World of Indian Art

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The first Durbar brought Delhi into the limelight in a concrete way. Its history, its monuments, crafts and other attractions were put on show not only for those coming to attend the durbar, but for those who read about it in the papers, books and guides that covered the subject. This pattern, considered successful in 1877, was repeated in 1903 and 1911 to mark the accession of Edward VII and George V. The political aims, in fact, reached their logical conclusion in the proclamation of the last Durbar, that Delhi would be ‘restored’ as the capital of India. The shift of capital and, soon after, the building of New Delhi, would bear the strong imprint of the political statement that had informed the very first Durbar – that of putting away the bitterness of the memory of 1857, and putting the British Indian Empire on a new footing, in its proper place in a long line of Indian empires with their capital at Delhi. The British Delhi Durbars have been the subject of much recent scholarly study and re-evaluation. The objects in this exhibition bring them materially present, through works by some of the leading artists and photographers of the period.

To view the exhibition

The exhibition locates itself historically in the larger cultural milieu of the 1970s and the excitement generated by the first-ever tantra art show in London at the time. It features the artworks, inspirations, and experiments, of artists that had a sustained relationship with tantra philosophy, its vivid, abstract sacred symbols, or their personal spiritual illuminations. Known as tantra, the mid-twentieth century saw a revival of interest and interpretations in this esoteric philosophy as a result of the counterculture movement that swept through the Western world that was seeking a humanitarian response to wars and rapid industrialisation that had dispossessed mankind from a social order that was increasingly under stress. An emotional and sacred quest drew people from all over the world to the Indian subcontinent in search of ‘answers’. Using elements of symbology, light, sound, word, consciousness, energy, and pro-creation, Indian modernists—in search of an abstract lexicon to call their own—responded with a range of ideas that have been represented here by G. R. Santosh, J. Swaminathan, Satish Gujral, Prabhakar Barwe, Shobha Broota, Biren De, Sohan Qadri, and P. T. Reddy. Their works can be interpreted as a visceral response to tantra with secret meanings that make these incandescent paintings glow with an otherness that is difficult to overlook. These compelling paintings expound the path to enlightenment and liberation in a language that is exciting, modern—and Indian.

To view the exhibition

In this edition of the Journal, we take a close look at the historical trajectories that women artists have charted for themselves under conditions not always of their own making. Art historian Soma Sen discusses the challenges and privileges faced by some of the earliest women artists from Bengal who found institutional support from experimental schools like Santiniketan. Memoirists like Rani Chanda wrote frequently about their association with artists like Mukul Dey (who was her brother), Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, but frequently obscured their own art practices which included ‘traditional’ work like alpona, or floor decoration, along with many woodcuts (see image right) that were widely reproduced in circulating journals of the time. We are carrying a translated excerpt from one of her essays on Bose.

Also featuring is an interview with the artist Gogi Saroj Pal who highlights some of the enduring influences on her work, a visit to Shobha Broota’s studio in New Delhi and the concluding part of our conversation with Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta on her book How Secular is Art?

Don’t forget to read our term of the month, which features an important process adopted by abstractionists like Shanti Dave, Bimal Dasgupta and Sohan Qadri: the ‘encaustic’.

Read here

In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist. India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.

A Place in The Sun, previously presented at our space in New York, aims to explore the remarkable contribution of women artists in the context of India’s twentieth century art, representing a selection of trailblazers, each of whom crafted a unique identity and practice. This exhibition surveys their artistic journeys, fighting prejudice and patriarchy at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing art, and uncovers the wide breadth of their interests including early abstract painting, the arduous regimen of making sculptures, and printmaking. Starting with Devyani Krishna, born five years after Sunayani Devi began painting in 1905 at age thirty, and Zarina Hashmi, born a decade before independence in 1947, the exhibition features 10 artists including Madhvi Parekh, Shobha Broota, Anupam Sud, Gogi Saroj Pal, Latika Katt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Navjot and Rekha Rodwittiya. As some sought to explicitly highlight feminist concerns in their work, addressing questions of gender, class, marginalization, and environments; others responded to folk, abstract, tantra or other aspects of art making.

Preview exhibition

DAG was established in New Delhi in 1993 and the capital has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the country’s largest and most respected art institution. It began in 1993 at Hauz Khas Village, which was then a sleepy outpost in the city with a historic character. But once the village became a trendy address for bars, lounges and fashion boutiques, DAG felt the need for a new location in keeping with its mandate of accessibility as well as the right environment in which to view art. The gallery, therefore, re-located to The Claridges in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi where its exhibitions proved a grand success.

To serve the ambitious nature of DAG’s growth, the need for larger galleries was soon felt. The new galleries are located on Janpath adjacent to Windsor Place within walking distance of hotels and the city’s shopping districts. With two galleries, it can host two simultaneous exhibitions or a single larger one. A rooftop terrace is ideal for events, conversations and other activities DAG may want to host from time to time.

DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.

The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.

Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!

Explore the collection online

The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.

Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.

Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.

See video

Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.

We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.