Delhi: Connaught Place
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Mahatta
The Times of India, Jul 05 2015
Avijit Ghosh
Unbeaten at 100, Mahatta a CP landmark
For old timers, Connaught Place is a graveyard of memories. Most shops and hang-outs, the bookmarks of their youth, are gone with the wind. To that generation, Mahatta & Co is a reassuring marker that some things endure.The fourth-generation family of photographers--since 1915, the sign outside the M-block shop declares--is now part of the city's living heritage. Mahatta & Co was first set up in the swish Bund area in Srinagar exactly 100 years ago. They even got the store's name there. The British tourists who thronged the shop mispronounced their surname, Mehta. However, the studio in Delhi, set up the year after the Partition, is their calling card.
Back in the 1970s and earlier, the photographic shop was regarded as the city's reliable matchmakers. In times when would-be grooms searched for a suitable bride from a bunch of snapshots, parents thronged the studio with requests to make their daughter look like a heroine, if possible even better. “The buzz was: just get your girl photographed from Mahatta. Uski shaadi ho jayegi,“ says Pavan Mehta, who now runs the shop with his brother Pankaj.
Times have changed but weddings continue to play an important part in their profile. Now Pavan's son, Arjun, a fourth generation Mehta, shoots for wedding albums in places even as far as Bangkok.
The Mehtas discovered the world of photography by chance. Pavan's grandfather Amar Nath, only 14 then, fled his haveli in Punjab's Gurdaspur district to escape a bloody family feud in 1912. He landed in Dalhousie, where he learnt the art of photography on a Rolliflex camera and technique of developing film the from foreign tourists. m foreign tourists.Family reasons made him shift to Srinagar with their studio lo cated for some time cated for some time in a houseboat. Over the next few decades, Mahatta & Co be came a well known brand opening stores as F far as Rawalpindi and Sialkot. During the chaos of Partition, the Mehtas shifted to Delhi. At CP, they functioned initially from the pavement outside Embassy restaurant; their lab at the Palace Heights hotel nearby . They moved to the M-block store in 1948.
Their early customers were mostly the city's elite: royalties, army , gen try with impressive appendages to their names: sir, rai bahadur etc. Watching their old photographs, many of them lensed by Pavan's father Madan, is like taking a guided tour of evolving India. Of black and white days when you could hear the hoofs of tongas in uncluttered CP, when Nehru-Indira holidayed in Kashmir, when Pragati Maidan's geometrical interiors was taking shape.
An incident from his early youth ncident from his early youth is embossed in Pavan's mind. First, when he taught Amitabh Bachchan the finer points of dark room techniques for 10 days. “He was recuperating from the life-threatening injury he had suffered during Coolie's (1983) shooting at a farmhouse in south Delhi.We were asked to teach him how to develop a film. One of the bathrooms was converted into a dark room for the job. Bachchan saab was a keen learner,“ recalls Pavan.
Today the Mehtas have a studio bursting with old cameras, a room stuffed with negatives and a head full of history . They are participant as well as witness to the changes in the profession. Pavan remembers the 1970s when the shop was so much in demand that delivery of prints took a week; now it's an hour. Everything changed once the world went digital.Some things, though, have remained the same. Wedding photography continues to be their primary breadwinner. “At the peak of the season, there's plenty of work.We do assignments in Bangalore, Goa, Mumbai,“ he says.
Generally speaking, these are hard times for old studios in CP and around. In recent years, several studios of repute-Kinsey Brothers, Rangoon Studio, Shimla Studio, Delhi Photo Company--have downed the shutters. Pavan and his family are survivors amidst the carnage. “To mark our centenary , we are working on a book which should hopefully be released on August 19, world photography day ,“ he says.
On their aging shoulders, Mahatta & Co continue to carry the burden of history and heritage.
