Artist Mehlli Gobhai, a master of lines, crosses the rainbow bridge

When artist Mehlli Gobhai had an exhibition at Gallery Chemould on the first floor of the bustling Jehangir Art Gallery, many visitors unfamiliar with his work would walk in off the street. “One time, somebody opened the door, peeked in, saw works made with artisanal paper from Ahmedabad and said, ‘Acha, brown paper ajun lagaya hai’,” recalls Shireen Gandhy, owner of Gallery Chemould.She was offended on behalf of the artist, but when she recounted the incident to Gobhai, he was very tickled. “He went to lunch with it. He found it the best story ever and repeated it for years afterwards,” says Gandhy.
The abstractionist—occasionally referred to as Mumbai’s Mark Rothko—died on Thursday morning at the age of 87 in a city hospital. He had suffered a series of strokes and had stopped painting a few years ago. Gandhy, who has his last painting, says it’s not dark and brooding like his other works but much lighter. “It’s a beautiful canvas,” she says, describing both his work and personality as painfully precise. “He had a maddening sense of exactitude,” she says. “He even monitored how much cream and sugar went into your coffee.” His obsessive side came to the fore while setting up and lighting his artworks before a show. “It was never good enough especially in the early days before we had modern lighting,” she recalls.
Gobhai, who lived on Carmichael Road, and later Colaba, studied at St Xavier’s School, and learned drawing under the master draughtsman Shiavax Chavda. He went on to study at London’s Royal College of Art, The Art Students League of New York and the Pratt Graphic Centre (again, in New York City). He then took up a job at an advertising agency and worked as a children’s illustrator, before becoming a full-time artist. After two decades in NYC, he returned to Mumbai in the 1980s, which was when Gandhy first met him. She describes him as an “absolutely dashing man”, who was young in spirit, naughty and flirtatious despite being gay.
Gobhai, who mentored younger artists and was revered by his peers—Gandhy calls him an “artist’s artist”—was always “modest and self-deprecatory”, says art critic Girish Shahane. “He would look at other artists’ works with great interest, even those much younger than him and working in different genres. He didn’t believe the kind of abstraction he did had a superior claim,” adds Shahane. Artist Sheetal Gatani credits him with creating a “shift” in her work and personality. “Conversations with him made me a better painter and person,” she says.
His cousin Noshir Gobhai and cultural theorist Nancy Adajania both recall his sensitivity, kindness and love for animals. While Adajania recalls him nursing a crow with a broken wing for almost two years, Gobhai remembers how during the monsoon, he would stop to pick up snails, who had strayed onto the pavement where people would accidently crush them with their feet. He would gently wash them in a stream of rainwater and place them safely in the garden. “He needed to make things whole and perfect,” recalls Adajania in a Facebook post. “A line out of place, a mispronounced word, bad craftsmanship—all of this gave him a visceral ache. The perfect line, the perfect musical note made him ecstatic.”