Matrix and Mould

Following Balani’s concert, the festival opened with two exhibitions focused on printmaking. A landmark collaborative show opened at the College of Art, Delhi, titled ‘Matrix and Mould’ that sought to revisit the innovative pedagogical exercises that were formulated at the College in its post-partition years when new faculty included migrant artists such as Dhanraj Bhagat and B. C. Sanyal, along with others like Somnath Hore and Jagmohan Chopra, who established printmaking at the College—often in the teeth of scarcity and lack of resources. Experimental styles and techniques were favoured, turning the classroom into an open co-working space that relied on exchange and collaboration, across personnel, material and medium. From its early faculty, the show highlighted the works of students who would later come back to teach at their alma mater, such as Anupam Sud, Kanchan Chander and Ananda Moy Banerji. After the opening of the exhibition, Banerji joined Shukla Sawant and some faculty members from the College of Art, to discuss the historical trajectories of printmaking in post-independent Delhi.

The other exhibition that opened at Bikaner House, featured iconic aquatints made the travelling artists Thomas and William Daniell.

Infinite Plate

As part of ‘Matrix and Mould’, a printmaking workshop was conducted by the eminent printmaker Santosh Jain at the College of Art.

Picturing Present-Pasts

From printmaking, we moved to the world of images made for children to disseminate historical consciousness. From comic books like Amar Chitra Katha to contemporary narratives written for children, panelists Aparna Vaidik and Samina Mishra discussed the political nature of such imagery and the ideological work they do in constructing broader concepts like the nation and patriotism in the minds of children who consume them. Along with this discussion, there was an archival display of a comic made by the Kashmiri artist G. R. Santosh, that also blurred the boundaries between pedagogy and propaganda as it sought to advocate for the merits of early childhood nutrition and celebrate the effects of the ‘Green Revolution’ in India.

Charting the Cosmos

Taking inspiration from the Daniells, who had painted the Jantar Mantar soon after its building in the eighteenth century, our next stop was at the heart of Delhi as we pondered the strange shapes of the observatory and the many meanings the site and its surroundings have accrued over time. Giles Tillotson gave a comprehensive lecture on the patron of the observatory, Maharaja Jai Singh II, and the various political subtexts that swirled under its making. The site is more commonly thought of as a gathering point for protests today, marking just one instance of the ways in which the city’s meaning shifts over time with changing patterns of use and accommodation.

The Community Museum

For our next stop, we reached the Baba Bagel Singh Sikh Heritage Multimedia Museum, situated inside the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. Museums like these have proliferated over the last decade or so, with the Sikh community employing these spaces to educate the general public about their community’s contribution to nation-building. A walkthrough of the museum’s collection of academic realist paintings was conducted by the historian Kanika Singh, who was accompanied by the artist Arpana Caur, two of whose works are presently on view at the museum. As questions of location and narrative emphasis were brought up during the walkthrough, we travelled to Caur’s own Museum that featured a wider variety of styles and mediums engaging with Sikh history and her own modernist response to the tradition.

Mediating the Mohalla

From Gurdwara Bangla Sahib and the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature at Siri Fort, we moved to the dustier, more neglected edges of Delhi in Jamia Nagar. Growing around the nucleus of Jamia Millia Islamia, the neighbourhood has developed over decades through layers of migration, community, education and everyday life. Walking from the Metro station towards the banks of the Yamuna, we traced some of these histories and encountered the social infrastructures that have shaped the area. In doing so, the walk drew attention to forms of urban development that often remain outside Delhi’s dominant narratives of infrastructure and progress, while revealing the dense and distinctive cultural environment that has emerged in their place.

The University and its Publics

Following our walk around the neighbourhood we turned up at the Institute of Objective Studies the next day, situated inside Jogabai Lane, as we tried to understand the history of Jamia Millia Islamia itself. Thematic presentations were made by Anab Naiyer, a scholar who spoke about the educational magazine published out of Jamia called Payam-e-talim; Ghazala Jamil, who discussed the neighbourhood through the lens of poetry and poets like Agha Shahid Ali, whose father taught at the University and lived in the neighbourhood, and Fehmida Riaz, the Pakistani poet who was in residence at the University; and Jamal Kidwai, who remembered the crucial decade of the 1980s when the University and the neighbourhood were caught in the midst of political tensions gripping the country which would ultimately shape the future of Jamia Millia as the minority institution familiar to us today.

Mapping a Madrasa

The Hauz Khas madrasa, established in the fourteenth century under Firuz Shah Tughlaq, offered the earliest model of a relationship between educational infrastructure and urban planning, the thematic lens that we applied for this edition. Situated around a large reservoir and integrated with a mosque, tombs, gardens and other civic structures, it brought together learning, worship, water infrastructure and public space. Knowledge was encountered not in isolation but through a built environment in which intellectual, social and everyday life were interconnected. Historians Sudeshna Guha and Amar Farooqui explored the trajectories through which the space revealed itself to influential outsiders during the fourteenth century, which included the conqueror Timur, as well as poets and administrators who celebrated its paradisiacal dimensions. Their site lectures were accompanied by a hands-on exercise that taught people to look closely and critically at archaeological remains.

Kitaab Chowk

Beyond museums, universities and workshops, we also wanted to ask what a radically reimagined library might make possible in creating communities around education and the sharing of knowledge. The Community Library Project, with its presence across different neighbourhoods, offered precisely the kind of intentional community space we had in mind. Working with the directors and volunteers of its Khirki Extension branch, we commissioned Social Design Collaborative to create an installation that could extend the library beyond its physical premises and into the neighbourhood. Conceived as a mobile, activated library, Kitaab Chowk travelled through the area over two days, attracting curious glances, prompting questions and becoming a lively node of exchange. Around it, conversations, storytelling sessions and informal encounters brought together children and adults, transforming the act of reading into a shared, neighbourhood-based experience.

Ghalib and the Moderns

For our final stop, we arrived at the Ghalib Academy in Nizamuddin, an institution established in the 1960s with the aim of foregrounding the role of Muslim minorities in the making of a secular nation in postcolonial India. This vision was expressed, in part, through the Academy’s commissioning of modern artworks by leading artists of the period, including M. F. Husain, Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, Shiavax Chavda, Biren De and the Pakistani artist Sadequain. A walkthrough of the collection, led by Kamayani Sharma and the Academy’s secretary, Aqil Ahmed, opened up these works within the histories of the institution and its cultural context. It also offered an opportunity to encounter a rare copy of Muraqqa-e-Chughtai, M. A. R. Chughtai’s richly illustrated volume based on the poetry of Ghalib. The evening concluded at the historic Chausath Khamba complex adjoining the Academy, where historian Rana Safvi and vocalist Rene Singh brought together music and poetry in a fitting culmination to the festival.