Young Innovators of India: Meet Arjun Jain - Founder of Red House Cultural Center - in-depth profile
MEET ARJUN JAIN
This article is part of a series: Young visionaries in India:
Artists, risk-takers, and innovators
Transformations: From Nuclear Physicist to Artist -
from Electronic Factory to Cultural Center -
The Story of Red House and Its Founder
Some of the many faces of Arjun Jain
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Transformation is not a simple task. Arjun Jain has worked with passion and vision, transforming his family factory, himself, and his community in the aftermath of the Covid tragedy that hit India “worse than a nuclear bomb” in April and May of 2021. Indeed, in his own words, he aims even higher:
“We're determined to do no less than transform our India with beauty.”
IIT Logo, from Wikipedia
Jain’s journey from nuclear physics graduate at one of India’s most prestigious universities, (Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Roorkee) to artist, manager, and proprietor of a budding cultural center involved growing pains and human sweat.
I met Arjun and his sister Sunaina on a hot Thursday morning at the Red House Cultural Center, located in South East Delhi. They are the team behind the center that has been operating since July 2022, offering a wide range of programs following the ideals of a handful of select thinkers that continue to inspire Jain and help shape his vision of the Red House and its mission in Delhi.
Over a year ago, in July 2022, Jain inaugurated the Red House Cultural Center in South Delhi, on the grounds of what used to be the Teen Murti Electronics Factory. A mere glance at Red House’s Instagram page gives a sweeping idea of its eclectic offerings over the past year, ranging from drama, dance, calligraphy, chamber music, to film-screenings, both indoor and outdoor. Additionally, hands-on workshops have introduced participants to an assortment of skills and hobbies including Kangra miniature painting, Kintsugi, Cyanotype, pottery, bookbinding, sushi-making, yogini dance therapy, indian street games, paper restoration, as well as various painting techniques inspired by renowned artists.
The room we met in had been the main stage for the assembly of IFTs (Intermediate Frequency Transformers) from the early sixties and until the family-owned-and-operated business shut its doors for good in May 2022, and let go of nine out of the ten remaining employees. The Teen Murti Factory was the brainchild of Jain’s grandfather, Ratan Lal Jain. It was later run by Jain’s father and uncle in the eighties; the siblings navigated it during the boom precipitated by the advent of color television coinciding with the Asian Games being held in Delhi, making color TVs in even higher demand. As more sophisticated computer technology arrived, the Jain brothers witnessed an “almost overnight” decline in demand for a couple of decades followed by a recovery period that came to a tragic halt following Arjun’s father’s precipitous death from Covid in May 2021.
It is not often that one meets people to whom books serve as a compass and a manual that shape their lives. When I asked Arjun how his idea for the Red House began, I did not expect a walk through art history and philosophy. His “influencers” are neither family members nor instagram celebrities. The thirty-two-year old with the earnest, contemplative eyes is influenced by such visionaries as John Ruskin, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Tagore, John Keats, Laurie Baker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William Morris, finding that each philosopher leads and feeds onto the next.
Jain sees many parallel chains of events in his life that led him to where he is today. The journey began in 2014, when the young IIT Roorkee student attended, at the Jaipur Literary festival, a talk by Ray Monk, biographer of the mathematics philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Just as Wittgenstein questioned and rebelled against the foundations of mathematical thinking of the time, Jain began to question his whole approach to and study of physics. He dug deeper into Wittgenstein, and found him to be a disciple of Tolstoy’s.
“...which then of course led me to read Tolstoy’s work as well. So after graduation I decided that the first thing I wanted to do was to go to Russia. Which I did. I went to Yasnaya Polyana where Tolstoy was born. This is a village 200km south of Moscow.”
On his second visit to Yasnaya Polyana, he secured a gig as a lumberjack at the Tolstoy Estate for two months, picked up a bit of Russian, and read the only English language book at the Estate’s library, a book about John Ruskin. As hard as it is to imagine this small-framed theoretical physicist-turned-artist as a lumberjack, it is a testament to his adaptability and capability of navigating the real world, motivated and inspired by his philosophical impulse.
“It (Russia) is a very spiritual place for me. Especially this particular village... This was 2014. I was reading a lot of Tolstoy’s later works that are more religious and philosophical. The type of books that Gandhi read. The Kingdom of God is within you, A confession, and How much land does a man need?”
In Jain’s own words, “Wittgenstein led me to Tolstoy, Tolstoy led me to Ruskin.” He also met Gandhi via Tolstoy, met William Morris via Ruskin, and lived in the realm of these thinkers' philosophies, humanitarianism, and aesthetic concepts.
After graduation from IIT, Jain decided to immerse himself in painting, and recreate himself as an artist. This was not a self-evident path. It was a direct result of his collision with Wittgenstein that caused the deviation in his life course. Although he had dabbled in art in childhood, he had never received formal training. He grew up in a very science-oriented milieu, both at home and at school. His grandfather and both his parents were formally trained physicists. The community he comes from, the Jains, are historically renowned for their success in trade and commerce, and that is the direction his grandfather and father ventured in, regardless of their scientific training. At school, he was successful at science and was encouraged in its pursuit. There is no specific art teacher that inspired him, no friendly aunt who took the young Arjun to museums or cultural centers. The moment of impact, Jain ascertains, can clearly be traced to that lecture about Wittgenstein, January 18, 2014.
Throughout college, he kept a visual diary of his entire five years on one canvas. He exhibited in galleries around Delhi, including the well-known Habitat Center, despite his lack of any formal art training. He found himself dissatisfied with the art scene in Delhi and felt the need to leave India for a while for the sake of his intellectual and artistic development. He applied to the highly respected Central Saint Martins Art School which forms part of the University of the Arts, London. He enrolled in a two-year art course specifically designed for scientists interested in the arts. As bespoke as that sounded, Jain withdrew midway.
“I found it (the course) to be too modern for my taste. There was nothing Ruskinian about it. Nothing classical. Nothing spiritual. So again: Whatever I was looking for I could not find there, so I left. I had vowed not to linger and prolong things in my life that were clearly not my path.”
His time in England connected him further to John Ruskin in another interesting chain of events. That lone English language book Jain read at Yasnaya Polyana, was Ruskin and Tolstoy, a pamphlet written by Dr. Stuart Eagles. Jain corresponded with the author to express his appreciation of the book and that prompted an email exchange between the two. At the time, Eagles was secretary of the Guild of St. George, a charity organization established by John Ruskin in 1871 as a “Utopian body”. Eagles invited Jain for a weekend at “Ruskin Land at Wyre Forest”, a property managed by the Guild. Learning about Ruskin and his influence on Tolstoy left a deep impression on Jain who soon became a Guild Companion and now serves as the first International Young Companions' Representative on the organization’s board. He also, coincidentally, lived on John Ruskin Street in Elephant and Castle.
England and Ruskin connected him to William Morris and his design of Red House in Bexleyheath after the ideas and philosophy of John Ruskin.
Romantic poetry was another strand that inspired him, especially John Keats’. He visited Hampstead Heath on weekends, milled about John Keats’ house and neighborhood, reading and writing poetry inspired by Keats and Rabindranath Tagore, and using Shakespearean English. He compiled a year’s worth of his poetry and self-published them a la William Morris’s Kelmscott Press - namely, taking pains to make each page aesthetically pleasing and selecting fonts deliberately. He used linocuts, a type of print similar to woodcuts but with greater flexibility.
“I did the designs myself. The font that we used was inspired by William Morris’s Golden typeface which was inspired by another calligrapher. I took it from Morris and Morris took it from (Nicolas) Jenson…” - a fifteenth Century French calligrapher working in Venice.
Jain got back to India in 2016 and worked at the factory helping his father who was now running the business solo. Arjun’s uncle had started his own export company soon after the millennial slump.
“My father was very keen on continuing with this business. I think he was the more sentimental of the two brothers. He always used to tell me that until his death, profit or loss, this is what he wanted to do for the entirety of his life.”
It didn’t take Arjun long to understand the technical aspects of the business, given his scientific background. Alongside his work at the factory, he started construction and beautification of the factory; The property was his experimental playground, and he transformed the landscape using John Ruskin’s architectural principles and Willam Morris’s aesthetic designs.
“I thought architecture to be the perfect merge of art and science. I found this to be quite satisfying. Gradually I started teaching myself how to work with brick and mortar. My father was very encouraging. I had no idea where I was going with this at the time, but this was my laboratory. I also experimented with the use of lime.”
He single-handedly built and designed walls and gothic arches, using John Ruskin’s sense of design as his guide. He also learned from “the Gandhi of architecture”, Laurie Baker, a British architect working in India, who championed building economically so as to make it universally affordable. Baker’s Book, Brickwork, was the manual for Jain as he designed the space and garden with a mixture of brick and lime, using a configuration that required sixty percent of the usual amount of bricks, without compromising structure and stability. He relied on a brick masonry technique known as Rat Trap bond, perfected by Baker. Jain later trained two masons in this highly specialized and unusual set of skills.
During the Covid years, life came to a halt in Delhi. People were dying by the hundreds daily – oxygen and hospital beds were unavailable. When Jain’s father succumbed to Covid in May 2021, Arjun came face to face with the darker side of human nature. The price of oxygen was multiplied tenfold overnight for those lucky enough to secure it to save their loved ones. Rogue chemists were selling empty tanks of oxygen to desperate family members who suddenly found themselves helpless regardless of their monetary assets. Money, for once, couldn’t buy everything, and, at times, only secured fraud oxygen tanks that led to death at home or on the street or in an ambulance awaiting a hospital bed.
“It was hell here. I think it was worse than if a nuclear bomb had exploded. I remember that one weekend where there was no oxygen anywhere in the city. I was maybe making a thousand phone calls a day. If your friends or relatives did not respond, the first thought that came to your mind is that maybe they are dead - that they were not there anymore.
I had just started learning Sitar from a teacher in the neighborhood where we live. Both he and his father passed away the same week as my father. Very strange times.”
After his father’s death, the whole family rallied together. His uncle came back to support them and help run the factory, taking care of debts, securing payments. It was a great learning curve for Arjun at the time as he had never managed a company before. Again, he found himself confronted with down-to-earth matters that he was not accustomed to.
Even though the need to close the factory became self-evident, it was nevertheless a heart-wrenching decision. It signified letting go of the remaining employees, witnessing the place that was a constant in their lives come to a halt, and, hardest of all, closing the door on his father’s legacy.
The family met daily to decide on the next steps. His mom and sister were very supportive. The idea solidified for a cultural center that brings beauty and community together after the rough Covid years, to counteract the isolation of the pandemic and the lack of empathy and evil witnessed during the height of the Covid months. Jain needed an anchor to regain his faith in humankind.
The Red House opened its doors for the first time on July 30, 2022, with a film screening of the movie Mango Dreams, set in India and directed by John Upchurch, a Canadian director. Both the director and the cinematographer, Nouman Ahsan, attended the inaugural screening, and held a Q & A with the audience of forty plus members.
The Red House has remained in line with Jain’s vision. It has hosted nights in honor of the visionaries that have inspired him - a Tolstoy night, with a virtual visit to Yasnaya Polyana, a Charkha weekend to honor Gandhi's birthday, and a brick and mortar workshop a la Laurie Baker. It has hosted programs to honor Amrita Sher-Gil, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Gustav Klimt. It has sought to make available to the public programming that was useful or beautiful, and, in most cases, both.
I had first met Arjun in Feb. 2023, when he gave the brick and mortar workshop, followed by a heritage walk to the fourteenth Century Tughlaqabad fort of the Tughlaq dynasty. There, Arjun pointed out how lime had been used as mortar since ancient times. Out of context, I did not see, at the time, how that fit into the world of the philosophers that Arjun has been submerged in since 2014.
In September 2023, Red House hosted a murder mystery party for Game Night. They have also held a group art exhibition on works produced using Artificial Intelligence, ranging from visual arts, photographs, textiles, installations, and mixed and digital media. Recently, they have added a film festival to their repertoire. No one can accuse Red House of being stuck in the 19th Century, regardless of its inspirational sources!
If he had a magic wand and no financial restraints, Arjun’s vision for Red House is for “it to come to full swing, to be bursting with good people at every event, for programming to be strong and meaningful, to be making a real difference, culturally. For people to consume art collectively as a community and to derive inspiration from it.” He would like Red House to be not just a cultural center, but a community center, and eventually, he would like it to be involved in health care in some fashion, a concept he has yet to elaborate on.
Even as India leads global lunar exploration and hosts the G20 summit in 2023, a lot of work is nevertheless still needed in the social and cultural realms. Idealists like Arjun Jain, with feet firmly planted in the ground, capable of sweating with brick and mortar, felling trees, and providing creative cultural programing, offer the hope of indeed “transforming India with beauty”.
Useful Websites:
Laurie Baker : Architect's Official Website - India and Gandhiji
Master Builder - Laurie Baker Eulogy in the Times of India
Музей «Ясная Поляна» Tolstoy Estate and Museum
Rat Trap Bond Of Brick – Advantages And Disadvantages
Useful Books:
THE GARDEN
Faithful to the Jain traditions: The Red House Cafe - named THE COILWINDERS’ ARMS - collects donations for the bird hospital.
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