When she was 8 or 9, Aroon Shivdasani remembers her maternal grandmother putting her to work embroidering petticoats. It was supposed to build character and make a whole person out of you.
Belonging to one of the “old-world” zamindari families of Karachi and Hyderabad that fled to India after partition in 1947, Shivdasani recalls her grandmother would make the siblings sit on a “pingha,” or large square wooden swing, out in the huge courtyard, on languorous summer holiday afternoons in Lucknow, “and do that damn embroidery,” while she told stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
Most people who know this bubbly and beautiful diva will tell you “Naani” was right. Shivdasani, co-founder and head of the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC), can talk freely on virtually any subject under the sun, though the arts and culture, particularly theater, are her passion. The recent success of the council’s annual film festival, held Nov. 11-15, is a testament to her reach and influence: The festival featured 47 films, 44 of them by independent Indian and diaspora filmmakers, and the top stars of Indian cinema.
Shivdasani is credited with building the council into a cultural force to contend with in a city where art and culture display a drive similar to the fat cats on Wall Street. She conceived and produced the first Festival of Indian Theater in North America in the late 1990s and has since added several others events to the council’s calendar: the annual Playwrights Festival in conjunction with the New York-based Lark Theatre, several film premieres, two annual film festivals – one of new films from India at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art and the other of Indian independent and diaspora films – an annual Erasing Borders visual art exhibition and a separate Festival of Indian Dance as well as myriad theater, film, dance, music, literary and fine arts events. Passionate about the mission to build an awareness of Indian artists and artistic disciplines, Shivdasani can barely contain herself explaining the accomplishments of the council, all achieved with the help of “invaluable” volunteers and a 24/7 schedule she continues on.
Shivdasani has a master’s in English literature and drama from Iona College, N.Y., and has worked in marketing, advertising, media research, taught school and college, run a theater company in Canada, been a docent at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., acted, danced, painted, worked in ceramics and stained glass. She left her position as adjunct professor of creative writing and English literature at Iona and vice president of her husband's marketing company, to take on her current position in 1998.
She has on her cell phone the private numbers of celebrities like Madhur Jaffrey, filmmakers Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta, actress Shabana Azmi, author Salman Rushdie, playwright Vijay Tendulkar, sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and dancer Mallika Sarabhai, to name a few, all of whom she has absolutely no qualms or hesitation in calling up to support any new venture.
“Aroon is full of passion for the arts and full of energy, a wonderful combination,” Madhur Jaffrey tells The Indian American. “She is a charming ‘doer’ who makes grand plans and has the ability to follow through with them. Rather like (like the late filmmaker) Ismail Merchant.” Asked about her own relationship with Shivdasani, Jaffrey says, “Well, I do whatever she tells me to do because I believe in her.”
Living in the Upper East Side in a luxurious apartment that actually has a backyard where Shivdasani loves to garden and throw frequent soirees with her husband, Indur, who has taken on cooking and rebuilding properties as his post-retirement hobbies, the couple evokes that lost old-world charm of India mixed with a seasoned New York elitism and a liberal dose of down-to-earth humor.
Lady Success attached itself early to Shivdasani’s ankle. That, combined with a “whole”-istic philosophical mindset imbibed from the elder women in her family, has given her petite frame a bearing of unshakeable confidence and a shimmer of playfulness that says, “I am exactly where I want to be.” Even if her parents overcame the setback of partition, they gave their children a life of security, stability and relative wealth.
After fleeing to India, her father Dru Gidwani, whom she fervently describes as the most “strong and gentle” person for whom making the transition from being a zamindar to working for other people was a “big switch,” worked at the Tarapur Atomic Power Station near Mumbai. Her mother, Krishna, went into higher education and secured a Ph.D. in literature. Shivdasani, who was born in Karachi in1946, and her sister, Rita Karmakar, now an artist in Los Angeles, studied at the elite Lawrence School in Sanawar, Himachal Pradesh, before going back to Mumbai.
She met Indur at a mutual cousin’s wedding when she was just 15. They were dating at 17, and she forgot about going to Oxford and chose to remain in Bombay where he was at the Indian Institute of Technology. They married when she was 21. “He’s the man of my life,” she ends simply.
She calls her husband “a wonderful, generous, brilliant man” an excellent bridge player who loves sports, reading, music, and who, having sold off his chemical marketing business, is dabbling in real estate, his latest acquisition being a building in Harlem that he is redoing. After graduating from IIT, Indur Shivdasani attended Imperial College in London, was with Tata Administrative Services in Mumbai, before the two decided to up and leave “just for the adventure,” much to their parents’ chagrin, and moved to Canada.
When they were younger, they loved dancing, but now that means going to clubs that she does not like, so evenings are spent going to a jazz performance maybe, or a movie, or seeing a play. That is, when she can spare the time from her absorption with the council.
Shivdasani lets out a hearty laugh when asked if she made her two daughters embroider petticoats as children, to build their character. No, but she did the next best thing – took them to plays, musical performances, museums, made them miserable trying out for the soccer team, nudged them do art shows, enjoy fashion and all the riches the city has to offer.
Today, Misha is a “fashionista” who has worked with Prada, Oscar de la Renta, Bergdorf Goodman and Salvatore Ferragamo, among others, looks and dresses like a “million-dollar model” and has “zillions” of friends, the doting mother says. Sacha is “brilliant,” and is the executive director of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), a Silicon Valley-based mentoring nonprofit that has gone global. Sacha’s baby daughter, Maya, has become Shivdasani’s new love.
But Shivdasani is no pushover.
“I don’t like boring clothes and outfits,” she admits. She wears classic Western clothes but loves bright colors. Reds, shocking pinks, parrot green, colors that compliment her complexion and make her stand out. “I like to make a statement when I dress,” she admits, though she does not go for brand names alone. “I go for looks.” With her petite frame, “Gallons and reams of clothing don’t do much.”
And when she wears traditional Indian clothes, she spices them up with revealing sari blouses. “The less I wear the better,” she laughs. That includes skimpy, backless blouses for saris. She loves “innovative” clothes though she stops short of what she calls “things like up and down hemlines and stuff like that.”
Of the Indian designers, she does not cotton the ones that try to be very Western. “They are sad.” But so are those that display too much bling. “I like Tarun Tahiliani. He makes the petticoats very trim and hugging and stretchy. His clothes are very flattering to women. He dresses women well.”
“I have seen the evolution in her, what she has accomplished,” says Jaswant Lalwani, Indur Shivdasani’s classmate from IIT Bombay, who has lived in New York since 1971, was president of Cunard Asia, which owns several cruise lines including the Queen Elizabeth 2, and went on to start his own cruise line. He knew the Shivdasanis since Indur began dating Aroon. She was always “exuberant, enthusiastic and interested in art and theater,” recalls Lalwani, who is now a real estate developer. He saw how she “took a fledgling idea and made it into a focus of the Indian and mainstream community.” Lalwani, 65, says not everyone can take their innate love for something and catapult it to a different level. “I couldn’t become a football player tomorrow,” he says. But even 30 years ago, he says, when they met, she would enthuse, “Oh, have you seen this or that play.”
He credits her ability to rope in big players for her causes to her ease in communicating. “She is very easy to connect with no matter who you are, your age, class, profession, whether you have anything to do with art or business.” He says he is afraid to sound sycophantic and speaks earnestly about her. “I want to make two points – one, about how she has taken her passion and realized it and offered it back to the New York community; and two, how she has taken IAAC as a force to reckon with, every year becoming bigger and better, by leaps and bounds. I’m not saying all this because she’s been a friend of mine. Just today, at a cocktail party, we were discussing how great the IAAC has become.”
That Shivdasani has way more friends and hardly any detractors is a credit to her approach, and to the luck of being at the right place at the right time. “There’s no ‘cultivating’ involved,” Shivdasani maintains as she talks about lining up celebrities for her events. She pauses, and reflects on why and how she gets high-profile people in her lineup. “I just go and approach them. I don’t know how things just happen.” And then there are the connections that bring together that top tier of 0.001 percent of the privileged among the Indian population from around the world, she agrees.
“Ismail (Merchant) was an old Xavierite,” she says about the late filmmaker who attended St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. “He wrote that cookbook, and I went and met him and chatted and when we did our first film festival, he was there.” Her connection with Rushdie just “happened,” she says. He is an old “Cathedralite” she says referring to Mumbai’s Cathedral & John Connon School.
She recalls how she met Azmi. It had nothing to do with her “connections,” yet everything to do with them.
In 1993, when the 6.3-magnitude earthquake rocked Latur and Osmanabad in Maharashtra on the morning of Sept. 30, Shivdasani and her friends at the Mahila Association of America collected a planeload of things to take there and deliver personally because they had heard things were being stolen and not reaching the victims. They got a plane because then-First Lady Barbara Bush, ambassador-at-large of Americare, said the organization would provide one. But, Shivdasani says, the response from Maharashtra was wanting.
“We heard Shabana was willing to get the help to us. She sent two busloads of slum dwellers and they and five of us carried everything. She came onto the bus. I didn’t even know her,” Shivdasani recalls. “We traveled through the night, stopped at desperately bad places for food. She brushed her teeth on the bus and spat out the window. She said she had practiced this during the movies; when I tried it, the damn thing came flying back, spraying my face. We became such friends, standing outside the loo at these stops looking out for each other.”
Many doors opened because of Azmi, she says. After distributing the food, the actress turned to her and asked, “So do you want to do more, or like a typical American, go away,” or words to that effect. Shivdasani jumped at the chance to help out. She was in it for the long haul she told Azmi. They organized a reading the play “Tumhari Amrita” in New York. They collected $350,000 for various causes in Mumbai, and Azmi made sure to send receipts of how the money was used.
With Mehta, the story was somewhat similar. The Indo-Canadian filmmaker was passionate about Sakhi, one of the earliest organizations in the U.S. to work on domestic violence within the South Asian community. Shivdasani, who helped Sakhi, ended up helping to screen “Fire,” Mehta’s first film in her elements trilogy that includes “Earth” and “Water.”
Interestingly, despite targeting the Indian literati and cultural elite of New York, Shivdasani says, she has not yet reached the “mainstream” elite of the greater New York area or Hollywood. “I really don’t know many ‘Western’ celebrities. I once met (Richard) Gere through Meera (Nair). And I met (Bill) Cosby.” She knows filmmaker Tracy Jackson and they have become friends; that’s how it plays between Shivdasani and celebrities. She has to get to know them and become friends. It is not a one-time association but a long-term commitment.
“I’m not restricting myself (to Indian celebrities). It’s a matter of chance,” she says. That, and her penchant for Indian culture and art.
She remembers how even 12 years ago, Indian arts were nowhere to be found in New York City except through the Asia Society or the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Whatever dance, music, or plays came, played in Queens, N.Y., or Edison, N.J., and not at mainstream venues. “India was not part of the New York cultural scene at all,” Shivdasani says almost vehemently. Ten years have witnessed a sea change, not least because of her council’s work, she contends. “In the last five years, we’ve really grown to mammoth proportions and only in the last three years has it become an Indian summer.”
People had heard of Ravi Shankar and even Zakir Hussain was not the rock star he has now become. “People knew about IT, about doctors, about Wall Street, but not the arts,” Shivdasani says. A couple of galleries showed Indian works, and Indian theater was unknown. The council brought India’s “3 greatest playwrights – Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar and Mahesh Dattani.”
She wanted to educate New Yorkers. “I wanted to say, ‘Hey, you think about (Luciano) Pavarotti, what about the Indian culture? Our culture is alive and kicking and well – it’s just that you guys don’t know about it.’ ”
Jaffrey remembers the same.
“When I first came here, Indian art and culture were unknown,” but then qualifies it acknowledging that some sections did know about world-renowned filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s films that were shown in New York City in the ’60s. But that was about it. “Contemporary Indian art was, on the whole, not known or appreciated. I have seen a sea change,” she says.
Bollywood films now are nominated for the Oscars and Indian paintings sell at high prices. It is partly the times that have changed, with India as the new big player on the global map, she surmises.
“But Aroon has a lot to do with the plays, movies, dance recitals and art shows that get shown around town. She had already set up her group well ahead of the general explosion of interest. She believed the explosion would come and it did,” Jaffrey says.
And it was all done at mainstream venues. Mainstream or nothing is the approach of the council or Shivdasani, the two being almost synonymous.
Shivdasani admits it is a lot of work to put together a festival or films, theater, music, anything, and to deliver a top-quality product. “I have to work 24/7. I am very lucky. I have a secretary, and my notepad goes with me.” But again with a signature frankness and a cute resort to expletives, she says, “The market right now is so shitty – and I mean shitty. I have become a permanent beggar.”
But she credits the enormous commitment of volunteers at the council, and the celebrities who give of their time. She is thankful Anand Mahindra of Manhindra & Mahindra stepped in to help the council, and the annual film festival now bears the Mahindra name.
“People like Salman, Deepa and Mira, they have been with me since the beginning. The council is about promoting the ‘little people’, the undiscovered talents, and these (celebrities) are the draw. Whenever I call, they come,” Shivdasani says.
There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the organizing. She sleeps very little. The night she gets to sleep at 4 a.m., she considers herself lucky. But her looks belie her sleepless nights.
“I have to tell you – I love my life."
