World of Indian Art

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.

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.

In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.

We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.

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.