An exhibition of Adil Jussawalla’s multilayered oeuvre swings between precision and spontaneity

Adil Jussawalla is primarily known as one of India’s preeminent English-language poets. But few realise that there is much more to his work. Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla weaves together his photography, poetry, prose, sketches and scrapbooks to chart a cartography of an artist whose work navigates the interstices of personal history and urban modernity.

The exhibition, curated by Deeptha Achar and Chithra KS at The Guild Art Gallery in Alibaug, near Mumbai, emerges as an intellectually exhilarating exploration of Jussawalla’s multilayered oeuvre.

The title, Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope, is a poetic invocation that captures the serendipitous discovery of meaning in the ephemeral – a hallmark of Jussawalla’s aesthetic. Rather than presenting a sanitised or monumentalised narrative, the curators embrace the provisional, fragmented nature of the archive, displaying materials such as dog-eared sketchbook pages, handwritten manuscripts and faded photographs.

The curatorial vision ingeniously avoids linear biography, organising the exhibition into thematic constellations such as “Sinhagad,” “Ships,” “Family,” “Bombay” and “Life and Books”. Jussawalla’s photography, reproduced as archival digital prints on Ilford Smooth Gloss paper, forms the exhibition’s core, spanning the 1950s to 1990s.

It includes images like “Kalyan Gate Entrance”, “Sinhagad, 1953” and “Worker, Mumbai, 1999”. The curators pair these with texts, creating synesthetic dialogues. For...

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