NCPA: The cultural institution plans to step out of Mumbai’s downtown area to reach a larger audience

In the early to mid-2000s, Jamshed Bhabha would host his protégé Khushroo Suntook for breakfast at home on Sundays — usually once a month. Early morning chats at the Bhabha House in Malabar Hill in south Mumbai often focused on the future of the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), which Bhabha headed then and Suntook heads now.
Bhabha was chairman of NCPA until his death in 2007 at the age of 93. Suntook wasn’t a young man either, well past 60, and found a second career in NCPA under Bhabha’s tutelage.

“Dr Bhabha would often get worried about the future of NCPA during our discussions,” says Suntook, “But then he would cheer up and tell me: ‘You do not have to worry. I will leave you this house’.”

Bhabha did leave his house to NCPA in his will. In mid-June the Bhabha Bungalow, as it is popularly known, was sold for Rs 372 crore.

Legacy, however, comes with its own baggage. Bhabha’s elder brother, Homi, a larger national icon and considered the father of India’s nuclear establishment, had also lived and worked from the same house till his death in 1966. While Jamshed Bhabha and NCPA are on solid legal ground, there are demands to turn the house into a museum from other quarters.

Two days before the auction on June 16, Bharat Ratna awardee scientist CNR Rao appealed to the prime minister, Narendra Modi, to turn the house into a museum. Workers of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre have also filed a public interest litigation in Bombay High Court that is pending.

The legal process is on — there’s no stay by the high court on the sale process and an optimistic Suntook is charting a fresh course for the cash-strapped NCPA, assuming this tug of war between science and art will not leave NCPA poorer.

There is a reason why it is possible to mobilize wide support in the name of Homi Bhabha. NCPA, the arts and culture centre built on the edge of Nariman Point, with five covered theatres, an open air stage and art galleries, is often perceived as a south Mumbai-elitist organization. And this is the first thing that Suntook would want to change with the new money (see...And Fast Forward).

He admits that NCPA was an elitist place in the old days. “It is still a bit elitist looking — rather posh and that in a good way. But we have simple theatres and many tickets are now priced at Rs 200-400, within the reach of the less advantaged and students too.” Suntook insists that the programming mix today tries to appeal to a wider audience with a lot of jazz, light music and fusion, and dollops of theatre. But he admits that being in south Mumbai is one of the “weaknesses” of the organization. In the past he tried providing an air-conditioned bus service from the railway station of the suburb of Bandra for performances, but it did not work very well.

Anil Dharker, eminent columnist, admits that NCPA’s other perceived weakness is its western music bias, but insists that this is not fair to NCPA.

Programme Sheet

Suntook has three game-changing ideas. The first is to hire on a long-term lease an auditorium in another part of the city. This will be an educational effort — NCPA has a lot of guru-shishya programmes with the teachers staying within the campus at Nariman Point. Suntook wants another such centre elsewhere in Mumbai. NCPA is already running some music training courses in Avabai Petit High School in Bandra.

Suntook wants to invest in upgrading the auditorium and then occasionally also have flagship performances at the hired auditorium. “But I want a long-term lease, so I can invest in it,” he says. The second idea is to bridge a gap within the current NCPA campus and build a mid-sized 600-seater theatre. “We have two 1,000-seaters and then capacity drops to 300,” Suntook explains. But for this he will need a sponsor, after whom the theatre can be named — possibly a large business house. He has had talks with a few people and they want a concrete plan before committing, so Suntook is waiting for the money from the house sale to come in.

However, he has already spoken to architects about the possibility of demolishing the 100-seater Little Theatre and the office block, and building a block that can house three theatres in the same building plus some rooms for offices and residences of teachers.

The third idea is to create a corpus of Rs 150 crore out of the sale proceeds that would allow him an annual income of Rs 12 crore or so. It will plug the gaps in NCPA’s current budget of around Rs 30 crore. With the rest of the money, Suntook wants to upgrade the audio and video equipment and bring in top consultants and programmers as well as directors from across the world to work and perform at NCPA.

Suntook insists that there is no one right way of expanding NCPA. While Dharker feels NCPA should start doing events all across the city, in auditoriums like Prithvi and St Andrews in Bandra and Juhu, Kunal Kapoor, Prithvi’s trustee, feels events do not serve any purpose and are “just a flash in the pan”. Kapoor welcomes NCPA and says: “What is needed is regularity, frequency and a management that is sensitive and holds the performers, and the audience experience most important.”