Keeping up with Bombay's public clocks

Indian Sailors Home, Masjid East. Pics courtesy/ Chirodeep Chaudhari

For a city always on the go, a 24-hour-clock might seem too inadequate or too little. But in 1996, when Chirodeep Chaudhuri, still a neophyte to photography, started training his lens on public clocks, the latter were almost redundant. "Nobody was looking at them, because most were not working," he remembers. While the analog world was still warming to the digital, the complex technology of the average public clock, was past its prime. Their dysfunctionality and futility poked Chaudhuri, and he would spend the next 23 years, documenting them.

His two-decade-old labour of love will now be on display starting Tuesday at the exhibition, Seeing Time: Public Clocks of Bombay, at Max Mueller Bhavan. The exhibition, which will be on till February 20, will showcase photographs of 81 clocks from across the city, in black and white. "It's not like I have run out of patience," says Chaudhuri, 47, when we meet him not far from CSMT that boasts of a Victorian time-piece, as old as the century-old structure. "I can still keep at it [taking pictures of public clocks]. But something tells me that if there are more, it's got to be just two or three. I have walked so much around the city, and looked so hard, I would know."

Chirodeep Chaudhari. Pic/ Suresh Karkera

It was in Calcutta, and not Mumbai, when Chaudhuri, then 23, first grew aware of public clocks. "I was there on an assignment for a newspaper, and happened to be at Esplanade, which is a lot like Mumbai's Fort area. That's when the Metropolitan Building caught my attention. The building has a clock on its facade. I remember trying to take a picture of the entire structure, but I had a 50 mm lens, and that was giving me a lot of trouble. I kept walking back, extending the distance [for a long shot] but beyond a point, I couldn't, because of the hawkers. That, in a sense, is the first time I had looked consciously at a building with a clock."

Back in Mumbai, the first clocks he clicked on his SLR were those at VT, Crawford Market and the University of Mumbai. He was, however, worried about the project being construed as an exercise in nostalgia. "Because it was about the city's history and architecture, it was likely to slip into something soppy. But, this was not just a story about clocks," he shares.

Three years down, Chaudhuri had managed to find 15 of them. Soon after, late historian and researcher Sharada Dwivedi had seen merit in his work and helped him put together his first exhibition at the debut run of the Kala Ghoda Festival in 1999. While Chaudhuri believes that it was this that opened the doors to other hidden and forgotten clocks in the city, he admits feeling that the first show had come too soon. It was still an unfinished exhibition, he says. Chaudhuri would soon realise that he had not even traced one-third of the clocks he was to find over the next 20 years.

Tejookaya park, Matunga

Some of the pictures from that exhibition, like that of Ghadiyal Godi on PD Mello Road, will make their way to his second show. "I believe that it is still a very strong image, and so, it has stayed," he says. But, he fell out of love with some of the others. "Or it could be, that my skill went up, or I discovered, new angles and perspectives to take the same picture," he explains, of why he didn't retain all the originals.

The 81 public clocks he has documented, might not be a definitive list. "But there was no list to begin with. The list that exists today, is my list. If I give that list to somebody, that person could photograph all the 81 clocks in seven days. But that wasn't what I was chasing," says Chaudhuri, whose previous city projects include The One-rupee Entrepreneur, where he documented the red coin-operated public telephones that once dotted the city, and XXX: Mumbai's Suburban Train Graffiti, The Commuters and In The City, A Library.

Bomanji Hosmasji Wadia Fountain, Perin Nariman Street

Another of his works, A Village in Bengal, which is about his ancestral home Amadpur, and which he published as a photo book in 2012, continued for 13 years. "When I do workshops, a lot of photographers ask me, how do you manage to stretch a project for long. But I think it depends on what you are chasing. With this, I was chasing the story of Bombay, and its technology. As a phenomena, these clocks are dead. I wanted to find out more."

Chaudhuri remembers how, a few years ago, when he was invited by artiste Sunil Shanbag to speak at the launch of Studio Tamaasha, an intimate theatre space in Versova, he deliberately chose to discuss the Bombay clocks project. "Before this, for a very long period, I hadn't talked about it publicly. So, I thought, let's see how people react," he recalls. Interestingly after that talk, two people came up to him, and told him about other clocks he hadn't heard about. "And just like that, over the next one year, I had found 10 more," he says.

Sridhar Balchandra & Co, Prarthana Samaj

In between all of this, he also got one of his former students, Suryasarathi Bhattacharya, to join him as research assistant. "The social aspects of technology have crept into my past works too. I wanted someone to go out on the streets, and speak to people about their recollections of these clocks and how they connected with them, once upon a time. That's where Suryasarathi came in."

He recounts how when Bhattacharya visited St Xavier's College, and spoke to students hanging around the quadrangle, about the clock above the basketball court, they actually did a double take. "They couldn't remember seeing it. I think it is the tiniest and flimsiest clock in the city. It looks more like the Sudarshan Chakra," he laughs. A staff member, however, shared an amusing story. "The joke was that the clock never showed the right time. Apparently, if the minute hand was at three, and if a pigeon sat on it, it would go down by five minutes." Vignettes like these will make it into a book that Chaudhuri has planned to complete in the new year.

Aurora Cinema, King's Circle

A curious find was a one-of-a-kind clock on the signboard of a saree shop, Shridhar Bhalchandra Aani Company, at Prarthana Samaj. " The clock didn't have numbers, but the alphabets of the shop's name on it. It's not functional anymore. While the saree shop shut down in its centenary year [2016], the clock still remains," says Chaudhuri. "When I met the owner, he told me that in the good old days, when the clock still worked, if it slowed down or showed the wrong time, people in the neighbourhood, would come to him and ask him to get it repaired."

That makes us wonder whether public clocks are redundant, after all. May be, if they work, they'd still be relevant, says the lensman, who gives the example of the David Sassoon Clock Tower, which was restored to its original glory by the Mumbai Port Trust.

This requires investment and inclination. "It would be over-simplistic to say that there is apathy. There is a cost involved to keep this kind of technology running, and some of the companies that manufactured these clocks and parts, no longer exist."

Expecting all the 81 clocks to be restored would be utopian, says Chaudhuri. "That's not going to happen. But there have been sporadic efforts, and it would definitely be nice, if there are more."

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