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<h1 class="centre">The morning of my interview with Radhika Gupta, the daughter of India’s first ever Oscar-winner– costume designer Bhanu Athaiya, my mother is warming up her vocal chords in the next room. I go to investigate what the guttural sounds are all about, and find my mother draped in an orange saree, mic in hand, preparing to karaoke to the track of ‘Aaj Kal Tere Mere Pyaar Ke Charche’ from the 1968 Hindi film, Brahmachari. “It’s for the building’s Bollywood music show, I’m supposed to be Mumtaz from the movie”, she explains. This is justified. The orange and gold stitched saree has cemented its place in history as inseparable from any retro-themed Bollywood parties. It is coincidental, however, that I am to speak with the people archiving the life and legacy of Bhanu Athaiya, the mind behind said orange saree, today. Perhaps it is not so coincidental at all, considering the sheer brilliance of the costume designer whose work has transcended generations, a multifaceted artist who left her mark on the world of art, cinema, and fashion.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">With the second edition of "Prinseps Presents: Bharat Through the Lens of Bhanu Athaiya", to take place from the 6th of December to the 1st of January, 2024 at Aguad, Goa, her contributions as an artist, illustrator, costume designer, and art advertisement conceptualist will be made available to the public once again. With the first edition having taken place in Delhi in January of this year, Brijeshwari Kumari Gohil, the curator, talks about her experience archiving the work of Bhanu Athaiya,“There are so many beautiful, inspirational layers to her as an artist and designer. Having the access and opportunity to study these and bring them to the public realm makes me feel like we are doing justice to her legacy.” The exhibition will display a chronological exploration of her work, educating the discerning art lover about her illustrious career from her days as the only woman artist as part of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) to her work in Indian cinema. “Using different mediums of printing and displaying her sketches or her film stills from the cinema that she's designed for, and using the mannequin, we've tried to mix the mediums that we are displaying. This is to have the audience engage with her creations in a deeper way,” Gohil says about the design of the exhibition.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">In the following conversation with her daughter Radhika Gupta, she tells dirty about the life and work of her mother, anecdotes about Bhanu Athaiya as narrated to her by the actors and directors she worked with, and the pressing need to preserve the artist’s legacy.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: How has the experience been, Radhika, of archiving the work of your mother?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: It has been quite reassuring to find that there is so much interest. Because she has always been a backroom person. She lived in a time when there was virtually no social media, so most people don't know her career graph and her growth. It's just her talent and hard work that took her forward. She didn't have a godfather, she was not from the city of Mumbai, she was from the small town of Kolhapur. And yet she managed to do all she has done, because of her exposure as a young girl and because of her desire to study. She knew the whole of India like the back of her hand. She would always say that my work will speak for itself. That was just her life. She said I don't need to go to parties because my work will do the talking.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">A lot of history about our country, very few people really know it today. You know what you're being told. The response to the Delhi exhibition was phenomenal. We didn't expect that kind of interest from so many people of all ages. So I think that gave us the confidence for Goa, to do it so big, because, as Brijeshwari was saying, encapsulating her body of work in one closed space is very difficult because she did myriad things. It was all artistic and creative, but they were all different areas. And so, cataloguing her work has been very important. After me, there will be nobody else to put it down. So it has to be put down. I don’t just say this because she's my mother, but she's done exceptional work. That kind of drive, that kind of focus, one finds in very few people. And she was not scared to try anything new, whether it was the Marathi stage, Hindi stage, English stage, calendars, or hotel uniforms, she did everything. Whenever she was approached, she just did it. And quite often, especially in the theatre, people couldn't even pay. So she said, fine, not a problem. I mean, someone like Kumar Shahani said, my budget is so low. To that, she said, “OK, I'll make the dresses and give them to you, and then you give them back to me.”</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: How was it growing up with Bhanu Athaiya as your mother? Give us a visual of what your house looked like.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: Our house in Colaba was quite chaotic, actually, because I had both my grandmothers here and I had three aunts here. And on the veranda, the embroidery karigars used to work. We have a little room upstairs where the tailors used to work. And my mother used to work in another room where she used to design. And when, say, Waheeda Ji [Waheeda Rahman] came for a trial, there was no uproar or nothing out of the ordinary. She quietly came up to our place and as you entered the house, before you reached the karigar's workplace, she had a little trial room. Growing up, I'd never had that kind of craze about film stars. They were such normal people to us. And my mother worked continuously. The film industry, as you know, is much more organised today. You get a ready, bound script so it's easier to work. But in those days she would get a phone call at six in the evening saying, “Tomorrow’s shift is at 2 PM, we need these many costumes ready.” If there was no cloth at home, she had to run around figuring it out. She used to work till 3-4 in the morning to get the dresses ready. So it was a situation where she learned how to deal with a totally rushed, and I would say a slightly cloudy area because those days nobody was really definite about the scene or the direction.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">dirty: Do you remember any particularly chaotic time, any film that she was working on day and night?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: Oh, that was Gandhi. She used to wake up at 4 in the morning and by 8-9, she would have tied at least 1500 dhotis and pagdis. She was always so sure about the kind of clothes that various communities wore. She did her research. Say, for instance, the length of the dhoti of a Maharashtrian man would be different, of a Bengali person, the pleats would be different. For a farmer, it would be different. Of a zamindar, it would be different. It came to her automatically. She says she's never worked so hard as she had to for Gandhi because the canvas was also huge. You’re dressing so many actors, and you’re showing a timeline of virtually over 50 years. So it is a huge job.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: Do you still find her notes and sketches and scribbles lying around the house?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: Oh! Lots of them. In fact, just the other day I found a letter from her where she was describing her trip to Russia, and it became like a guided tour for me. There was no WhatsApp in those days, of course, so she used to write letters. When she went to Paris on her scholarship, she used to send letters from there. She'd tell me, “Acha, I have given the tailor this work, and Yash Chopra wants something done quickly. Here's the sketch. Please give it to the tailor and get them to do it.” I was then, I think ten or eleven years old, but I was part of this setup. They'd say “Baby aake baitho” (come sit), “baby beads alag karo” (separate the beads), and I’d sit there happily doing all that with the embroiders.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: There are personal handloom textile pieces that were passed down from her mother and her grandmother as part of the exhibition– handwoven sarees with real gold zari. Are there any pieces from her collection that you wear to this day?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: No, I don't wear anything now. I've handed over everything. I had worn one at my wedding. My mother and my aunts had all worn this from that lot, which will all be on display. But a nine-yard sari, where am I going to wear it? And it deserves its rightful place in a museum because they're fragile and they need to be preserved. I can't do it. But the fact that they have lasted till now, I thank the good lord for it.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">dirty: What was your familial life like, in the house in Colaba?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: My mother had six sisters, and she brought four of them to Bombay. Her mother, after her father's demise, was going through financially stringent times. So she brought them here, she educated them, and they stayed in our house. I stayed with them when my mother was away on shoots. The only difference was that my father would walk me to school. And that's why I'm extremely close to my aunts, and three of my aunts never married. I've done everything for them. When two of them were sick, I was looking after them. So it was a big family. Lots of people in the house. As far as I was concerned, Yasin Bhai and Abbas Bhai, the embroiderer and the tailor are all part of the family.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: What is a piece created by Bhanu Athaiya that you hold closest to your heart?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: Well, I think the piece I hold closest is her painting of the ‘Lady in Repose.’ I love that. I love the colours. I love the shading. I love the look of a jaali (screen), covering her. She is lying in bed, nude, but she doesn't look exposed. It’s beautifully done. The shade and light effect is tremendous. And of course, if you see her sketches of the costume, the detailing in them is so fantastic. It's like a miniature painting. The embroidery details, the jewellery details, all that was there. Literally, you can compare it to the whole ‘farm to table’ thing. It's like ‘sketch to costume.’ Because she knew what she wanted to do. She made her sketch and that was reproduced exactly.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: Do you remember any anecdotes about her from the people she worked with?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: When she first went to meet Raj Kapoor Ji for Shree 420, he explained all the situations in the film that involved Nargis Ji. He told her, “This is the storyline, and this is the music that's going to be there. I'll just go in and arrange for some tea if you can think of some ideas.” By the time he had come back, she had made six sketches. He was so taken aback, and so taken up, that he approved of them on the spot. She immediately understood what the director wanted. Back then, it was just between the director and the costume designer. It was only later that, say, when she did costumes for Waheeda Ji, she did so many films, that they had established a relationship. So Waheeda Ji would always tell my mother "For my personal wear, why don't you give me a stitched saree, it makes it so much easier. I don't have to drape it." There are so many little, little things. Rekhaji says that her knowledge about Indian textiles, and embroideries all came from my mother. She said I was like a student with her. And that’s for somebody like Rekha, who is such an amazing dresser, she's a diva.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Everybody that I've spoken to, whether it was Waheeda ji, Tanujaji, or Rekhaji, they have all said that we knew we were being taken care of by her. She would ensure that we are projected well and that we don't become a kind of object of the male gaze, despite whatever costumes we are wearing. Somebody like Zeenatji in Satyam Shivam Sundaram wearing the white saree, my mother said she was the only one who could carry off a costume like that without making it look obscene. Or, for instance, the first stitched sari, for Waheeda ji in Guide, when she’s singing ‘Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai’, was stitched so that she could sing and move with abandon without worrying about the pallu falling. So that much thought has gone behind all this.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">dirty: What are some memories that you have of her?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: Well, she was a very gentle person, a very soft-spoken person. But she used to get very exasperated with me because I never liked the way she tied my hair when I was still going to school. So there are lots of stories she used to tell me about my childhood. She was an excellent cook, but surprisingly, she was never interested in food. If you gave her half a litre of milk all day in coffee or just plain milk or dahi, and if you gave her khichdi, she would be quite happy. When she went to the Oscars, I had to send some of my sarees and jewellery from Calcutta because she said, "I don't have anything to wear." And the saree that she wore, she had it embroidered literally overnight at her place! I still have a little piece from it.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">dirty: What do you hope for people to take away from the exhibition?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Radhika: Being a creative person, she was not administratively strong, so she wasn't even thinking of how she would preserve her things and where she would give them. We went to so many museums. We sent mail to Delhi. We did all that. People weren't interested. I mean, there was one museum where the gentleman in fact, somebody in the ministry said “Send everything you have, we’ll keep it, and we’ll see what we can do with it” And that's when it sort of entered my head that I've got to do something because this is an amazing trunk of work of hers, which has to be preserved. It's fine to say, oh, she was born with that talent. But taking that talent so far, while always believing herself to be a student, is something. And if she didn't know something, she'd tell the director that I need to go there and see how it's done. I think people should know all of this. I think we don’t value our traditions, our culture, maybe because we have too much of it around. But look at how they preserve stuff abroad. Look at the museums in America. I won't talk about the museums in Britain. Let's not go there. But it’s what made me realise the need to preserve her legacy, for young creative people to see her work, and absorb it. The end result is that the work should be accessible to everybody. She becomes like an encyclopaedia, a reference point.</h1>

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