TAKING YOU BACK IN TIME
BENGALURU’S HMT MUSEUM IS TESTAMENT TO A WATCH THAT MADE INDIA TICK
Nostalgia yearns for the impossible—it hopes to turn back time. Watches, with their forward march, are more practical. A nostalgia for watches then defies logic. Looking at the 2,216 watches on display at the HMT Heritage Centre and Museum in Bengaluru, it’s hard to escape that irony. When, in 2016, a cabinet committee decided that HMT would close down soon, the headlines wrote themselves— ‘Time runs out for HMT’—but this recently opened museum is perhaps testament to the fact that the HMT watch is now certifiably a little timeless.
Set up in 1961, in collaboration with Japan’s Citizen Watch Company, the HMT manufacturing unit in Bengaluru was a small step for Indian industry, but a giant leap for its self-belief. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru perhaps knew this. He christened its first indigenous collection of watches, Janata. Presumably, Indians then didn’t feel slighted to be consigned to a collective. They would line up for hours to buy the few dozen watches carefully rationed out.
If the queues at the museum’s shop are anything to go by, the Janata watches—now being sold at Rs 3,000 instead of their initial Rs 110 price— still have life left in them. The kind of nationalism that had once made popular advertising slogans such as “desh ki dhadkan” and “timekeepers to the nation” has perhaps now given way to the collector’s “retro-cool” sentiment, but the design of some wristwatches (HMT Pilot, especially) stands the test of time.
Some of the watches on display at the museum are admittedly artefacts. Introduced in the 1970s, the Nurse Watch, for instance, had to be pinned upside down on the nurse’s uniform so she could read the time conveniently. There’s a collection of watches in Braille, also launched in the 1970s, which even came with a Braille instruction manual. The Moon Face, from the 1990s, showed
you the current phase of the moon. HMT seemed to have a watch for everything.
The ‘Utsav’ line of watches came with glittering bracelets and bangles instead of a strap. Then there was ‘Sangam’—unisex watches from the late 1990s. ‘Chandana’ came in a wooden box with a bottle of sandalwood oil and the ‘Gold Biscuit Watch’ with a gram of gold in the centre of the dial. The ‘Ana-Digi’ told the time in both analogue and digital formats and there were also the coveted pocket watches within gold cases with a chain to be tucked away in shirt or trouser pockets. “Since the museum opened this year, almost everybody has asked if the pocket watch is still available for sale,” says Murlidhara.
An HMT employee for 32 years, Murlidhara has observed that even though Indians were happy being part of a ‘Janata’, HMT’s line of watches that were given common Indian names—Archana, Sujata, Abhishek and Lalit—have remained runaway hits. It remains clear that the HMT watch spoke to every Indian. It marked occasions—passing a board examination, first salaries and weddings. In the end, it became a casualty of liberalisation, but when given a magnifying glass to see the workings of an HMT watch, you can, for a second, see India tick.
—Chandni Doulatramani
—Shaikh Ayaz
In
h i s n o v e l The Ground Beneath Her Feet, author Salman Rushdie had described Mumbai’s Art Deco buildings as “Art Dekho”. After Miami, Mumbai is home to the largest cluster of Art Deco in the world. For those eager to learn about the iconic buildings, the Art Deco Mumbai Trust recently launched a walking map to help them rediscover a slice of the city’s architectural history.
Last year, 92 of these Art Deco-styled buildings, mostly located in the old quarter of Marine Drive and Churchgate, were collectively declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Following the recognition, the Art Deco Mumbai Trust spent a year making a map that helps identify the four prominent architectural styles that define the city’s 19th and 20th century marvels.
Of the 92 buildings, 76 are examples of Art Deco, while the rest belong to Neo Classical, Indo Saracenic and Victorian Gothic styles. All 35 buildings adorning the Queen’s
Necklace, for example, are typi- cal Art Deco. “There’s a symme- try on Marine Drive buildings .... The flats have eyebrows and curved balconies embellished with grills and ship-deck style railings. Most buildings have round windows, like in oceanliners, which swivel and pivot on a central axis. There are a lot of nautical designs—a nod to Bombay’s rich history as a bustling port, its original idea of a dream city by the sea,” says Atul Kumar, founder trustee, the Art Deco Mumbai Trust.
Many Art Deco apartments flanking the Oval Maidan, Churchgate, bear a strong colonial influence—Windsor House, Queens Court or Empress Court—while, as you move towards Marine Drive, Kumar notes, “the Indian identity [is] expressed more freely, especially in the building names”. For instance, Soona Mahal (one of
Kumar’s personal favourites), Gobind Mahal, Shanti Kuteer and Jyoti Sadan. Many are named after the family that owned them, such as the Sidhwa family’s Soona Mahal (built in 1937 by architect G.B. Mhatre) which was rechristened after the owner’s wife, Soona Bai. It looms over Queen’s Necklace with its signature red vertical bands and curved balconies offering the most expensive view that money can buy. Apart from the residential buildings, Art Deco is also visible in the styles of popular cinema halls like Eros, Regal and Metro.
Globally, Art Deco can be found in New York, Chicago, Miami, Napier, Montevideo and Manila, but the Art Deco of Mumbai, says Kumar, stands out as it symbolises the “city’s core cosmopolitan identity”. He says that these vanishing spaces once fostered a strong community life. For Shubhika Malara, who designed the map, Art Deco is all about “freedom”. Born in Jalgaon, she says, “This city’s a sea of people but it also makes you feel at home.”