In Kolhapur, often called Kalapur, a city of the arts, artistic and cultural activity flourished in the early twentieth century, with artists such as M. V. Dhurandhar, Abalal Rahiman, and Baburao Painter shaping its cultural life, as modern visual technologies such as painting, photography, and cinema took root in the state.
Read More
Leatherwork in Santiniketan originated from a broader movement to revive the traditional crafts of rural Bengal and reintroduce skilled occupations to village life. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore turned his attention to the villages surrounding Santiniketan and began to organise a programme of rural reconstruction that placed work, skill, and livelihood at the centre of education. In the early 1920s, at Sriniketan, he established a rural reconstruction centre where agriculture and village industries were developed as regular institutional activity. Craft entered this programme as part of daily labour. Weaving, carpentry, pottery, dyeing, and leatherwork were taught alongside cultivation and rural service, and workshops became working spaces where students and village artisans learned trades. Speaking about the purpose of this effort, Rabindranath expressed the principle that guided the work: "The drama of national self-expression could not be real if rural India were banished."Within this programme, leatherwork was developed through the initiative of Rathindranath Tagore. In 1928, during his stay in England, he began studying leatherwork and developed a lasting interest in the craft. After returning to Santiniketan later that year, he introduced leatherwork to students and continued to practise it within the training system at Sriniketan. In 1930, after formal vocational instruction in Europe with Pratima Devi, he established a regular leather workshop at Silpa Sadan. Ink and Embossing on Leather by RathindranathTagore From 1932, the workshop produced a growing range of leather goods—handbags, book covers, portfolios, trays, and domestic objects—made from vegetable-tanned goat and sheepskin and decorated through embossing, stencil work, and batik techniques. These objects soon appeared in exhibitions and institutional displays, carrying the name Santiniketan and establishing a recognizable tradition of leather craftsmanship rooted in the revival of rural craft.
Read More
Narayan Shripad Rajhans was born in 1888 in Satara district, into a Chitpavan Brahmin family deeply steeped in music and theatre. In the household and within its immediate circle, music was part of devotional and everyday practice—his mother sang, and his maternal grandfather, Appa Shastri, a Sanskrit scholar, recited the Puranas at Baba Maharaj’s gatherings. It was within this environment that his earliest leanings toward the stage took root.
Read More
Radha and Krishna have appeared in Indian painting for centuries, their story retold across manuscript illustration, temple painting, and courtly miniature traditions. In the early twentieth century, the Bengal School sought to reshape the language of modern Indian painting. Instead of following the heavily modelled realism taught in colonial art schools, its artists turned to earlier Indian traditions—Ajanta murals, sculpture, and miniature painting—for inspiration.
Read More
When the Orientalist William Jones wrote his hymn to Saraswati in the late eighteenth century, he described the goddess as the “patroness of fine arts, especially of Musick and Rhetorick. (archaic)” Reflecting on the poetic tradition surrounding her, Jones remarked that it evokes the Ragmala—the “Necklace of Musical Modes,” which he called “the most beautiful union of Painting with poetical Mythology and the genuine theory of Musick.” [1] His observation captures something essential about Saraswati’s place in Indian culture: she belongs at once to music, language, and the visual arts.
Read More
Marie-Louise Chassany (Chassagny) was a French painter in the Paris art circles of the early 1930s and, for many around her, a muse. She shared a studio with Amrita Sher-Gil in Montparnasse and became a compelling presence within that artistic milieu. Tall and slender, “like a Giacometti,” [1] as one contemporary recalled, she carried an enigmatic air that drew the attention of the painters around her. Yet Chassany was not merely an inspiration for others. She was herself an artist whose work Sher-Gil admired, once likening it to the strange sensitivity of early Pablo Picasso alongside the intensity of Chaïm Soutine.
Read More
Jamawar textiles emerged from a long history of exchange across Persia and South Asia, shaped by trade, migration, and courtly patronage. First circulating through Persianate networks, these densely patterned textiles travelled into the Indian subcontinent, where they were absorbed into local systems of making and dress. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kashmir had become the most important centre for jamawar production.
Read More
In nineteenth-century Bombay, silver occupied a central place in the homes of the city’s leading families. More than tableware, it marked entry into a way of life shaped by inheritance and continuity, giving material form to the old notion of being “born with a silver spoon.”
Read More
At Santiniketan, correspondence played an essential role in artistic life. Letters, postcards, and small drawings circulated steadily between students, teachers, administrators, and friends, creating a working network through which ideas, images, and observations moved across distances. These exchanges were not incidental. They were closely aligned with Rabindranath Tagore’s educational vision, in which learning extended beyond the classroom into daily life, travel, and conversation, and in which artistic practice was embedded within lived experience rather than confined to formal instruction.
Read More
Why Jamini Roy's Visual Language was Truly Avant-Garde This discussion examines Jamini’s invented language (of modernism) and what makes him a creative genius. This examines his crucial contribution to Modernism in India / the beginnings of true modernism in India.
Read More
In the mid-1950s, Jamini Roy was working from his studio in Ballygunge, South Calcutta, within walking distance of his home. He showed little inclination to travel. Contemporary accounts note that he rarely left the city and routinely declined invitations to exhibitions and public appearances that would have taken him elsewhere. Yet one of his paintings hung thousands of miles away, on the dining-room wall of a house in Coogee, a coastal suburb of Sydney.
Read More
There was a time when Amal Chandra Home Ray, known to peers as simply Amal Home, was a name familiar to Bengal’s cultural, literary, and political elite. Described by writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri as a “showman, an impresario,”[1] Amal was an elegant, erudite, complex figure whose legacy today lives on in scattered memories, faded photographs, and the quiet efforts of his daughter, Amalina Dutta, to restore him to public memory.
Read More
If one were to visit Lalitha Lajmi’s home in her later years, one would find a space that quietly mirrored the artist herself. The walls were defining spaces in Lajmi's living room that spoke volumes about her creative personality. On the round table, a half-painted watercolour waited patiently, flanked by brushes and metal cups, its silent companions in the long hours of her nocturnal practice.
Read More
The next chapter in the multi-part auction series of The Estate of Sir Mangaldas Nathubhai turns to the interiors of 1930s Bombay — a city at the height of its Art Deco transformation. As cinemas, apartment blocks, and seafront promenades rose along Marine Drive and Colaba, this new design language entered Bombay’s homes. Within the Mangaldas family residences at Girgaum, Malabar Hill, and later Commonwealth, these cabinets, wardrobes, and vanities reflected the same spirit of progress, precision, and elegance that defined the era.
Read More
Few artists in India's modern history have lived a life as inspiring as Satish Gujral's. Losing his hearing at a very tender age, he transformed silence into creative expression. A student of both the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and the Sir J.J School of Art in Bombay, Satish Gujral's creative journey spanned painting, sculpture, mural and even architecture.
Read More
To be precise my garden is currently two flower pots but as any other Oval Maidan (Mumbai) or Central Park (NY) facing resident would say – the entire oval (park) is my garden!
Read More
The third chapter in the multi-part auction series of the Estate of Sir Mangaldas Nathubhai turns to the shelves of his Girgaum and Malabar Hill homes — the quiet centre of a cultivated Bombay life. Known to the city as a philanthropist and reformer, Sir Mangaldas was also a deliberate collector — one who read about what he acquired. His library was a place of study as much as of leisure: Hamlet beside The Grammar of Ornament, scripture beside travelogues, manuals of craft beside memoirs of empire.
Read More
From the humble lanes of Beliatore to the grand pages of Indian art history, Jamini Roy's life was a journey of artistic awakening. His artistic journey, deeply rooted in Bengal's folk traditions, reflects a bold departure from the Western academic styles. The following timeline translated from the Bengali text Jamini Roy: Jibonpanji, written by Debasish Mukhopadhyay, presents a chronological account of his life, education, and major achievements.
Read More
If the porcelain of the previous chapter revealed Sir Mangaldas Nathubhai’s eye for refinement, the timepieces and sculptural treasures in the family capture the rhythm and sentiment of his world. Within the family homes at Girgaum, Malabar Hill, and later Commonwealth, these pieces measured the passing of hours and reflected the family’s cosmopolitan curiosity. Passed down and faithfully wound through four generations, they speak of precision, devotion, and inherited grace.
Read More
Bhanu Athaiya often described herself simply as “a painter who came to cinema.” She carried the discipline of her art training into every film she worked on, treating costume as an extension of character. Actresses who worked with her — from Waheeda Rehman to Zeenat Aman — remembered how she would sit with them, discuss each scene, and ensure that they felt completely at ease. Rekha called her “a mentor, creative guide, and friend,” [1] while Meena Kumari’s first words to her on the set of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam were, “Bhanu, take care of me.” [2] That instinct — to listen, to understand, and to protect — would come to define her feminist practice.
Read More
Install this application on your home screen for quick and easy access
then 'Add to Home Screen'