The canon of Indian abstract art includes the likes of V.S. Gaitonde, S.H. Raza and Ram Kumar, but Mehlli Gobhai's name has, sadly, slipped through the cracks. A new Mumbai retrospective, however, finally gives it its pride and place. Don't Ask Me About Colour will be on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art till April 25 and, according to Ranjit Hoskote (who has curated the show with Nancy Adajania), it is designed "precisely to demonstrate the richness of Mehlli's work, of a compelling and inspired 70-year quest".
Fascinating and unnerving in turn, for Hoskote, Gobhai's abstractions "never gave in to the easy seductions of colour, pattern and references to the landscape". Artist Sheetal Gattani, who often talked shop with Gobhai, says that he persisted for decades to arrive at what she calls "colourlessness". Colour was irrelevant to him, she says. "He didn't want colour to look like colour. A red, for instance, shouldn't be a red that screams out. It must appear as if it's been there forever, as if it's been developed over a period of time."
For a man averse to colour, Gobhai's formative paintings are vibrant. Chemould Prescott Road Gallery's Shireen Gandhy has loaned two works from her holdings to this retrospective. She says that those who know Gobhai only as an abstractionist, will be very surprised: "If his early career was marked by crazy blobs of colour, the mature phase is all about mellow and brooding intensity. It feels like the earlier works are giving the latter ones new meaning."
Endearing and eccentric, Gobhai was the ringleader of a close-knit coterie that included Hoskote, Adajania, the late artist Jehangir Sabavala and writer Jerry Pinto. It was a ritual for this pack to ring in the new year at Gobhai's Charles Correa-designed hideaway in Gholvad, a seaside village near Mumbai. Adajania says the idea for this exhibition was born during one of those New Year vacations some 14 years ago. "He always felt a retrospective should be a posthumous event." Yet, more than an elegy, Don't Ask... is first a celebration.