In a city that every day seems to find new ways of disfiguring itself, Sharada Dwivedi continued to find areas of grace
Sharada Dwivedi; d. 6 February 2012
It was the first thing that you noticed in her home. The books. There were books everywhere, on every surface, racked, stacked and piled, novels, histories, coffee table books, old books, new books. Even the furniture seemed to morph itself around books. Here was a sturdy old chair, a shaded lamp just so beside it, which could only be meant for reading. By its side another old piece of furniture, a revolving book stand. It was quiet here, as books demand. The books were visibly well-thumbed but undamaged, like good friends, and the furniture was lovingly restored. Books, as they say, are the spine of a house, and if there was one thing Sharada Dwivedi and the house she and her husband Bhagirath had, it was plenty of spine.
Sharada was one of four children, three sisters and a brother, born to parents of singular enlightenment. Her father, D. S. Joshi, joined the Indian Civil Service and rose to prominence as a career civil servant, serving as Cabinet Secretary to the Central Government. Her mother, from a wealthy industrialist family, dedicated herself to many causes: she helped set up Asha Sadan and was, in the 1950’s, president of the Maharashtra State Women’s Council. All four children achieved renown in their own fields: medicine, finance and banking, history and civic affairs and computers.
We know of her as a chronicler of the city, a city historian, an advocate for heritage conservation. But she had no formal training in history or architecture or design or urban planning — she studied commerce and library science. What she had was a passion for her city. That, with her commitment to excellence, and her refusal to be cowed or bullied, put her very quickly at the vanguard of the city’s heritage conservation movement. She did more than document the city’s past; she uncovered its present: buildings and precincts and artefacts that are all around us, cultures and histories that tell us who we are. Her writing and publishing — she had her own imprint — came late, but it was prolific and, particularly with Rahul Mehrotra, she mapped the city, then and now, as no one has ever done. Bombay: the Cities Within is a book that gets under the city’s skin and shows us the many cities within the city. It is only one of her many books, and the range is wide: railways, sacred tanks, princely lives, the Taj Mahal hotel, cosmetics, automobiles, most recently on stained glass (appropriately titled “Stories in Glass”) and the one that remains closest to my heart, the book on the Bombay High Court’s building, released on the 125th anniversary of its completion. That book wasn’t possible without her, and the first section of it is entirely hers: the text, the sourcing of old photographs, the delineation of the history of an institution with which she wasn’t otherwise concerned.
We in the High Court saw the passion with which she threw herself into the project, and we wondered why. This building matters to lawyers and judges, but it seems to be little more than a magnificent pile for everyone else. Sharada saw it differently, as an integral part of the city’s design, an interface between sea and city, between the happy chaos of the bazaars to its east and the solemn business of law to its west, an institution that reflected, too, the many spirits of the city. She seemed to know, with a familiarity and confidence that shamed us, about odd furniture in court (a lockable chest for a judge’s lunch box, strange high-backed chairs, bannisters and railings), narrow stair-wells that seemed to go nowhere, the ermine cloaks of English judges, the weird and wonderful carvings on its walls, the quirky engineering and design, the violent reactions to the building when it was commissioned, about its evolution as an institution. She got Noshir Gobhai to photograph it, and together they showed us a High Court we’d never seen before though we walked its corridors every day. At the end of it, some said they’d done far too good a job: the book showed a luminous, stately, splendid building that the casual visitor was unlikely to find. And that was what she did: she saw and recorded and told of things we did not see but which were all around us.
She wasn’t one to be bullied, especially not in her field and had courage quite at odds with her small bird-like frame. She stared down imperious judges and arrogant ministers and supercilious bureaucrats; courage, she showed, has nothing to do with largeness of body and everything to do with largeness of mind. But there wasn’t a mean bone in her body: if she cut a bully to size, she also made those not in authority feel like princes.
Her work was as much about the city’s future as it was about documenting its past. With others, she fought tirelessly to protect the city’s heritage, and it led her to wider concerns about urban planning and architecture. For those who took up planning issues, Sharada was often a refuge, quietly supporting, encouraging, unwavering in her convictions. Shyam Chainani and the Bombay Environmental Action Group counted her among their most committed supporters. One evening, a few weeks after we lost the Mill Lands litigation in the Supreme Court, I dropped in to see her. It was a tough time for all of us, lawyers, NGOs, professionals, who believed that a planned makeover of the Mill Lands area was critical to the city’s survival. In her house, we talked about other things, and she laughed and the smoke-husky effervescence in her voice made things look a little better. A little later, I told her of our sense of dismay and despair. She listened quietly and then said, “you mustn’t let it get to you. These things happen. Come, I want to show you something.” She led me to the little balcony of her fifth-floor flat at Churchgate. It is a small, quirky affair, little more than a perch, but she loved it for all that. “There’s a little nest in that tree there,” she said. “And every now and then it gets knocked down, and those birds, they start all over again. They just keep coming back. That’s all we need to do. Just keep coming back. Because if we stop doing that, we’ll lose the city.” And then she burst out laughing. “You know what they say: guts and glory! Guts and glory!”
Cities are anthologies of stories: Bangalore, with its fabulous parks and the once graceful MG Road area; Pune’s Koregaon Park, East Street and Main Street and camp, Ahmedabad’s links to textile, fabric, architecture and design, Delhi’s overabundance of centuries of history and colliding cultures, Kanpur, Lucknow, Kolkata, Chennai, Pondicherry, Cochin. Few cities, though, are blessed to have a sutradhar to tell those stories; Bombay, Mumbai, Maximum City, City of Gold, was blessed with one. I do not know if we will ever find another.
In a city that every day seems to find new ways of disfiguring itself, mean-spirited uglinesses masquerading as architecture erupting like pustulent sores at every turn, Sharada continued to find areas of grace that we too might find if only we cared to look: late evening on Marine Drive, the park at Charni Road that no one seems to notice but which has truly lovely trees, the stately facades of buildings at Kala Ghoda and Fort and Ballard Estate, the steps and tanks at Banganga, temples, dhobi ghats, parks. Sharada showed us what to look for, how to see it, and why, to ensure our future, we must preserve our past. She was the keeper of the faith, someone who truly believed in her city.
She loved her classics — and, with a surreptitious joy and a self-deprecating laugh, trashy soaps on television. An article here a few weeks ago on Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark delighted her. We met a few days after it appeared, and she launched gleefully into a word-perfect recitation of the poem, segueing a few seconds later into Jabberwocky:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that snatch …
The day after she passed was Dickens’ 200th birthday, something in which, too, she would have revelled, marvelling at all the wonderful commemorative events and happenings around the world to mark that event, and excitedly sharing it with everyone around her. It didn’t really matter if you were interested or not; her many enthusiasms were contagious.
How do you measure a life like this? Awards, money, positions, recognition: they all sound cold and empty, without value in memory. The best-lived lives are those to whom the trappings of success are unimportant, lives that touch others with grace and humour and kindness, lives that earn the goodwill of the rich and the poor alike, the famous as much as the unknown. By that measure, Sharada had wealth beyond counting.
It was the first thing that you noticed in her home. The books. There were books everywhere, on every surface, racked, stacked and piled, novels, histories, coffee table books, old books, new books. Even the furniture seemed to morph itself around books. Here was a sturdy old chair, a shaded lamp just so beside it, which could only be meant for reading. By its side another old piece of furniture, a revolving book stand. It was quiet here, as books demand. The books were visibly well-thumbed but undamaged, like good friends, and the furniture was lovingly restored. Books, as they say, are the spine of a house, and if there was one thing Sharada Dwivedi and the house she and her husband Bhagirath had, it was plenty of spine.
