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Ashvin Rajagopalan of Ashvita Gallery* is a collector – specifically of Madras Memorabilia. He is also a collector of the magpie variety. Nothing is too trivial for him – as long as it represents history, heritage and, most important, lives that have been lived.
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In what might be called his ‘memorabilia room’, where objects, books, thingummies, tumble all over each other in glorious testimony to the owner’s varied interests, before you can even launch into your “pre-interview introductory speech”, he hands you a metal object, and rattles off: “This is an alloy of iron. Really old, and I bought it for Rs. 50.” Thrown a little off-balance, you search for a suitable reply, when he rushes off, saying he wants to fetch an “old album I just found in a house that’s being demolished.” In the second it takes for you to realise that conversation just changed tracks again, your eyes alight upon a Parry’s Sweets tin box, with an image of a girl holding a kitten on it – and suddenly you are back in school.
It’s your birthday, which means it’s your turn to distribute sweets, from a box much like this one, to classmates, and enjoy the sole privilege of wearing a ‘coloured dress’ to school for that one day.
Meanwhile, Ashvin is back with the album.
“I always visit houses that are being demolished,” he tells you. “I walk around from demolition to demolition. Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, there’s a network in place, so I’ll get a call saying: ‘Saar, fan irruku, light irrukku….come take a look.’ They feel there’s ‘a crazy man’ who buys all this stuff,” he grins, “and they let me know.”
Whoever has left the house invariably leaves what is considered rubbish – ‘kuppai’ – behind.
To coin a phrase, one man’s kuppai is another’s treasure.
Ashvin says he picks up calendars, tiles, woodwork, albums, books, and magazines – anything he considers valuable.
‘Houses are gold mines’
Ashvin Rajagopalan is the grand-nephew of Madras’s iconic Dr. E.V. Kalyani. His gallery is housed in her former residence. “I wanted to save the house, to preserve it. We did no remodelling at all. The only way you can save a building is to occupy and use it.”
Why do people allow houses to be pulled down?
“We have no firm heritage laws. There is no sense of heritage and history.” And, you cannot stop private property from being demolished, Ashvin points out.
Often, demolition is done swiftly, “overnight.” Especially if a well-known landmark building is involved. In one case, “…Friday evening they demolished it; the stay order was brought only the following Monday morning. By the time they ‘stopped’, half the building was gone.”
And these houses are gold mines.
“People in the business assess each part, and know what they’ll get out of it.”
Tonnes of girders, or whole rosewood staircases – the ‘finds’ sometimes run into lakhs.
Even lightning rods of old houses, especially those struck by lightning in the past, have been known to fetch one crore. These are believed to have special, alchemic properties, “although I suspect that’s just an urban legend,” says Ashvin. “But you’d be surprised at the number of alternative medicine practitioners who believe firmly in it.”
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You peer at the old album, a record of lives lived decades ago – in 1887, actually – of jewellery worn, and poses struck. This was obviously a rich family.
The women are weighted down with jewellery, glowering at the camera, in the manner of all really old photographs. Apparently, this album was the owner’s attempt at creating a family tree. The writing is in Tamil. You find a photograph of two foreigners, perhaps people he worked with, and are able to decipher the words “Collector of…”
But, for Ashvin, the “lottery” lies in the fact that, nestling within this album, are a first well-preserved daguerreotypes, “the oldest form of photography.” The images are of European women. “I doubt these are people he knew; he must have just bought the photographs as souvenirs,” Ashvin guesses. I, meanwhile speculated on what prompted this person to include these people in his “family tree”. With some regret, I stoically prevent my mind from darting down this rather intriguing, imagination-filled path, and pay attention.
“None of my collections has been researched,” says Ashvin. “I do know some of the historical background of individual pieces, but I haven’t made a study. I hope to someday.”
Now, where did this start?
It’s obviously in his blood. His paternal grandfather, E. V. Rajagopalan, collected stamps with what Ashvin calls ‘frenetic’ passion. His maternal grandfather collected “Everything…If he went to a restaurant, he’d collect the menu. He never threw anything away.”
His parents collected decorative antiques. “The first thing I ever bought at an auction was a bag of coins.” He was ten or eleven at the time. His uncle, Dr. Ravindra Padmanabhan, a successful surgeon, who collected old typewriters, books and cars, introduced him to Murray’s auctions. When Ashvin was in the 12th Standard, or thereabouts, his uncle took him to Moore Market, “and that sealed my Fate”.
Ever since, he’s been there every day. “And ever since, I have been poor.”
Too young to remember the old Moore Market, he says it is still the same in spirit, adding, “There’s always an air of excitement of a discovery around the corner.” And “I am like the ‘patron saint’ of Moore Market,” he laughs. He’s become very close to the dealers there, “they are like friends and family now”. Most important of all, he gets first priority there, and first refusal.
He dates his collections loosely from the British era to present day. “Modern day collectibles,” as he puts it. But he does not deal with the source of any of these pieces; he assumes honesty, and so far has never come across any stolen goods.
His Madras memorabilia “has now become as large as Madras. I have anything that came out of Madras – old, new – even posters of a recent movie, or IPL T-shirts, artefacts, photographs. They will, in time, become history. So, they qualify.
“This is the general philosophy of my collection.” He points out a humble kotankuchi veenai. “Soon they’ll stop making them, and they will become mysteries.”
Cheese graters that probably belonged to an expat family somewhere in the 1930s, Parry’s Acid Jars, a part of colonial history; a collection of English shaving blade sharpeners, curved swoops of green glass (“white is very rare”), whose manufacturer rejoiced under the delightful name of “Lillycrap” – suddenly an image of people who set these little enterprises afloat springs to mind, the processes, decisions, entire life histories here – and yes, you understand the fascination.
In the process, he’s discovered little nuggets of information like: “Did you know that at one time there were residents of Triplicane who were ‘bodyguards of soldier quality’ to the Mysore Maharajah?”
He has a very fragile old 1909 catalogue of Richardson & Cruddas. This used to be sent to top retailers, and you can actually trace the Industrial Revolution in India just by studying the items listed in this catalogue, he exclaims. Governments could ‘order’ an entire railway station, façade included. “If the Madras Municipality wanted 500 pumps on the streets, all they had to do was order from this catalogue.” Boilers, pumps, cranes, lampposts, buckets, weighing scales, watering cans and measuring tapes, even huge cannons, steam engines… (imagine being able to point to a page of steam engine images, and saying: “I’ll take four of those”!).
‘I’ve tried to catalogue the city’s lamp posts,” he says, suddenly.
Why? You ask faintly.
“Chumma. I’m crazy,” comes the quick reply. “I tracked down the British era lamp posts in Madras, and located the last one at the Flower Bazaar Police Station. It’s cast-iron, and that design cannot be replicated simply because it makes no economical sense.”
He is fascinated with the world of coins, and the factual history it represents. “The history told through coins is at times so different from the history we are taught,” he says; they present completely different viewpoints, even on assumed and actual origins of famous rulers. “And the sheer technological precision of these old coins, some of which are hundreds of years old, is fascinating in themselves.”
Time-lines appear to matter. The weeks post-Pongal and Ayudha Puja are always hectic.
Then, after exams, people throw out books, and invariably you find treasures that have been inadvertently chucked out. “First edition of a Wren and Martin that his grandfather gave him, for example.”
River beds and their yield – an amazing tale in itself. “Especially after a flood. This has been going on for hundreds of years.” He gives the example of the Kaveri. Sand-sifters go into action in the summer, when the river is dry, and start digging, soon hitting a clay layer. The first three-four inches of clay is what interests them. “In the midst of all the plastic toys, odd pottery pieces and modern-day rubbish, you also find centuries of history – old Chola jewellery, Pallava coins…. and fresh layers appear every time the water is churned up.”
Sifting is what he does too, …. every day in Moore Market. “Yes, sometimes I get 500 things in a week, sometimes nothing at all.”
He does not get into the antiquity markets. “It’s very expensive, and is a totally different ball-game. I buy stuff that’s openly traded, and for much smaller monies.”
How paying is all this?
Not lucrative whatsoever, because he sells only occasionally, and only if he really has “a lot of the same thing.”
In all of this, Ashvin has been very fortunate in gaining a partner like his wife, Sruti. Their mutual interest in art, galleries and culture-based lectures brought them together. A creative person in her own right, Sruti Harihara Subramanian is a film-maker, and a collector. She also understands that whatever income comes in is “blown on collecting, and that too on stuff I refuse to sell.” But Sruti “is extremely supportive of what I do, and shares the same enthusiasm, even if she’s the more practical one.”
The running of the gallery and the café is his profession. He also manufactures and designs jewellery, but that is not their core business. But collecting is what he does best.
“I collect, not because I have the money; it’s because I feel I have to. If I don’t, who will? At the age of 50, I will stop and build a museum.”
But that, for Ashvin, is still in the future.
*(Ashvita is located at 11, Second Street, Dr. Radhakrishnan Salai, Mylapore, Chennai 600004. The gallery and café are open from 11am -10 pm. Ph: 4210 9990)
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