When Kabiguru Spoke: Rare Speeches from the Rathindranath Tagore Estate

Among the lesser-known archival treasures preserved in the estate of Rathindranath Tagore are several rare speeches of Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore, some of which are believed to have been written and corrected by Tagore himself. These speeches are important not only as historical documents, but it also carries the voice of an ageing poet-philosopher reflecting upon art, education, spiritual crisis of the modern civilization, and the changing social atmosphere of Bengal and Santiniketan during the final years of his life. 

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1922

1922 seems to be quite the pivotal year in Indian art. 

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Satyajit Ray, Bhanu Athaiya and Amol Palekar: A Shared Artistic Sensibility

The audiences who wept through Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, with its kash flowers, rain-soaked landscapes and the first stirring of Apu’s world; who watched Meena Kumari as Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, where Bhanu Athaiya’s painterly sense allowed saris, borders and translucent layers to carry emotion through the greys of the black-and-white screen; who recognised themselves in Amol Palekar’s gentle, unheroic presence in Chhoti Si Baat and Gol Maal, were responding to three artists whose work had entered public memory through film.

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Rathindranath Tagore's Theatrical Treasures

Among the handwritten treasures once preserved in the estate of Rathindranath Tagore, is a fascinating, dramatic manuscript dated simply “22nd Poush, 1322” (7th January 1916). Written on both sides of the pages, the manuscript appears to have been intended for stage performance. One of the plays of this manuscript, Phalguni has a strong resemblance to Rabindranath Tagore's celebrated dance-drama of the same name, suggesting that these manuscripts may represent adaptations of the original text. Its dramatic structure, language, and humor speak vividly of the cultural milieu from which it emerged.

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Persianate Sculptures

This research note concerns the two gilded bronze sculptures discovered at the Mangaldas Estate, whose provenance suggests they were likely acquired during the estate’s principal period of art collecting in the mid to late nineteenth century.

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Bhanu Athaiya and Early Indian Modernism: Steps Towards Abstraction in Post-Independence India

This is a research note on early post-independence modernism (1951-1952) and steps towards abstraction, with a specific focus on Bhanu Athaiya.

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The Battle of Hyderabad by George Jones RA? A Newly Discovered Version Under Study

A sweeping battlefield unfolds across the canvas, the vast sky painted a dull orange. At the centre stands General Sir Charles Napier on an elevated ground, surrounded by the Queen’s 22nd Regiment. The terrain breaks into dry riverbeds and trenches hurl with haunting sounds of intense combat. A fraction of the troops continue to press forward through the uneven landscape while another navigates a distant plain. 

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Prabhakar Barwe - His Language and Motifs

Investigating Prabhakar Barwe

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Who Was Hari Ambadas Gade? Progressive Artists’ Group Painter and Indian Modernist Explained

A founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group and one of the first Indian modernists to incorporate abstract expressionism into their artworks post-independence, Hari Ambadas Gade is known for his abstract landscape compositions and vibrant colour palette. Working against the dominance of western academic realism under the British Raj, he developed a vivid, structurally driven visual language that remains singular within modern Indian art. 

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A portrait of Annasaheb Rajopadhye's mother

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.

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Leathercraft at Santiniketan

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. 

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Becoming Bal Gandharva: Voice, Stage, and the Making of an Icon

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.

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Nandalal Bose’s Radha Krishna: An Epitome of the Bengal School

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. 

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Saraswati in Two Artistic Worlds: Sunayani Devi and Baburao Painter

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.

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Marie-Louise Chassany: The Artist and the Muse

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.

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The Kashmiri Jamawar: Cloth, Craft, and Cultural Memory

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.

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The Mangaldas Nathubhai Silverware

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.”

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Santiniketan in Correspondence

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.

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Jamini Roy’s Modernism

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. 

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Between Sydney and Calcutta: Jamini Roy, Oscar Edwards, and a Letter (1955)

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.

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