"The idea for this popped up years ago in December 2005," says cultural theorist, curator and poet Ranjit Hoskote, who, along with wife, cultural theorist and curator, Nancy Adajania, has curated the recent retrospective on Mehlli Gobhai—one of India's most distinguished and pathbreaking abstractionists. "It was a cold winter night in Gholvad, where we were bringing in the new year with Mehlli, as we had for the past 12 years, and he wasn't able to sleep. So, we gathered around the dining table, and both Ranjit and I proposed two exhibitions. One was a retrospective, a monographic show, which Ranjit thought was due a long time ago; and I proposed a show called Excluded Contents, where one would experience an expanded portrait of Mehlli's practice; his work in advertising, his illustrated children's books and his personal collection of artefacts, such as the mukhi dibba from Bengal, Chola stone sculpture and drawings from the Rajput ateliers," adds Adajania.

Gobhai, however, felt retrospectives should be posthumous—"He felt a sense of mortality associated with it. He had very mixed feelings about it…in a way we're honouring his wishes by holding this retrospective posthumously," thinks Hoskote. Comprising nearly 200 works of his art spanning over seven decades, this retrospective—titled Don't Ask Me About Colour—includes a range of art from his earliest drawings as a teenager in the 1940s and children's books commissioned to him during his time in advertising in J Walter Thompson in New York to the journals he amassed over time chronicling his travels and a film script written by him set in Konark and Varanasi.