BackPerformance anxiety
With the NCPA struggling for funds to upgrade and expand, what does the future hold for the cultural centre?
Premium
Next week, the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) will celebrate the birth centenary of its founder, Jamshed Jehangir Bhabha.
The institution itself has spent almost 40 of its 45 years at its current location on NCPA Marg at Nariman Point, a busy southern tip of the island city next to the financial district. Bhabha’s protégé and current NCPA chairman Khushroo N. Suntook, who took over after Bhabha’s death in 2007, says: “Bhabha built something that was much larger than what it could absorb at that time. It was a futuristic vision."
The airy and spacious campus by the Arabian Sea on Marine Drive has quiet, wood-lined corridors. Theatres, offices, conservatories and galleries punctuate the corridors. Its interiors are inaccessible, like any temple of high culture. Its programming list every month includes the biggest names in Indian classical music, contemporary and classical dance, theatre and visual arts. It hosts around 650 performances a year.
On 21 August, an all-day celebration curated by former executive director of programming Vijaya Mehta will mark the visionary’s birth centenary—dancer Aditi Mangaldas, actors Shabana Azmi and Rajat Kapoor, musicians Rakesh Chaurasia and Jayateerth Mevundi, and Shiamak Davar's pop-dance troupe will perform. High art will meet pop art, just as the institute might want its agenda to be for the future to stay relevant and lucrative.
Financially, the NCPA is in a limbo. Bhabha willed his estate in Malabar Hill, also once the home of his brother and illustrious nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha, to the NCPA, and in June, it auctioned the estate for ₹ 372 crore. The money, meant for the refurbishing and expansion of its infrastructure and programming, is however still not theirs.
Suntook says: “We are still in court. Under Section 36 of the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950, you have got to get the charity commissioner’s permission. He has yet to approve the sale, and honestly we don’t know when it will come. Besides that, two employees of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) union have filed a PIL (public interest litigation) to preserve the estate. The fresh hearing is at the end of September."
Barc employees as well as celebrated scientist C.N.R. Rao have requested the Union government to convert the estate into a museum.
The NCPA has been struggling for funds for around seven years—it’s dependent on patron donations and memberships, small grants from the Union ministry of culture and the money gained from auctioning Bhabha’s moveable assets in 2007 and 2012.
Recently, it started a special annual membership of ₹ 15,000, more like a donation, and double its regular annual membership fee. “We have patrons who pay up to ₹ 1 lakh too, just as a gesture of giving for art," Suntook says.
Through it all, the NCPA’s reputation as an elite cultural hub promoting the pure forms of theatre, music, dance and visual arts has remained intact—it has the only auditorium in India that can host a symphony orchestra, the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre inaugurated in 1999.
Violin virtuoso Zubin Mehta and author Vikram Seth have reiterated the importance of the NCPA’s own symphony orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), which Suntook founded in 2006 when he was vice-chairman. The NCPA is the lodestar of Western classical music in the country. Its reach and core membership is still the discerning cultural mavens of south Mumbai.
So where does the NCPA go from here? Can it become an inclusive cultural centre while retaining its purist bias?
Suntook has a threefold plan on paper: to hire, on a long-term lease, an auditorium in another part of the city; to build a mid-sized, 600-seat theatre (the largest Jamshed Bhabha Theatre has a capacity of 1,109 and the smallest and oldest, the Little Theatre, accommodates 114); and to create a corpus of ₹ 150 crore.
“We are already in talks with our architects about the possibility of demolishing the Little Theatre and the office block, and building a block that can house three theatres in the same building, plus some rooms for offices and residences of teachers," says Suntook. He says he wants to upgrade the audio and video equipment and invite consultants and programmers from India and other countries to work and perform at the NCPA.
The NCPA is taking small steps to look outward. Recently, an SOI team performed at a suburban mall. It has music educational initiatives in schools such as the Bai Avabai Framji Petit Girls High School in Bandra West. Open spaces within the NCPA premises are thrown open for summer festivals for children and the city’s performers. Bollywood has sneaked into its programming, alongside broadcasts of celebrated operas and classical music concerts from Europe.
In 2015, says Suntook, tabla player Zakir Hussain will perform with the SOI, and Hindi cinema composer Pyarelal’s (of the Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo) string quartet will be showcased soon.
This is a time of crisis for classical arts all over the world. Curators and connoisseurs are more concerned with preservation and archiving, using the latest digital wherewithal, than with promoting pure forms and their practitioners.
In the UK, for instance, government funding of cultural institutions first decreased dramatically more than two decades ago, during Margaret Thatcher’s era, and has remained on the lower side since.
The NCPA has a large, enviable archive of Western classical music and opera, which needs digitizing. The Stuart-Liff Collection in its library and its music archive has loyal members, but not enough resources for the upgrade. “We tied up with Sony Music thinking that they would do a vast job (bringing out CDs). They are going slow. Sales of classical music are absolutely slow everywhere," Suntook says.
The NCPA may never lose its loyal patrons or members. But to be the kind of cultural centre that is a part of a city’s attractions, it perhaps needs more than money. As Suntook says, “The problem is not purism, but more the fact that we don’t have a trumpeter."
The birth centenary celebration of Jamshed Jehangir Bhabha on 21 August at the NCPA is an invitation-only event. For details, visitwww.ncpamumbai.com
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
