Saryu Doshi - high priestess of the art world

Waking up with

Each week, Malavika Sangghvi gives the lowdown and high points of Sunday

For over the years at this internationally renowned art authority’s home, Jackie Kennedy has dined, Rudolf Nuruyev, Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan have shined and a host of India’s most brilliant artists playwrights and film makers have argued about art aesthetics and ideology till the cows have come home.

Married early in to one of corporate India’s wealthiest families in the fifties, Saryu was not going to let her brilliant academic career first at Queen Mary, (which also bequeathed Mumbai with a host of dazzling women, such as Nargis, Shobhaa De, Sunita Pit amber and Shabana Azmi), then at Elphinstone and the JJ school of Arts be subverted under her responsibilities as bahu of a traditional business family.

"Even when we spent our initial years in Satara - I would travel once a month to Mumbai, visit the libraries and bookshops and take back with me a tome of books to study. That’s when I met luminaries in the art world like Dr Moti Chandra, Karl Khandalawala and Mulk Raj Anand."
 
The effect of this high-born beautiful wife of a top industrialist on the world of arts must have been immense, but you never hear Saryu talking about it.

Hers is basically an academic-educated approach to things, so if one does not prod her for details one will never know that she is a Padma Shri, has won the Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship in 1972, has been a visiting professor at Berkeley and Michigan and is a PHD in Miniature painting and Jain Art!

Neither will you learn, unless you question her diligently that she has edited a host of scholarly books on art and photography is on the board of the world’s greatest museums, curated exhibitions for the Festivals of India, and was editor of Marg that unparalleled paen to the arts for five years.

But some say Saryu’s finest hour was when, for nine years, she steered NGMA Mumbai to its present glory, bringing in the likes of the Picasso exhibition, Beyond Borders, the art of Pakistan, to India and making the gallery a vibrant meeting place where Amitabh Bachchan read his father’s poetry and Shubha Mudgal sang!

So how else would this erudite gracious lady spend her Sundays but imbued with scholarship and reading?

"I wake early and spend breakfast with my grandchild Saheer where we create stories together," says Saryu "lunch is always a ritual with us hosting a few friends, and where Vinod (her doting husband - himself a fine actor, photographer and cinema buff) makes his famous Margaritas. In the afternoon I like nothing better than to settle down with a good art book-or visit galleries."
 
Currently busy with setting up a museum in Goa, cataloguing exhibitions and writing for erudite journals across the world, Saryu, who has been a force in the art world since the sixties, cannot be happier that art consciousness has finally entered the Indian psyche.
"Yes," she says "some people are buying for the wrong reasons,but even so - just the exposure to art - the process of seeing it and experiencing it will go a long way in making art lovers out of ordinary people."