Gersonise your performance.” Alyque Padamsee would holler across the stage at us actors in his magnum opus production Begum Sumroo. So grand was the persona of the actor, poet and ad man Gerson Da Cunha, who passed away on 7 January at 92, that it influenced Mumbai’s theatre lingo. Larger than life, a sophisticate with a presence that commanded attention and a crown of silver grey hair that elicited envy wherever he went, Gerson was like his friend Alyque, a cultural monolith.
These were the men who would not tolerate lazy intellect or parochial thinking and constantly sought revisionist ideas. I remember Gerson telling me that when he first began working on the Mumbai stage in the 1950s, they didn’t look for audiences, they looked for good writing and good actors. Theatre is a great education, he would tell me. I didn’t understand then because I was having too much fun. But I do now.
With these men and women gone, Mumbai has lost the flag-bearers of a liberal past, constantly curious, stubbornly independent and utterly beyond the confines of religious and social custom.
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Journalist, ad man, writer, but an actor first
Gerson may have hailed from the glamorous, golden era of advertising. Many will credit him for not only growing and diversifying ad agency Lintas’ clients, but also introducing the incredible talents of Shyam Benegal and Alyque Padamsee to the country.
Alyque cast him as General Walter Reinhardt Sombre, a Swiss German mercenary whose name became corrupted to Sumroo during his time in India in the late 18th century. He meets and marries Begum Sumroo nee Farzana, my character, an ambitious dancing girl who goes on to defy convention, take on the British army and amass one of the largest fortunes in modern Indian history, part of which she was dispossessed of by the East India Company upon her death. With his booming voice and piercing eyes, Gerson was every bit the part and soon the entire crew began to refer to him as General.
Gerson wore many hats — journalist, news reader for Bombay Doordarshan, actor in Electric Moon (1992) written by Arundhati Roy and Merchant Ivory’s Cotton Mary (1999), and a magnificent turn as Othello. But I believe he was most proud of his civic activism and work with UNICEF. Among several languages Gerson spoke fluent Portuguese. Brazil, where he spent many years, held a special place in his heart. His contributions to UNICEF were honoured by the Brazilian government and he received the ‘Order of Rio Branco’ in 2018.
By the time I met Gerson in 1995, he was no longer an ad man. He had moved to being an actor, a writer and working on several forums to ameliorate Bombay’s civic standards. During his leadership of NGO AGNI and Mumbai First think-tank, he became deeply involved with creating an accessible forum where Mumbaikers could work alongside and question their local government representatives.
A staunch Nehruvian, Gerson rued Babri Masjid demolition as the beginning of the end of Mumbai as a secular bastion and he vociferously blamed local political parties for the sprawl of illegal slums, dodgy roads and the rise of the underworld. He was fearless. We need to be fearless.
And while he was a stern critic he was also generous to a fault, an old-fashioned Grandpa who insisted all the young ladies rehearsing for Begum Sumroo late nights at Raell Padamsee’s home Kulsum Terrace, the Mecca of Mumbai theatre, were accompanied home by ‘one of the lads’. He often rebuked Alyque for not feeding us properly and went out and came back with boxes of pasta from Cafe Churchill.
Like me Gerson loved his food, he would eat anything that was very well made. For all his international travel and the tag of elite that never left him, he ate a Chicken pattice from Bastani with the same gusto he drank a Barolo. I ate my first meal at Zodiac Grill with him and his wife Uma and he explained to me why Hemant Oberoi’s Camembert Dariole was pure perfection.
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An artist who welcomed everyone
Dressed always in a crisp white kurta, I once joked he was the Simi Garewal of Mumbai theatre. He found it immensely amusing and plunged into a saucy tale about Mera Naam Joker (1970). Gerson was among an elite coterie of people who knew everyone, had a tale about everyone and exciting things always happened around him.
I had dinner with Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul thanks to him. I was a tongue tied 20-year-old who had just read A House For Mr. Biswas. I met actor Dev Anand through Gerson and landed a part in one of his movies. And then it was his wife Uma who cast me in Bombay Boys (1998) opposite Naseeruddin Shah.
If you were someone making avant-garde cinema or doing something dangerously different, then Da Cunha’s art deco Oval Maidan-facing home was a no miss pit stop on your Mumbai map. But it wasn’t just to meet Gerson but also his wife. Uma was the calm, organised decision maker who brought order into his otherwise chaotic life. An ever-supportive presence, she made everything he did possible.
She was also the one who recognised the good actors and the good scripts and turned their home into a veritable hub for offbeat cinema. They both shared a passion for the movies and attended every important film festival around the globe. They both lent their names and offered their hospitality to many struggling artists and new filmmakers.
I introduced Gerson to a school friend Anu, actress Kamini Kaushal’s granddaughter who was a brilliant, budding interior architect just back from Los Angeles with ideas far ahead of her time, trying to get a break. She was doing Gaudi in Mumbai when most people thought that that meant it was something gaudy. In less than 20 minutes he grasped her original ideas and her design married his Goan heritage to his Mumbai life, and an office study of re-purposed mahogany with antique stained glass was born.
Into this hallowed study, actors who came in to audition for the movies Uma was casting, directors, journalists, politicians and wannabe writers like myself were served lavang tea by his loyal Jeeves Vijay Singh. Nandita Das and I met for the first time in Gerson’s home. One would drop in for a rehearsal or a screen test and bump into Girish Karnad and Amol Palekar rehearsing Naga Mandala, Charles Correa discussing architecture or Saeed Jaffery guffawing about some recent caper — the list is long and delicious.
Gerson’s mastery over the English language was extraordinary. There wasn’t a poet worth his salt Gerson hadn’t read and he introduced me to Gabriel García Márquez and Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. When I gave him the first draft of my poems and stories, Fifty and Done, he laboured over them, making notes, all with red ink, explaining assonance and the difference between a sestet and a stanza to someone who had just graduated college and never studied poetry. He then consented to read from it for the book launch and roped Dalip Tahil in as well. No one could quite render English poetry like Gerson.
I introduced him to my editor at HarperCollins Renuka Chatterjee, who instantly wanted to publish him.
So his collection of poems was born and over clove tea I had the good fortune to suggest a title he adopted. So Far is an extraordinary collection of verse that reflects Gerson Da Cunha’s life and literary legacy and must be put back in print.
Adeus General! Descanse em paz.
The author is an actor and writer. She tweets @Tara_Deshpande. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)