It was the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto who provided the fateful introduction between myself and the art of Indian miniature painting, and thus to India and even my entire life to come. The first film I ever made, in 1956, was a documentary about Venice and the many artists who had painted her. In the course of making this film, I came to admire Canaletto's etchings of the city. Hoping to find one, I went to see a print dealer in San Francisco named Raymond Lewis. I had not been told that he also dealt in Indian miniature paintings.
On the day we met, Lewis had been showing his stock of Indian pictures to a buyer; they were still spread around his gallery when I came in. Years later, when I thought back on that afternoon, I would wonder: what if I had turned up slightly later and he had time to put his pictures away? Had I even passed the unknown buyer on the stairs as I went up? Everyone's life history is made up of such possibilities, for better or worse. Love, murder, passions, like collecting, start in this way.
I had never seen an Indian miniature painting before. I knew very little about India apart from the intoxicating memory of the country I had taken away after seeing Jean Renoir's film The River two or three years before. Some of the radiant scenes from the world created by Renoir, starting with a jewel-like dancing Krishna and Radha, now seemed to be lying in front of me in Lewis's show-room, and could be picked up and held in my hand.
As I moved from picture to picture, taken from a manuscript painted in 18th-century Delhi called Ragamala, I forgot that other 18th-century world of Canaletto and entered the one of Indian miniature painting. What were the stories these little scenes were telling? There were many moods, some inexplicable: a dark-skinned, half-dressed woman wearing a skirt of leaves sitting under a tree in communion with some friendly snakes; an embracing couple sitting in a swing in a downpour; a man with a donkey's head like Shakespeare's Bottom listening attentively to someone sitting above him on a throne. On the spot, possibly rashly, I decided to make a film about this new world I had come across so unexpectedly. Also, on the spot, I bought two of the pages from Ragamala, and so this collection began.
For someone like myself, both as a film-maker and as a collector, only the vivid image counted. It seemed enough, and mystery may have enhanced it (as did just plain exoticism), for I lacked any real knowledge of Indian religions, of Indian literature and languages, of history. I was very lucky to meet [the art scholar] Stuart Cary Welch in India at the beginning of my collecting days there. He helped me to widen my appreciation of pictures worth having. Without him, my first Indian-bought acquisitions would have lacked breadth. For him, too, it was always the image itself that shone through. I even felt that it bored him to have to talk in an academic way about all the myriad contexts, divine and secular, to be found in Indian painting.
I sometimes would ask him for a bit of arcane enlightenment about what he thought might actually be going on in a picture of his, and he would brush my questions aside and hold forth on its dynamic composition. Or he might instead make up some fantastic and irreverent story, or scenario, assigning new names and personalities to the gods and goddesses depicted.
How, then, could this inexperienced young film director imagine he was qualified to make a film about such a subject as Indian miniature painting, with its teeming surface worlds of naturalistic observation, themselves holding further hidden worlds of poetry and sophisticated religious (and often disguised sexual) iconography? I don't know where I found the nerve to proceed, but I did.
I have always enjoyed looking at pictures, and my many hours and days spent poring over these enhanced my enjoyment of them – and with that, maybe even imperceptibly, my intelligence both about filming and collecting. The pictures' images excited me as a film-maker and held up under the closest examination: a very finely painted face no bigger than my thumbnail, when magnified by my camera lens and projected on a screen, became a powerful and riveting icon full of drama, mystery, religious devotion, sensuality. To these could be added newly discovered Indian classical music – more worlds within worlds, which also, like Indian painting itself, was just beginning to come into its own in the west.
So, fortuitously for me and my film, there was now a new audience of art and music lovers who had become as enthusiastic about India as I was. My 22-minute film, which I called The Sword and the Flute, turned out to be a romantic film about India made by someone who had never been to India, but who already had very romantic feelings about everything Indian. Written by me and shot by another student at the University of Southern California film school, Mindaugis Bagdon, in time it would help propel me into my new life of making films in India, and naturally, collecting pictures there.
Jewel-encrusted fly whisks
In October 1959, I could scarcely wait to get off the plane that had brought me to New Delhi so that I could go to the Indian Arts Palace in Connaught Place and begin buying miniature paintings. This was the premier destination for collectors and had been long before modern international travel – since the Raj, probably. Shops like this sold silks, jewellery, antiques, souvenir trinkets of the more expensive kind, such as gilded, jewel-encrusted fly whisks, pornographic scenes painted on ivory, and evening bags.
These Indian art dealers naturally knew a lot more about what they were selling than western dealers. They could read the inscriptions and texts on the front and back of pictures, were familiar with the iconography, and knew in which courts their pictures had originated, having bought them wholesale and even unseen in large tied-up red bundles from a palace retainer, who had brought them on a bus from Rajasthan.
Some lots arrived dumped into a suitcase, which might also contain the retainer's lunch of rotis. You went through these bundles and suitcases in the windowless recesses of the gallery, under a ceiling fan, often seated on a sheet spread over the carpet, with a Coke in your hand. Pictures of no quality whatsoever emerged back to back with extraordinary ones, jumbled up with drawings big and small, which had sometimes been used for lists or calculations, or to write down a recipe.
As I became better acquainted with the gallery owners and developed an understanding with them, I came to be looked on as someone serious. I might be told of certain "precious" things that had been saved for me, things that had not been seen by anyone else. These were kept in locked metal office cabinets and were brought out and shown to me rather ceremoniously, one by one, during which time I tried not to look too interested when I saw something that for me, too, fell into the "precious" category (such as the beautiful 1820 watercolour I bought depicting the confusion of Krishna).
Did I develop any ruses of my own in order to buy what I wanted at a reasonable price? In time, of course, anyone who has ever done real business in an oriental bazaar will learn the tricks and feints of buying and bargaining there. In India, I tried never to show enthusiasm for the things I wanted most, but instead to focus it falsely on something showy, ask the price of that and then make a disappointed face when told. Casually, with something of a deprecatory gesture, indicating the piece I secretly liked, I would ask: "What about that?" This always worked, I prided myself in thinking, but I have no doubt my regular dealers soon figured out the inscrutable American act and had a good laugh, having dealt me their best things with predetermined savvy prices.
I learned, too, that most dealers had their "problem" pictures. These were paintings with off-putting or even monstrous subject matter that sometimes were superbly painted, but had no chance with squeamish western customers when compared with a vapid chocolate-box picture of lovers in a garden. Pictures like that might go for five times the price of a truly delectable monster of fantastic quality.
Hullabaloo with Peggy Ashcroft
Some of the dealers in those days – Essaji in Bombay, Nowlakha in Calcutta, Bharani in New Delhi, and especially the elder Vijaivargia in Jaipur – were masterful in manipulating their foreign buyers' hopes and fears, their jealousies, their insecurities. So much so that I was inspired to make another film about Indian miniature paintings called Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures, with Peggy Ashcroft and Saeed Jaffrey (who had narrated The Sword and the Flute 10 years earlier), and a funny screenplay written by Ruth Jhabvala.
By that time (1977), however, the great days of collecting in India were all over. The action had moved on to London, to dealers like Spink and Hartnoll and Eyre, and to New York, where the Doris Weiner Gallery was now weirdly buying up the choice pictures of the first generation of collectors from the 1950s, as they died or divorced or lost interest in collecting. It was fun for me to track the careers of some of these pictures: from their own red-bundle days to London, then to East 57th Street in New York, onwards to Christie's and Sotheby's, and next – I have only heard of their homeward journeys – back to India and into the new collections being formed by Indian millionaires.
