Sayed Haider Raza’s spectacles were slightly awry and his hair was mussed, but his black Armani suit was immaculate. He needed a cane to walk into the Palette Art Gallery in New Delhi. At 84, he was not as firm on his feet as he used to be. It was as if on each visit…
About ten years before the painter F.N. Souza’s death in 2002, I came across a pair of nudes by him in a gallery in Bombay. They were made in shaky lines with a black marker on what appeared to be the cover and inside pages of a British men’s magazine. The images, of blonde women…
Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer by Ranjit Hoskote, Publisher by Sakshi Gallery, Pages: 207, Price: Rs. 2000. And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded hereAmong these dark Satanic mills? 200 years ago, Blake—a greatly eccentric interpreter of cosmic intention—wrote those lines as a call to arms against…
Suphala is a slight woman, almost elfin, who is transformed when she gets behind a pair of the skin-covered hand drums, one a little larger than the other, that make up a tabla player’s precision instrument. North Indian classical music, though rooted in tradition, has always been open to the world. It evolved its signature…
