even know about otherwise. Naturally, it impacts the work you do.”

If this sounds too good to be true, it may well be. But for Ravji Sojpal Compound, where redevelopment is definitely on the cards, we can’t say what the future holds. Will artists—specifically, those on a budget—be able to afford a roof here? Will a high rise crush a thriving arts community? Will the terracotta tiles be replaced by Carrara marble? “It’s hard to predict which way the tide of money and politics will turn, but for now, everyone’s trying to enjoy their time in this little community, for as long as it will have them. “Time will tell,” adds Bansal, optimistically, “It’s better not to think so far ahead.”