Search results for: 'Experience the Legacy of S H Raza'

Madhvi Parekh was born and raised in Sanjaya, a village in Gujarat. Though she is self-taught and took up painting only in 1964, inspired by her artist-husband Manu Parekh, art remained a part of her consciousness through childhood memories, her family’s rituals such as the traditional floor designs of rangoli, popular folk stories, and simple village life. While expecting their first child, Parekh’s husband gifted her a book on drawing exercises by Paul Klee, and soon she was taking the first steps towards creating her own art vocabulary. Learn More

A guided walk by urban history researcher Sujaan Mukherjee, uncovering the forgotten histories of monuments and sites around the Indian Museum, and their changing fates after Independence.

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Born in Nashik, Maharashtra, M. S. Joshi studied at Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in the 1930s. Joshi combined his training in academic realism with a sense of vitality, precision and aesthetics to reveal India’s rich cityscapes and landscapes in his watercolour and gouache works. There was immense depth in the rendering of his subjects, which included people, places, architectural elements, all done in a subdued yet textured palette. Learn More

One of the most important South Asian artists of the twentieth century, Syed Ahmed Sadequain Naqvi was born in Amroha in Uttar Pradesh in pre-Partition India and grew up in a family that highly valued calligraphy. He moved to Delhi in 1944 to work as a calligrapher-copyist with All India Radio where his elder brother was also working, but shifted to Pakistan following Partition. Moving between jobs for a few years in his new homeland, Sadequain devoted himself fully to the arts in 1955 after his fame as an artist rose with the patronage of the country’s prime minister, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Learn More

Born in Lyallpur in 1933 in pre-Partition Punjab, Ved Nayar’s earliest creative urges were born out of his close engagement with the jungle around his house. He moved to Delhi as a teenager following Partition and obtained a B.A. degree from the city’s St. Stephen’s College in 1952. He then joined Delhi Polytechnic in 1957 and participated in Lalit Kala Akademi’s national exhibition the same year. Learn More

A graduate of Delhi College of Art, Rameshwar Broota has been an art teacher throughout his career. He was a lecturer at his alma mater before moving to Jamia Millia Islamia University and then Sarda Ukil College, eventually taking over as head of department at Triveni Kala Sangam, a position he has held since 1984. Learn More

Twenty years after India’s independence, Films Division, the government’s documentary and propaganda filmmaking body, was seeking to re-invent itself. It had the mandate of recording the nation’s history on film. It was also a project of moulding the citizen through films that were screened in cinema theatres, before the entertainment feature. The films covered varied subjects from development, self-reliance, social issues, to art and culture, making them an invaluable archive of the Indian state’s record of the nation’s history as a modern, progressive nation. The films remained largely unpopular, like homework, among the unwilling audience of people who waited for the entertainment film to follow the documentary. Learn More

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Pebet is a ‘phunga wari’, a type of traditional fireside story told to Manipuri children by their grandparents. Directed by the renowned theatre practitioner Heisnam Kanhailal and performed first in 1975, it subverts the familiar icon of the bird and the cat to comment on political and cultural indoctrination.

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A guided walk of the first free circulating public library of India—Uttarpara Public Library—with researcher Sarbajit Mitra, traversing the history of regional literary cultures, and sifting through their vast archive to delve into the vibrant world of illustrated periodicals in colonial Bengal, followed by a poetry reading by Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee. 

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A musical evening at Prasad Tagore Palace, the heritage residence of Pramantha Tagore, preceded by a conversation with Sujaan Mukherjee about the Tagore family’s ties to music, theatre, and art patronage.

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The medieval ages saw the rise in India and parts of Asia of philosophical, theological, cultural, literary and visual manifestations that derived from diverse faiths but with one aim—to attain enlightened liberation. Its resistance to Brahmanical texts and hegemony resulted in the creation of geometrical aesthetics that were interpreted by way of texts, paintings, and architecture and had a monumental impact on society. At the centre of its geometric configurations—the triangle, the square, and the circle—lay the idea of Creation itself, the source of primal energy that could to be diverted towards a higher consciousness, and all universe was manifest in this. Learn More