Kalighat Paintings, figurines, photographs of contemporary performances, contemporary painters and pat scrolls In the nineteenth century Kalighat Paintings recorded the changing world of Calcutta. Intergraphicality allows us to look at the introduction of western modernity and the links between inherited … Continued »
Periodicals Kanu Desai’s Wedding albums, Kalyan, photo studio magazines, film magazines Coming at the time of the swadeshi movement, anti colonial departures drove the content as well as artistic style in magazines. Gujarat’s Kanu Desai’s wedding albums drew from the … Continued »
Books People of India Series This study looks at the ‘People of India’ series of photographic plates, colonial post-cards and a series of pictures of the Monuments of India. The analysis attempts to look at the politics of seeing and … Continued »
Playing Cards A pack of playing cards displaying Indian National Congress leaders commemorating our independence affords us to investigate processes of nationhood, mobilization of national emblems, ‘Hindu’ nation, print capitalism and imagined communities. We examine content of these images via … Continued »
Post Cards Post cards of Indian Places The attendant information on the post cards displaying cities and hill stations of India inflects them with discourses around the 19th century obsessions; imperialism, landscape and photography. These annotations also discuss other junctures … Continued »
Posters Ravi Verma, Brijbasi, Islamic, South Indian Posters, Sivakasi, Ramdevji , Political posters of national leaders, educational charts The texts trace the aesthetic, social and political rhetoric that these posters draw from and contribute towards. The text thus draws arcs … Continued »
Jain hell scenes Jain hell scenes depict the pitfalls of making wrong choices. This Jain soteriological doctrine of ‘Karni-Bharni’ gets imported into mainstream Hinduism in the late nineteenth century. The annotations stay close to Christopher Pinney’s lecture on “Lessons from … Continued »