The role of the portrait in India between 1560 and 1860 served as an official chronicle or eye-witness account, as a means of revealing the intimate moments of everyday life, and as a tool for propaganda. Yet the proliferation and mastery of Indian portraiture in the Mughal and Rajput courts brought a new level of artistry and style to the genre.
Returning to 1960s' India after decades beyond its borders, Ved Mehta explores his native country with two sets of eyes: those of the man educated in the West, and those of the child raised under the Raj. Travelling from the Himalayas in the east to Kerala in the west, Ved Mehta's observations and insights into India and some of its most interesting figures - including Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray - create one of the twentieth century's most thought-provoking travel memoirs.
A Compelling Work On The Cultural Character Of The Indian People&Both Provocative And Revealing -Shyam Benegal In Outlook A Remarkably Perceptive Analysis Of Indian Character -Khushwant Singh In This Bold, Illuminating And Superbly Readable Study, India S Foremost Psychoanalyst And Cultural Commentator Sudhir Kakar And Anthropologist Katharina Kakar Investigate The Nature Of Indian-Ness . What Makes An Indian Recognizably So To The Rest Of The World, And, More Importantly, To His Or Her Fellow Indians? For, As The Authors Point Out, Despite Ethnic Differences That Are Characteristic More Of Past Empires Than Modern Nation States, There Is An Underlying Unity In The Great Diversity Of India That Needs To Be Recognized. Looking At What Constitutes A Common Indian Identity, The Authors Examine In Detail The Predominance Of Family, Community And Caste In Our Everyday Lives, Our Attitudes To Sex And Marriage, Our Prejudices, Our Ideas Of The Other (Explored In A Brilliant Chapter On Hindu-Muslim Conflict), And Our Understanding Of Health, Right And Wrong, And Death. In The Final Chapter, They Provide Fascinating Insights Into The Indian Mind, Shaped Largely By The Culture S Dominant, Hindu World View. Drawing Upon Three Decades Of Original Research And Sources As Varied As The Mahabharata, The Kamasutra, The Writings Of Mahatma Gandhi, Bollywood Movies And Popular Folklore, Sudhir And Katharina Kakar Have Produced A Rich And Revealing Portrait Of The Indian People. An Important Book&A Readable And Carefully Considered Statement On The Issue Of Identity Pavan Varma In India Today
A catalogue showcasing the artistic journey of portraits from miniature to modern art. It starts with the miniature paintings done by different schools like Pahadi, Rajasthani, Central Province, Deccan, Company period, Bengal, Colonial Influence and goes all the way up to modern art. The catalogue has 37 portraits which were exhibited in October 2010.
Patrick French brings one of the globe's most dynamic nations springing to life. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country, sensitivity to its subtler nuances and a wealth of research.
A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.
The first biography in over sixty years of a great American artist whose paintings are more famous than the man who made them. George Catlin has been called the “first artist of the West,” as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a “vanishing race” before their “extermination”—his word—by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over six hundred portraits—unforgettable likenesses of individual chiefs, warriors, braves, squaws, and children belonging to more than thirty tribes living along the upper Missouri River. Political forces thwarted Catlin’s ambition to sell what he called his “Indian Gallery” as a national collection, and in 1840 the artist began three decades of self-imposed exile abroad. For a time, his exhibitions and writings made him the most celebrated American expatriate in London and Paris. He was toasted by Queen Victoria and breakfasted with King Louis-Philippe, who created a special gallery in the Louvre to show his pictures. But when he started to tour “live” troupes of Ojibbewa and Iowa, Catlin and his fortunes declined: He changed from artist to showman, and from advocate to exploiter of his native performers. Tragedy and loss engulfed both. This brilliant and humane portrait brings to life George Catlin and his Indian subjects for our own time. An American original, he still personifies the artist as a figure of controversy, torn by conflicting demands of art and success.
