Mahindra museum builds On Brand and staff loyalty

For two decades she too had been working on an idea for a museum—a museum of stories about the people who built the Mahindra Group, and who had stuck by it from license raj to liberalisation

Mumbai In 2013, Prochie Mukherji, former chief of staff to Anand Mahindra, came across a blog post by an American tourist in which he described his disappointment after a visit to Mani Bhavan on Laburnum Road. Mahatma Gandhi’s Bombay years, wrote the tourist, had been reduced to a few “objects in glass cases”.

Corporate museums such as the World of Coca Cola in Atlanta and the Mercedes-Benz museum, in Stuttgart, which serve as brand extensions, have been drawing in visitors globally since the 1990s (HT PHOTO)

The blog post set Mukherji thinking about what a museum should be like. For two decades she too had been working on an idea for a museum—a museum of stories about the people who built the Mahindra Group, and who had stuck by it from license raj to liberalisation and beyond.

“Back in the mid-1990s, I had embarked on this ‘core values’ project, which involved collecting stories from people who had worked with our founders as well as younger employees – about their values, their heroes, their relationship with the company. Many of those stories stayed with me,” says Mukherji. “That post made me think differently about the narrative, and I immediately sent off a six-page note to Anand Mahindra (chairman of the Mahindra Group).” The Museum of Living History, which opens this morning at the Mahindra Towers at Worli, is a realisation of that vision.

Corporate museums such as the World of Coca Cola in Atlanta and the Mercedes-Benz museum, in Stuttgart, which serve as brand extensions, have been drawing in visitors globally since the 1990s. And the last decade has seen several Indian legacy firms, most notably the Tatas and textile manufacturer Arvind Ltd, showcase their heritage and future direction. The Museum of Living History is an addition to that.

The 4500 sq. ft. space, created by design and creative consultant Elsie Nanji and experience designer Harsh Manrao, is shaped like a nautilus, and uses the works of over 20 artists and illustrators along with interactive display screens, period films, hype boxes, holographic boxes, light and shade, and a Formula E simulator to subtly communicate the philosophy that has shaped the $19.8 billion cars-to-factory-equipment conglomerate over the last 75 years. To Anand Mahindra, the museum celebrates the philosophy, DNA, core values, and the culture of the group. “Just as life is not static, the Museum of Living History is a living, breathing entity in the ever-changing world of the Mahindra Group,” says Mahindra.

Visitors entering the Mahindra museum through a crimson-red passage called the ‘interspace’ are welcomed by Anand Mahindra’s familiar voice. The story of the company, which was founded in 1945 by J C Mahindra, K C Mahindra and Ghulam Mohammed, is narrated by the commentator Charu Sharma and Mukherji herself. (Originally called Mahindra & Mohammed, the company changed its name to Mahindra & Mahindra after Partition, when Mohammed emigrated to Pakistan to become its first finance minister.)

“I knew that I would be primarily working with stories – and not objects. My brief to the artists was to reinterpret these stories in the mediums they were comfortable with,” says Nanji who was approached by the Mahindra Group in 2017. Amid the subtle, symbolic allusions to the group’s values and ethics, what stands out are the human stories and also the stories of the group’s missteps.

Italian artist Sara Lovari’s memorialisation of Mohan Redkar’s life is one of them. Redkar, a young trainee engineer with Mahindra & Mahindra, died in 2008 after helping save the lives of two drowning couples at Bandra Bandstand.

Lovari’s art work uses his personal effects – a Motorola cell phone, a watch, newspaper cuttings of his sporting triumphs – that are housed in a restored briefcase to commemorate his heroic act. (The Mahindra Veerta Award was instituted in honour of Redkar’s life-saving rescue in 2009.)

Manrao and Nanji collected numerous stories from both primary and secondary research, but barely 10 percent of them made the cut. Manrao is especially fond of retelling the story behind the ‘Respecting Diversity’ art work by Alijan Shaikh, a self-trained, Pune-based chalk sculptor. In the early 1970s, Bharat Doshi, a chartered accountant, received offers from two companies, one of which was from Mahindra and Mahindra. When he approached his father for advice, the latter asked Doshi to study the companies’ annual reports and join the firm that was more diversified when it came to community representation. “Doshi joined Mahindra, despite the fact that the other company was paying him more, and rose to become a board member. Shaikh’s art work uses exquisitely carved chalk faces to show faces of people from various cultures,” says Manrao.

Barely ten metres away from Shahrukh Irani’s mirror-and-red-acrylic tribute to the Pininfarina Battista, one of the world’s fastest electric cars – Mahindra acquired Italian car design firm Pininfarina in 2015 – is Jaipur-based Ritu and Surya Singh’s ‘Respecting Failure’, which will particularly resonate with Mumbaikars. The art work, made of discarded watch and clock parts, car mats, nibs, and, tellingly, red tape, references Mahindra’s hovercraft service that was launched in the mid-1990s but ran aground in 1998.

Manrao says that the museum has been designed as a public space. “In due course, visitors can simply book an appointment and come over to experience a pluralistic narrative of a group whose story in entwined with the country’s.”

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