Fine Arts Studio and Craft Workshops by Shinjini

Fine Arts Studio and Craft Workshops by Shinjini
Jaypee Kosmos, Sector 129, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201304, India

Fine Arts Studio and Craft Workshops by Shinjini stands in a quiet lane off Ballygunge Circular Road, Kolkata, where the clack of tram bells and the rustle of banyan leaves seep through louvred windows. The 1908 townhouse has been washed the colour of turmeric and lime; its arched doorway opens onto a walnut-floored foyer that smells faintly of gamaka, coconut oil, and fresh mountboard. Every vertical foot of wall is hung floor-to-ceiling—ragas transcribed into water-colour, miniature Kantha squares, and wire mobiles of extinct birds—each piece labeled with the month it was made, a hand-written anecdote, and the student’s first name only, preserving innocence.

To the left, the grandest room—once a Calcutta barrister’s ballroom—has become the Classical Listening Loft. Twin Devale tube amplifiers feed Quad Electrostatics cradled in teak frames; the popcorn ceiling is masked with felt quilting woven in the pattern of a Dhrupad tala cycle. Every Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Shinjini herself cues a vinyl—Hildegard, Mallikarjun Mansur, or Brian Eno—then dims the chandeliers to tungsten embers so participants can sketch their sonic contours on translucent rice paper. Those drawings are archived in a long glass sleeve that snakes down the hallway like an illuminated manuscript.

Across the corridor, three smaller studios pulse with more tactile music. Studio A houses six restored pedal looms; here the rhythmic thump of the shuttle echoes gamelan strata while Shinjini teaches “textile counterpoint,” translating Messiaen modes into warp and weft. Studio B is the experimental electronic lab: modular rigs, contact mics taped to terracotta pots, and a library of scratched sitar strings ready for granular sampling. Overhead, red lines of Bhairavi notation are UV-printed onto blue backlit glass, turning the space into a living, internally luminous scorecard.

The newest addition, the Annex, is only found if you follow the faint sound of tablas leaking from behind the kitchen pantry. Slide the faux-spice shelf aside and descend six steps into a low, white-washed brick cellar where eight-person gamelan circles happen on full-moon nights. Clay diyas float in a shallow lotus pond at the centre; their flicker projects Ravi Shankar’s face from a 1957 concert photograph in ripples across the vaulted roof, making the guru nod in perpetual approval.

Membership is by invitation or audition, yet every first Saturday the doors open to passers-by for a “Sound-Swap”: bring any noise—a broken typewriter, recoiling tape measure, your grandmother’s laughter recorded on phone—and leave with a paper score and a fired-clay rattle sculpted in its likeness. By midnight the town-house hums like a tanpura, reverberating down Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road until even buses seem to slow down, listening.

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