MUMBAI: There are houses that shelter lives, and there are those that absorb them—rooms thick with argument and laughter, corridors steeped in conviction, walls that remember more than they reveal. ‘Kekee Manzil: House of Art (KM)’, the feature-length documentary directed by Dilesh Korya and produced by Behroze Gandhy, belongs to the latter category. It is a film that listens to memory, history and the murmur of a city finding its modern voice.
At its centre is Kekoo Gandhy: gallerist, catalyst, indefatigable evangelist for Indian modern art, and a man whose influence was felt as much at the dining table as it was in the gallery (Chemould) he founded. But the film, tenderly and deliberately, resists the temptation of monument-making. Instead, it opens a door—sometimes literally—into a Bandra home that became a nerve centre for ideas, dissent, conviviality and culture in post-Independence Bombay.
Genesis of the film
The film’s origins are deeply personal. In the early 2000s, Behroze Gandhy began filming her parents, Kekoo and Khorshed, with a handycam—initially borrowing one, then buying her own—without any clear intention beyond preservation. “Friends, artists and well-wishers urged me on: this was a generation, they said, that would not be around forever; their stories mattered.” What began as domestic documentation—meals, conversations, idle moments—slowly accrued a different gravity. “By 2008-9, I realised I was holding more than family footage. I was holding the fragments of a cultural moment.”
That realisation marks the emotional pivot of ‘KM’. The film gathers together intimate 8mm family recordings, later digital footage, stills from the Chemould archive, and interviews with artists, writers and thinkers to trace not only Kekoo Gandhy’s journey, but the making of a modern Indian art ecosystem.
Korya, an editor by training who has worked extensively with archival material for the BBC, recognised the cinematic potential of the footage. “The grain of 8mm, its unsteady framing and washed-out colours, does something quietly radical: it universalises the personal. A child in a cowboy hat, a wedding, children dancing—these images feel like our own recollections, borrowed perhaps from an uncle’s cupboard or a forgotten reel.”
And yet ‘KM’ is not unmoored from chronology. Beneath its drifting surface runs a steady historical spine, moving from the optimism of Independence through the Progressive Artists’ Group, the Emergency, the ruptures of 1992, and into the quieter reckonings of old age. “Chronology,” Korya insists, “is not the enemy of lyricism but its enabler—the structure that allows the film to wander and return without losing its bearings.”
London-based composer, producer and tabla virtuoso Talvin Singh, who brings a quietly assured musical intelligence to ‘KM’, says: “Mumbai is a city of art, migration and music, with a kind of restless creative energy. The film uses many formats that the music had to hold together.”
If Kekoo Gandhy is the animating spirit of the film, the house itself emerges as its most eloquent character. The stately Bandra residence—eventually christened Kekee Manzil—was not merely a domestic space but a site of congregation. Artists such as MF Husain, SH Raza, Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee drifted in and out of its rooms, along with writers such as Salman Rushdie and Jerry Pinto.
The film captures with particular grace Gandhy’s belief not just in artists, but in Indian art itself as a language capable of speaking to the world. A child of newly independent India, Gandhy returned from Cambridge in 1939, his studies interrupted by war, his future uncertain. Education came instead from unlikely quarters: Austrian émigrés fleeing Nazi Germany, Italian prisoners of war. Conversations picked up by chance – art for him was not inherited; it was encountered.
Later, when he left it to Khorshed to run the fledgling Gallery Chemould while he spent months in Europe promoting Indian art—often with little money and no sponsors—she thought him mad. Yet his persistence paid off. Gallerist Shireen Gandhy speaks in the film about the audacity of Chemould’s beginnings. In a city with public venues such as the Jehangir Art Gallery and the Bombay Art Society, the idea of a private gallery actively nurturing artists was radical. Selling contemporary art was hardly a business then; collectors were few, buyers occasional.
Art and purpose
Later, as he aged, his attention turned increasingly to politics, environmental concerns and the moral weather of the nation. During the Emergency, the house became a refuge—activists like Mrinal Gore hid here at a personal risk to the family. In 1992, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the riots that scarred Bombay, Kekee Manzil opened its doors again, this time to mohalla committees and difficult conversations.
The voices that populate the documentary are carefully chosen. Artists and writers appear not as talking heads but as fellow travellers, their testimonies braided into the film’s temporal flow.
The larger story—of art as a response to social and political currents—finds eloquent articulation in the reflections of Sarayu Doshi, the pioneering art historian and institution-builder. She recalls Gandhy’s quiet but decisive role in realising the long-cherished dream of a National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Mumbai. “At a time when bureaucratic inertia threatened to stall the project indefinitely, Gandhy lobbied tirelessly—first alongside Pupul Jayakar, then directly with Indira Gandhi. He mobilised artists, critics and patrons, argued for Mumbai’s centrality to modern Indian art, and helped shape an institutional vision that treated art as a living practice rather than a static archive,” Doshi reminds adding, “NGMA stands as part of his enduring legacy: the conviction that artists need institutions, not just markets.”
Contemporary artists, too, recognise the film as an act of cultural placement rather than nostalgia. Atul Dodiya recalls being barely 30 when Gandhy invited him to show alongside modern masters at Chemould’s 25th anniversary exhibition in 1989. The documentary, he says, locates Gandhy’s work “perfectly within the socio-political and sociocultural matrix of Mumbai and India”—a hat-doff to a man who never lost touch with the city’s grassroots.
Even beyond the art world, Gandhy’s influence rippled outward. Theatreperson and casting director Dolly Thakore speaks of his unassuming mentorship, from conversations at Samovar to meticulous guidance that launched her as one of India’s leading art auctioneers. “Help, when it came from him, arrived without ceremony,” she says.
‘Kekee Manzil: House of Art’ will be screened at Title Waves, Bandra, on February 9, at 6pm.