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Sometimes the standard city souvenirs just won’t do
THERE WAS A time when the Bollywood movie posters that add splashes of colour to the Delhi landscape were all hand-painted labours of love, but progress means it is now cheaper and quicker to employ digital printing. And all those old poster painters? They’ve faded away like a movie end credit.
Except for one, at least. When I heard that Vijay Kumar Sangwan, said to be one of the most prolific poster artists in his day, was still ekeing out a living near Old Delhi, I was inspired. I would resurrect his dying art to create the perfect keepsake of myself and my wife Jenny’s 18 months in India’s capital.
After a few wrong turns in Darya Ganj, the striking art deco neighbour-hood near the Red Fort but well off the tourist trail, we found Vijay.
He didn’t speak much English, so he recruited the help of Manesh, an English-speaking twentysomething with a flashy mobile phone who managed the local cycle-rickshaw syndicate. Together we walked up a dirt road by a centuries-old mosque to Vijay’s open-air studio.
Fading painted starlets gave us sultry glances from the dusty wooden walls as we explained to Vijay exactly what we wanted. We showed him examples of some 1970s-style posters we liked and talked colour schemes, poses and composition.
We’d intended to commission a small work, perhaps the size of an unfolded magazine, but Vijay insisted that his work could be no less than five feet tall. The price was the same, so we agreed to indulge his artistic sensibilities. We celebrated our agreement with Pepsi.
Finally, two weeks after we had commissioned the work, Jenny and I returned to Darya Ganj to behold our first starring role, captured in perfect retro Bollywood style on a poster that had now grown to six feet in size.
It now hangs proudly in our Singapore flat. When visitors to the apartment ask, we tell them that it’s actually a documentary of our life in Delhi: our spontaneous dance scenes in the city’s grand ballrooms, the time we worked as special investigators in the local police force, that awful day when those precious diamonds turned Jenny and I against each other, and the climactic autorickshaw chase and gun battle that followed.
And our parents thought we were working office jobs.
WORDS Dave Prager
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