I am cocooned in a world ruled by yesteryear. In black and white, at that. You expect sepia walls to leap out at you and pull you happily back in time – a more graceful age, a time of beginnings. First portraits of actor Zeenat Aman were shot here, for a marriage photograph, no less. First pictures of former supermodel Persis Khambatta. Images of Bollywood leading ladies Madhubala, Saira Banu, Babita. Rare portraits of the Dalai Lama and his guru; group pictures of Mumbai’s major industrial families from the Birlas to the Mafatlals; maestro Zubin Mehta’s father Mehli Mehta at the violin and the conductor himself; unseen portraits of industrialist JRD Tata, his mother, his French wife, Thelma; royalty, bureaucrats, ambassadors, religious heads....

When you enter Hamilton Studios, in Mumbai’s Ballard Estate, be sure you have time on your hands and a mind to listen to the meanderings of proprietor Ranjit Madhavji who has many a tale to relate. He tells of how he shot the Dalai Lama without any film and yet managed to get invited to tea later on with his family and get amazingly candid shots. He tells of princes and stars who arrived here to have their portraits taken. If you were anyone of standing in this city, you had to have been to Hamilton Studios. In 1958, Madhavji a cloth trader from Kalbadevi, acquired the premise from Sir Victor Sassoon who set up the studio in 1928, modelled after a London studio. “I gave them a blank cheque and never looked back at it,” he recalls. “Here, there was a big staff suited and booted, tie and all, so I also got into a tie.” And gradual experience and diligence took care of the rest.

A believer in old fashioned, detailed photography, Madhavji takes 45-50 minutes for a click. He of course only uses manual cameras.
“I prefer to do it my way,” he maintains. “ I prefer to have 10 lights in front of me and I use every light. I use only Tungsten lighting. Since the bulbs are not available, I went to Chor Bazaar and got the bulbs. I switched to Minolta years ago and when the film was not available, I bought up whatever I could find and stored it in the fridge.” Antique flash bulbs, huge in dimension and lined with silver paper, lie scattered on the Victorian carved table in the high ceilinged space, that forever retains its antiquated charm and presents an ode to the history of the city’s personages, big and small.

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