If Salman Rushdie had to enlarge on the character of a rich, passionate art collector-entrepreneur in exile, he could fall back on the biography of Emanuel Schlesinger. While Kekoo Gandhy appears in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh as Parsi gallery owner “Kekoo Mody”, Schlesinger and Rushdie only share the same address in Bombay’s posh Breach Candy district: Villa Windsor in the Westfield Estate off Warden Road (now Bhulabhai Desai Road). Picturesque mansions characterize this residential complex with villas of some of the richest men in Mumbai today. In 1946, Emanuel Schlesinger lived in one of these bungalows, the Windsor Villa. Before that, the Austrian refugee couple Camilla and Julius Thenen, relatives of Joe Schimmel residing in the neighbourhood, lived there; then, after Schlesinger, the author Salman Rushdie as a child in the 1950s. Rushdie’s Muslim parents left Delhi in 1947 at the advent of the Partition riots to live in cosmopolitan Bombay. They later bought the villa, only to sell it again in 1964 and move to Pakistan. Rushdie showed his strong emotional ties to his childhood home by using the colonial estate as a model for the Methwold estate of his Midnight’s Children.
It was Schlesinger’s first residential address in South Bombay, after years of living in accommodation in his factory in a more northerly district, Dadar. His Austrian daughter Susanne joined him from Australia at the beginning of the year. The frugal man had probably finally decided to spend money on adequate housing to welcome his descendant after being separated from her during the entire war. With the uprising of the Nazi regime in Austria, the Viennese family had been scattered across several continents.
In 1938, Emanuel Schlesinger’s Austrian property was expropriated due to his Jewish origin. From his in-laws, he inherited the hat factory, Damenhuterzeugung und Handel S. Engelmann [women’s hat production and trade S. Engelmann] in Vienna’s textile district. In late 1938, he managed to make arrangements for his family to emigrate to the United Kingdom. His daughter Eva (born 1923) and her later husband Max Grünwald as well as his wife Nelly (née Engelmann; born 1900) settled in Manchester, where he bought them a house. His mother-in-law Fanny Engelmann (1872–1940) had to stay behind and died a year later. Emanuel Schlesinger himself was able to leave Vienna on 28 February, 1939. With the help of a friend, he fled via Switzerland to Italy, where he boarded a passenger ship heading east, with Shanghai as his final destination. But with arrangements of John Klein through the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay, he received a visa for India while on board the ship, and arrived in Bombay on 20 March 1939. In search of entrepreneurial opportunities, Schlesinger concluded an agreement with Messrs. Omprakash Durgadas to start manufacturing pharmaceutical products in collaboration with the Viennese pharmacist Hans Blaskopf (1903–1974). At the beginning of the Second World War, he was briefly interned for two months, first in Deolali and then in Ahmednagar.
After their release, the two Austrian businessmen Schlesinger and Blaskopf, together with their Indian partner, set about installing their pharmaceutical company Indo-Pharma Pharmaceuticals Works (INDON) at Dadar (Bombay) and concentrated on the production of vitamins. The Indian counterpart sold his share to the two Viennese refugees in January 1941, turning them into two successful factory owners who achieved a monthly income of around 3 000 rupees in 1946. Despite his high income and business success, Schlesinger was unable to bring his family to India, neither his wife with their younger daughter, who survived the war in England, nor his brother. Although he had been granted a visa, the brother was unable to leave Europe because the war had broken out and he spent most of the war years hiding in Vienna.
In April 1947, Emanuel Schlesinger was granted British citizenship. In the autumn of that year – after eight years of separation – he went to Manchester to reunite with his family. After this long period of estrangement, the couple agreed on a divorce, and Schlesinger later married his Indian domestic servant and started a family with her in Bombay, raising two daughters.
During the war, he had already regained financial security and resumed art collecting; like others, he collected Indian coins, wood and stone sculptures. But, as in Austria, he began to also collect modern, contemporary art. This was now Indian contemporary art by young, unknown artists; artists who did not study at the art academy and who made a living by painting posters and washing cars. Schlesinger’s financial resources and his deciphering eye for talent made him a respected art collector whose purchases became trendsetting in cosmopolitan Bombay of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Together with the Langhammer couple, the Leyden brothers and a circle of Indian art lovers and promoters like Mulk Raj Anand, Homi Bhabha or Kekoo Gandhy, he shared the vision for modern Indian art, the belief and confidence in the creativity and success of these young artists, mainly of the Progressive Artists’ Group. They all actively supported the young Bombay avant-garde by writing favourable art reviews in newspapers, opening their exhibitions, and expanding their exhibition spaces by displaying their paintings in calendars and advertisements, and thus getting the paintings into the homes of the common people.
Unlike Leyden or Langhammer however, Schlesinger was not a practitioner, but an art connoisseur. The businessman Schlesinger had a good understanding of the financially difficult conditions of the artists and tried to provide financial help by commissioning the young artists to paint. With some of the artists, he maintained a lifelong friendship and sponsored them temporarily, like Raza and Husain. Schlesinger’s 1956 letter to Raza (Schlesinger 1956), six years after Raza’s departure and settlement in France, shows the continued support by Schlesinger, who tried to get articles about Raza’s exhibitions and successes in France printed in Indian newspapers and to make paintings of his collection available for calendar prints. When Schlesinger visited him in France, Raza received a painting by Fernand Leger as a wedding present.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Emanuel Schlesinger was one of the most important modern art collectors in Bombay. With his company INDON, he was one of the first and most important drivers of the corporate culture of buying art in India.
“Schle”, as Langhammer and Leyden called their comrade in the common cause of supporting the young avant-garde, primarily provided financial support for mostly destitute artists by creating employment opportunities for and collecting works by promising young artists. All five of the emigrant circle, Käthe and Walter Langhammer, Albrecht and Rudolf von Leyden and Schlesinger, had a strong understanding of art and used it for constructive criticism on an equal footing. Putting their forces together, they tried to democratize the art display by generating new audiences and virtual spaces for exhibitions through printing in newspapers. However, Schlesinger’s greatest and foremost contribution to the development of modern art in Bombay in the 1940s and 1950s was his collecting activity, which found many followers in individuals as well as in corporates.