The painters, who illustrated the Raaso in the south Gujarati style, rendered the sea with their imagination
The painters, who illustrated the Raaso in the south Gujarati style, rendered the sea with their imagination
For some odd reason the circus has been on my mind lately: not because of some childhood memories of which I have some but not many
I haven’t read it myself, but someone narrated to me a story by U.R. Anantamurthy once in which the writer speaks feelingly about the two very different worlds inhabited by men and women of the same family in a traditional, well-to-do...
ONE knows that memories grow faint with time, and giving honour where it is due is not, in general, what we are good at. But the fact that few even know that there lived a man called Bhai Ram Singh,...
I might well have spoken of the subject on another occasion, but the patka, "that long and elegant strip of textile which adorned nearly every noble waist in India once", continues to interest me. The names by which this costume accessory was...
WHEN one copied some text or words exactly — I remember from my childhood days — especially with little understanding of its contents, one was reminded sharply by the teacher that doing this amounted to makkhi pe makkhi maarna [squashing one fly...
WE had very little idea — my wife and I — of how a fortnight-long visit by two old friends from Heidelberg in Germany, Susanne Hawkes and her husband, Leslie, was going to turn out. The personal pleasure of having...
THIS is not a piece about women's issues. There are no references to liberation here, no talk of empowerment; try as one might, it will be difficult to hear in it any voices, strident or muffled, smell in it the...
While royal temple guards imperial shades Unseen the sinuous hair in secret glides And penetrates the sanctuary’s heart. Insidious roots invade its sacred core And swell to strangle gallery and tower. Binding the stone in predatory embrace The naga coils...
Aman Nath’s recent work—‘Brahma’s Pushkar: Ancient Indian Pilgrimage’—uses an impressive amount of material from texts and floating myths for establishing what makes this tirtha a great centre of pilgrimage and commerce, says B.N. Goswamy
There is commotion in the Middle East yet again, a flurry of activity. This time, however, of a different order, for it concerns the relatively quieter domains of art. Quite suddenly, many of the emirates and sheikhdoms in the Persian...
Surrealistic images dominate the Pahari paintings of the Kedara-Kalpa, writes B.N. Goswamy
A great deal has been written on Nathdwara, and about the art that has flourished there for several hundred years: paintings on cloth, and on paper, and all the art that goes into making the ceremonies and the rituals there a...
The e-greetings of today seem mechanical, impersonal and devoid of any warmth or care which the sender might originally have had in his mind, says B.N. Goswamy
AMONG all those environmentalists whose names crowd the annals of America, and all those that loved nature deeply, John Muir stands out tall. I was familiar with his name – as one active a little later than the east coast...
Paintings about dreams and omens lead us into a mystifying world: inexplicable, intuitive, and beyond reason
To appreciate Indian paintings and manuscripts one must love their elemental qualities blazing colour burnished gold leaf darkly inked lines as well as learn the profound philosophy and mythology that is their wellspring
The African presence in the history and politics of India remains generally obscured from view. B. N. Goswamy writes about the role of an emphatic figure who played a decisive role in the history of the Deccan
IN the tragically parochial, and strife-torn, age in which we live, there are many who would be startled at even the barest mention of the subject on which I write this piece. A Ramayana? For the Mughals? So closed are...
The colour indigo blue has had a pervasive presence in our culture. It is present everywhere: in paintings, textiles, and our life, in general
More than 400 objects are on display at the hugely successful exhibition on Teotihuacan, which is currently doing the rounds in Europe, says B. N. Goswamy
ONE does not often realise it, for only a few names are mentioned again and again, but the glittering court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh at Lahore teemed with people of foreign origin: Not only those who came visiting — of...
Combining primitive religious beliefs and practices and great sophistication at the material level, the mysterious temple in Peru, which was the theme of a recent exhibition at Zurich, continues to remain a puzzle
Pepita Seth’s study of the Krishna temple at Guruvayur draws a clear line between myth and history, says B. N. Goswamy
" … the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold …." —John Milton, Paradise Lost EDWARD Schafer's The Golden Peaches of Samarkand remains a source...
Mughals had a tradition of taking pride in books and leaving a record for posterity, writes B.N. Goswamy
WHAT happens to art, and to the soul of artists, in the times of war is not always easy to fathom. Frequently, nothing seems to happen on the surface, but ideas keep simmering; thoughts keep on getting embedded in the...
THEY speak of it as the most simple of all materials, and yet the most mysterious of them all: glass. Simple because all that it takes to make it — imagination and skill apart — is sand and fire; and...
The works of Nainsukh of Guler, celebrated painter from Himachal Pradesh, are without parallel in Indian art
To break out of all literary confines and rigid modes of thought, poet, novelist, dramatist and philosopher Goethe threw himself open to other cultures, says B. N. Goswamy