NEW ARRIVALS

The paintings to which this volume serves as a catalogue belonged once to one or the other member of the Sarabhai family. But, compared to so many other distinguished collections which the family owned, and later gifted either to the Calico Museum of Textiles or the Sarabhai Foundation—of textiles, pichhwais, manuscripts, Jain artifacts, and south Indian bronzes, among them—they have remained little known till now.

There is no dominant theme that runs through the collection, and paintings may not, by themselves, have been a dominant passion in the life of the Sarabhais, but the works they collected reflect great discrimination and aesthetic sensibility. What is more, in the collection there is remarkable breadth and even the casual viewer would be struck by the well-rounded view it offers of the broad historical development of Indian painting. There are works here that come from as early as the...

In May 1893, a young attorney arrived at Durban on a year’s girmit (contract) to fight a lawsuit for Dada Abdullah and Co. Thrown out of the train to Pretoria, he was to taste the racial discrimination that plagued the land at that time.
In Durban and Beyond, Giriraj Kishore retraces the socio-political background of the 19th and 20th- century South Africa, highlighting the importance of the young attorney’s actions in South Africa and their monumental significance for humanity as a whole.
A flesh-and-blood human being, Mohandas is an average man who finds himself, along with many others, in a particular socio-historical configuration that sets him off on a life-altering path—towards becoming the Mahatma…

In the spring of 1808, Captain Hyder Jung Hearsey and Captain Felix Raper became the first visitors to get a view of the Garhwal Himalayas from the bend near Lal Tibba in Landour.
For centuries the Himalayan foothills have been summer retreats, where, the chaans or temporary thatch-shelters of the local hill folk were the only signs of human habitation. It was left to the British to come up, move in and claim all the credit for discovering hill-stations all over India.
In the early nineteenth century, Capt. Young, an intrepid official of the East India Company arrived in Landour, was charmed by the gentle climate an indispensable relief from the heat of the plains down below and built a shooting lodge in Mullingar…

India is a civilization of many images, a culture of many visual feasts, a tradition where the visible and the palpable are as important as the oral and the occurrent, where our highest truths are embodied not only in our erudite texts but in our kathas (stories) and gathas (songs), akritis (visual forms) and rachanas (compositions), rich with a variety of forms, shapes, designs and motifs.
Akriti to Sankriti: The Journey of Indian Forms explores some akritis that adorn both majestic and grand monuments, as well as common and ordinary spaces, and which through their purely visual language are pointers to not only our culture, but equally to brahma jnana or transcendental knowledge...