A cap, a shirt, a swing and history calling
- Meher Marfatia
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Bombay film, theatre and legal luminaries share fascinating stories behind bequeathed treasures they hold dear
Everyone hugs close a cherished heirloom. Mattering far more than the finest family jewels, some everyday objects keep glowing with unmatched worth and value.
A table, a swing, a book, a shirt, reading glasses, even just a well-worn cap... Proud legacies all, these gems are attached with a silken significance handed down over generations.
Tale of the Topiwala
On a wall behind filmmaker Vikas Desai’s desk in Rajkamal Studio hangs the simple cloth topi of his great-grandfather Anant Shivaji Desai. It has earned his scions the sobriquet of Topiwala – his descendants went on to establish Topiwala Medical College at Bombay Central and Topiwala Theatre in Goregaon.
Bringing this cap to his Worli home especially for our evening interview, Vikas describes the compelling circumstances that led to “Topiwala” appended to the Desai surname (watch the video).
Eight-year-old Anant Shivaji Desai’s business acumen budded in a humble, tiny chana-kurmuri counter where he helped his father in Walawal village in the former princely Konkan state of Sawantwadi. On his father’s death, the boy was forced to leave for Bombay to seek work. A relative pressed a rupee coin into his hand, eight annas of which was ticket money for the 13-day boat trip. Two months later, on finishing the chinchuke (tamarind seeds) and rice his mother had packed, he fainted of hunger at Grant Road station.
Employed as a labourer at the station, he learnt tailoring in a mill during his lunch break. Those sewing skills soon won him a series of orders. By 1872, caps he specialised in stitching beat competitors with their superior style. Bombay’s elite clientele of Parsis, Muslims and Gujarati sethias paid handsomely for the quality caps fashioned by the city’s best hat maker. The British conferred Anant Shivaji Desai with the title Rao Bahadur Topiwala.
The topi appears almost to crown his great-grandson, blessing him from four feet above his studio desk. Vikas has never worn it, out of respect. The last Desai to do so was his son Hith, as a little boy tearing around to play “Topiwala-Topiwala”.
Rock Machine to Indus Creed
From the 1800s to 1980… Visiting my friends Sunila and Bobby Duggal in Goa, I heard an engrossing chapter in the history of the rock band familiar to those of a certain vintage. Bobby pulled out a shirt from his cupboard, worn by the band he was the drummer for.
This was designed with great thought when Rock Machine changed its name to Indus Creed in 1993. Speaking of the reason for the new name (watch the video),
Bobby leaves it to the group’s English manager, Russell Mason, to explain more – “The tee shirt was designed by Ian Lichfield in my Dubai office, from a sketch I scratched on a piece of paper. He came up with the font which we liked and used on all reference to Indus Creed, still in the early days of being renamed and rebranded from Rock Machine. I look back fondly at my time managing Indus Creed, though they told me I was chosen because I was the only white man they knew at the time and wanted to go international. The three-and-a-half years managing them were the best and the most enjoyable $50,000 I lost!”
A table to treasure
Stage doyenne Vijaya Mehta, who started the dynamic Rangayan movement in the 1950s, has always expressed gratitude for the Bhulabhai Desai Institute and to Soli Batliwala who helmed that creative nest on Warden Road. “When the institute giving us so much freedom and joy could no longer survive, Solibhai gifted me three pieces from his office. One was this desk that was Bhulabhai’s very own. My husband Farrokh fell in love with it and it has been part of our lives ever since.”
Mehta’s actress daughter Anahita Uberoi reveals the two-sided desk meant both her actor parents worked on it simultaneously. Its structure forms a kind of tunnel going through the desk, which her daughters Anisa and Aliya used as a playhouse, taking their dolls in there.
Uberoi says, “Mum being a person who did her thinking while everyone was asleep, often woke in the middle of the night and put on the desk lamp to write her notes for the next day’s play rehearsal or movie shoot. As a child sleeping alone, I’d see that light coming under the bottom of my shut bedroom door and feel very comforted. She was a cool parent. As a teenager I never had a deadline to come home. When I returned at 4 or 5 in the morning, she stayed engrossed in her work. Other friends were always a bit scared tiptoeing home, but I’d laugh, knowing there was this big chance my mother was anyway there.”
Prize from a patriot
Another desk with a meaningful association is advertising legend and theatre personality Gerson da Cunha’s black, carved wooden writing table. It belonged to his grandfather, Antonio Maria da Cunha, the founder-editor of Goa’s oldest daily, Heraldo. In 1920, that spirited newsman wrote an outspoken editorial at this desk.
“Those were the days when the administration censored any advocacy of greater independence for Goa from Portugal. He did exactly that,” said his grandson. The bold stance cost him a stint in Aguada jail.
“It’s a massive desk, so I don’t sit at it. But Gerson was a large person and it suited him rather well,” says his wife Uma da Cunha.
Gerson’s other prized possession has been an inscribed first edition of the seminal work, The Origin of Bombay, by the grand-uncle and renowned historian Jose Gerson da Cunha, after whom he was named.
A swinging legacy
The iconic horseshoe dining table and rocking chair on which Kulsumbai Padamsee used to savour her paan continue to grace the Padamsee ancestral Colaba home where her grand-daughter Raell (the daughter of Kulsumbai’s son Alyque) lives. Less known, though, is Alyque’s father Jafferbhai’s jhoola, the focal point of the thespian’s living room in his former Breach Candy home. Over a century old, the magnificent traditional jhoola from Kathiawad was a wedding gift to Alyque’s parents. In an interview with me some years ago, he said, “I distinctly remember my father swing all day on this jhoola, smoking and contemplating the universe. My brothers and I would crowd on its arms, huddled together. Craning over, we asked him to draw pictures for us.”
Special specs
From jhoola to jhopala, the Marathi word for “swing”. Solicitor Rajan Jayakar speaks of the great fun he and the other grandchildren of their maternal grandfather Balaram Narayan Ajinkya had, swinging on the zhopala in the living room of their Queens Road home. An officer in Banque Nationale de Paris (French Bank), Ajinkya moved with his wife to this flat around 1910, pursuant to the plague epidemic in 1896. “My mother was born in 1908 at Bhagwantrao’s Relief Camp based in the Chowpatty sands,” Jayakar says.
Ajinkya had a small library with important books, including one of the first editions of an eight-volume set of the Mahabharat, printed by the Chiplunkar Brothers. It is a treasure his grandson still possesses. “After his demise in 1961, I requested my grandmother to hand over to me his old spectacles in a damaged box,” recollects Jayakar.
“When I first participated in the period costume section of the vintage car rally, I wore his black, long dagla (coat) and pagdi (headgear), with those gold-framed glasses. To my surprise, they matched my vision well, causing me no headache or discomfort. I could read properly with them. I wear his dagla, pagdi and glasses whenever I depict a Pathare Prabhu from the 19th century. I also have his barabundi, a typical Pathare Prabhu sadra tied with knots instead of buttons, with a pocket in the centre for a handkerchief, mainly to clean the nose after a pinch of snuff. I have his silver snuff box too.”
Bible of humanism
Another unusual inheritance passed on to an appreciative son, Tom Alter’s father’s well-thumbed Urdu Bible occupied pride of place in the actor’s Bombay Central apartment. On a wintry morning of 2006, he brewed me and Time Out magazine photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri fragrant herbal tea, before enthralling us with lyrical couplets from Ghazal-ul-Ghazalat (the Song of Songs).
The son of American Presbyterian missionary parents spoke of his grandfather Emmett reaching Rawalpindi in 1916 – “My father James received this cherished Bible on being
ordained into the United Church of North India, at Jamuna Church in Allahabad. My earliest impression as a 4-year-old, was of it lying on his bedside table and especially loving the Christmas story. My passion for the Urdu language came from here. After 1947 the country was faithful to Hindustani, in which morning devotions were read at our ashram. Our hearts remained in the Urdu version.”
His handsome face wreathed in smiles, Tom recited: “Yehi hai ibaadat, yehi deen o imaan/ki kaam aaye duniya mein insaan ke insaan – This is prayer, this is religion, this is truth/that in this world man lives to help man.”
© Meher Marfatia
Multimedia production & digital marketing: Danesh Mistry
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