Into The Blue

The stately Kasturbhai Lalbhai museum in Ahmedabad is home to a new contemporary art exhibition that celebrates indigo: a dye that’s indelibly linked to the history of the city. Arun Janardhan speaks to Sanjay Lalbhai, Chairman and Managing Director, Arvind Ltd, about this unique initiative – and narrowing the cavernous gap between art and craft.

- Arun Janardhan

On a crisp winter morning, as a few young people trickle into the Kasturbhai Lalbhai museum, Sanjay Lalbhai’s 114-year-old ancestral former family home in Shahibaug, Gujarat, drapes of blue-white cloth hanging from trees and ceilings greet them. The white bungalow, with wide gardens, outhouses and sloping trees that let sunlight filter through, lends itself fittingly to Lalbhai’s grand ambitions: an exhibition, Alchemy, that celebrates indigo, the dye and the fabric.

Dressed in a long-sleeved linen shirt, dark jacket and, of course, jeans, and sporting a silver beard, slicked-back hair and silver-rimmed glasses, the Chairman and Managing Director of Arvind Ltd says the company was reinvented because of indigo and denim – changing its fortunes, and his personal career, in the process. “Ahmedabad had almost 65 composite mills, and everything has since vanished [due to the advent of power looms in the 1980s] – except Arvind, because of denim,” he says.