Maganbhai Patel
Pro-Chancellor, distinguished friends, colleagues, graduands and guests.
This year, as we are all aware, Coventry is bidding to become the 2021 City of Culture. Elements of Coventry’s culture are well documented and celebrated – Lady Godiva’s ride to spare the poor from crippling taxes, George Eliot and Philip Larkin, the Coventry Blitz, the car making industry. Even the ring road has its poets. However, a huge part of Coventry’s culture lies within its history of immigration, especially during the 1950s and 60s, when many people travelled to the city from all over the world to find work. Yet while newcomers made Coventry their home and their culture enriched everyone’s life, many of their stories remain untold.
One man that did capture the hope and aspirations of newcomers during that time was Maganbhai Patel. Known fondly in the Coventry Asian community as Masterji, he arrived in Coventry in 1951. Although he had been a school master in India, he started his new Coventry life working night shifts on a machine press at the General Electric Company. An income allowed him to buy his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, and attend a photography course at Lanchester College. His passion, hard work and dedication led to setting up the photography studio on Stoney Stanton Road, which would become his lifetime workplace.
It was here Masterji documented the lives of thousands of local families, many of whom, like him, had left their home countries for a new life in Coventry. His work gave them an artistic outlet, an opportunity to control the camera, to be seen as they wanted to be seen. For fifty years Masterji built up a visual history of Coventry’s Asian population and it is this rich archive that fills a gap in our understanding of Coventry’s past.
Although well-known in the Asian community, Masterji’s work was unknown to a wider audience until 2016, when he held his first exhibition at the age of 94, with the help of the City of Culture funding and the hard work of his daughter Tarla and local organisation Photo Archive Miners. During the past two years, six exhibitions, including New York and Mumbai, have attracted the attention of critics from all over the world and formed a central strand of Coventry’s City of Culture bid. His photographs are shortly to be available in his first photography book, whilst Coventry University and Masterji will produce a second book of his work, to go out to Coventry schools. This will inspire young people to look into their own family archives to tell more stories of unknown Coventry.
His photography studio is now proudly run by his son Ravindra and helped by his wife Ramaben, a testament to his presence in the community. It is still visited by the older generation, and now their families, as well as the new generation of people that have made Coventry their home. There is no doubt that Masterji’s work provides a window into a past which otherwise would be lost to future generations forever.
So, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the photographic heritage of Coventry, Coventry University, by decision of the Academic Board, has the privilege of conferring the Degree of Doctor of Arts, honoris causa, on Mr Maganbhai Patel.