An exhibition was held in the foyer of the Little Theatre at the NCPA on the 23rd and 24th of April this year on the occasion of World Book Day. I walked in on the 24th and was bedazzled by the displayed collection of the NCPA library—books, photographs, play scripts and more. Sujata Jadhav, Head of library and documentation centre, showed me around. 

Being a poet and author, I was attracted to the book section at first. More than 50 rare books were on display, and this was only a minuscule segment of the huge collection of 25,000 books in the library. My eyes fell on Kaifi Azmi’s Kaifiyat: Verses on Love and Women; Satyajit Ray’s own translation of his Feluda series; The Folklore of Bombay, first published in 1924 by R. E. Enthoven; and a translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Streer Patra into English by Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay.

An elongated table on one side had displayed original handwritten drama manuscripts by personalities like Vijay Tendulkar, Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar and Shanta Gokhale. There were 16 such precious manuscripts. 

Besides the books, there were photographs of iconic people and memorable performances at the NCPA. Some photographs showed the founders of the NCPA, Dr. Jamshed Bhabha and JRD Tata, with illustrious people like Indira Gandhi. Visits of dignitaries like (then) Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher have been documented in photographs too as is the essence and energy of performances of great artistes like M. S. Subbulakshmi, Balasaraswati and the famous mother-daughter dancer duo Mrinalini and Mallika Sarabhai. The famous Rodin exhibition, which was held at the NCPA in 1983, and the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, held at the 1986, were also documented. The library is a repository of about 200,000 such photographs starting from 1969, when the NCPA was inaugurated. Here, I met Hilda Darukhanawalla, who has been working with the NCPA for 52 years. A conversation with her was a slice of oral history where she remembered the initial years when the NCPA started out of a building at Breach Candy.

Then I moved on to a display of the stamp collection. A series of postage stamps was commissioned by the NCPA to commemorate illustrious figures in the realms of music, art and science. It was lovely to see the white first-day covers with the golden Indian emblem protecting the stamps. There were stamps of Franz Schubert, the Austrian composer; Max Müller, the British philologist and Orientalist; Salim Ali, the Indian ornithologist and naturalist; George Frideric Handel, the German-British composer. The scientist in me wanted to see the stamp of Charles Darwin, which was issued to honour his legacy in evolutionary biology, but which could not be displayed. Such a rare collection is any philatelist’s dream. Dr. Bhabha had worked very hard to commission these stamps. He not only proposed but also designed some stamps, like the one of Beethoven.

As LP records played on a turntable, they added another dimension to the peaceful, calming atmosphere of the exhibition, bringing back memories of my childhood. From about a hundred records that were a part of the exhibition, my favourites were those of The Beatles and Louis Armstrong. There was also Lata Mangeshkar’s recital of the Bhagavad Gita and many other records of classical singers.

In all, this was a fulfilling experience for people who love history, music and the arts. The collection of the NCPA holds a special place in India’s contemporary history and remains a source of inspiration for generations of the future

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Dr. Paramita Mukherjee Mullick is a writer, poet, scientist and educator.