Remembering B N Goswamy View More

The Jnaneshwari is no routine commentary upon the Bhagavadgita: it is regarded as a classic of early Marathi literature on its own,

"In a way a painting is not fully realized until several centuries of poems have been added to it." YEARS ago, returning from the United States via the Pacific, I was on a flight from the Japanese city of Kyoto...

Highly cultivated Japanese practices like the tea ceremony, haiku, monochrome ink painting, Zen meditation were all within the ambit of the samurais

Safdar Jafri was filled with deep concerns, but possessed of a mellow, affecting voice in his poetry. A warm, gentle being who registered everything, he was somehow able to withdraw to a distance and view things calmly, writes B. N. Goswamy, paying a tribute to this legendary poet

BN Goswamy Looking over the road to my homeland Under the bright moonlight The clouds are turning around, flying. My country is located to the edge of northern sky. Who would fly to my town, Silla, and deliver my words?...

"Here is a man who transforms a blank sheet of paper into all space, an inkwell into all the waves in the ocean, the tip of a brush into the mountain Sumeru itself …." — Hoyen Gosozan (died 1104), writing...

Theatre curtains and sets, which were in vogue nearly a century ago, have inspired many an artist

HOW remarkably little do museums form a part of people’s awareness generally in India, one knows. But even those who do know something about them, or take interest in these matters, would not find it easy to answer these two...

When my granddaughter Damini returned from a short break abroad she told me of an interesting exchange she had with a minor functionary someone like an usher or a bellhop of a hotel in which she was staying

The Basmalah appears everywhere: carved on monuments, engraved in stone, etched upon metal, penned upon paper. And one is constantly astonished at the form it takes in gifted hands

A virtual reality show at Melbourne on Vijayanagar offers a strikingly different visual and emotional experience, writes B. N. Goswamy

Exquisitely woven Vasco da Gama tapestries, describing his visit to India, were conceived as a document of an empire to celebrate a triumph

From a simple village lad, who would wander off into the fields to draw, S. G. Thakur Singh became one of the most prominent artists of the region, all on the strength of his hard work and single-minded pursuit

It has taken long, but slowly and surely the work of the painters of the southern part of our country is coming into sharp focus. Sculpture is another matter—for the sheer brilliance of southern sculpture was always recognised —but time was...

There is scarcely a major museum in the world, which has not, at one time, or another, acquired a fake. It would seem that not all art is truth, writes B. N. Goswamy

It is a technique for producing colourful patterns on paper by swirls of paint, traditionally water-based paint, floating on water, writes B. N. Goswamy

Many an artist has painted Mirza Ghalib and Momin, the two iconic figures in poetry, differently

A sense of exquisite neatness and refinement is striking in the works of Swiss abstract artist Sylvia Zumbach

The works produced by Indian artists, mainly for servants of the East India Company, are alive with the most wonderful of observations and remarkable penetration of character, says B. N. Goswamy

Though the founders of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh were Rohilla Pathans, who lived mostly by the sword, this little place emerged as a major centre of the arts, writes B. N. Goswamy

IT is unlikely that the Macclesfield Psalter has been the subject of much talk here lately. Very few might, in fact, have even heard of it. For one thing, a psalter is a Biblical book of psalms, and not many...

The remains of the Viking age reveal remarkable levels of sophistication in their art and artefacts

SOME days ago, the elegant city of Zurich seemed suddenly to have been taken over by sorcerers and demons, fairies and sea-monsters. For, the Hamzanama show had opened at the Museum Rietberg. And everywhere you went, you were confronted with looming, superbly...

THE last time that I met Horst Metzger in Zurich some years back, I had no idea that he was suffering from an illness that eventually claimed his life last year. He must have known it himself, of course, but...

A recent book on tea establishes for the reader what tea means to Indians, and how it is served everywhere, besides providing a peep into its history