My third place

The Marylebone Road, a major thoroughfare that thunders through central London, can be a rather hostile and stifling place. Though just a short hop from Regent's Park — one of the city’s most beautiful — it is packed with commuters and tourists eager to explore the many attractions (Sherlock Holmes territory and Madame Tussauds, to name a couple). Therefore, stepping out of it into an elegant apartment lined wall-to-wall with Jamini Roy paintings feels both surreal and liberating.

The apartment is the London home of Nirmalya Kumar, a popular and successful former academic at the London Business School. He has authored a number of books on both India and marketing — including last year’s Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global — and ranks high on many global lists of management thinkers (he came in 20 on last year’s Thinkers50 list). Recently he joined the Tata Group’s executive council for strategy operations, which has returned him to India, a country he left several decades ago.

The apartment has few traces of his business persona: alongside the 70-something Jamini Roys he’s collected over the past decade and more, there are a handful of Rabindranath Tagores as well as works by other Indian artists and, most recently, a rare JMW Turner set in India. Bookshelves are stacked high with volumes on modern and Indian art.

We discuss some of Roy’s characteristics that Kumar appreciates as a businessman, including his marketing instincts. Roy was well ahead of his time — he recognised the art world’s desire for reinterpretations and his own appeal to ordinary Indians as well as art enthusiasts worldwide — of whom he acquired a substantial following during his lifetime. But these are not particularly the qualities that count with Kumar, for whom his art collection is entirely distinct from the rest of his world. “You need to have a third side: home, work and a third place to recharge yourself. This is my passion, my third place,” he says, pointing to his most recent Roy acquisition, a large and striking painting of Krishna and Balarama that dominates the space above his fireplace (and which fetched $60,000, according to the Christie’s New York website).

Kumar has established himself as the Roy go-to-person for London’s numerous art auction houses, often consulted by them to determine the genuineness of Roy’s paintings. (Roy’s penchant for reinterpreting and copying previous works on works without dates or names has left his collection ripe for forgers). Kumar even owns a fake, which we look over closely as he points to some of the obvious (to him) characteristics, such as its colours, subject matter and lack of depth. Yet, while he clearly has an expert knowledge of the artist’s work, Kumar’s relationship with Roy is essentially an emotional one. When I ask what attracted him to his first Roy — a sensuous portrait of a wide-eyed mother and child — he says simply that it “spoke to me… it was visceral.”

The issue of identity figures frequently in our discussion. In a frank and rather emotional chapter in Re-Imagine: India-UK cultural relations in the 21st Century, Kumar wrote of how learning about Roy — whom he first came across in 2001 and has since researched with the eager precision of an academic — helped him develop a better understanding of himself. Leaving Calcutta in the ’90s as a graduate student bound for the US, Kumar had been eager to shun his old identity before commencing to find a new balance: that of an Indian who wasn’t confined by his national identity. There was something in Roy’s work that struck a chord. Roy had experimented with both Western and Indian art techniques before developing his own unique ‘flat’ style of painting that took inspiration from Indian folk art and used a restricted palette of earthy colours. Over five decades, Roy seemed able to draw on both the East and the West while not being confined by either, says Kumar.

We pause by pictures juxtaposed against one another to show Roy’s evolving technique: two of his Kalighat-style cat with a prawn (a composition that developed over time), and paintings of a solitary female figure who became more curvaceous and sensuous as Roy honed his method. We stop before an exquisite portrait of Rabindranath Tagore (the uncle of Roy’s teacher, the modernist painter Abanindranath Tagore), executed in a Byzantine style reminiscent of Russian icons, while Kumar explains the complexity of the technique, marvelling simultaneously at its depiction of the “grandness and grandeur” of the man. He recollects the eyebrows raised by the substantial sum he paid for the picture back in 2003, and the warnings he received about the risks of putting too much into one artist.

Kumar has become increasingly select with his choices over the years, bidding only if he believes it will fall into the top 10 or 12 in his collection. While his new role at Tata has meant he only spends a week or so every month in London, he is eager for other Roy enthusiasts to see his collection while he is away. I ask whether he misses the collection he has built so fervently, but he seems surprised by the question. “Of course not, they are always in my head.”

COMMENT NOW