Posted by: John Elliott | February 3, 2026

F.N.Souza’s grandson Solomon has his debut art show in Mumbai

Theme of Hard Labour – birth, family and manual work

A rebel, like his grandfather, he started with graffiti then murals 

Solomon Souza paints fast. He had to he says when he began doing graffiti around the age of 12. “In the street you have to be fast, or you finish up in jail”.  When he moved on to painting more acceptable wall murals, it was expensive hiring cranes, so speed was again important. 

But there’s more to it than that. “Painting should be a burst of energy when you have an idea. It has to be done there and then,” Soloman told me while he was painting – in just three or four hours – a 12ft x 8ft mural (below) that is now hanging outside an exhibition of his work at the Cymroza Gallery in Mumbai.

“I love tackling large space and I rarely go back to change a work,” he said. “Your energy changes and you yourself change”. 

Age 32, energetic and an enthusiast who speaks quickly, Solomon is the grandson of F.N. Souza, one of India’s most famous masters and a leading member of the Mumbai-based Progressives group that included names such as Tyeb Mehta, M.F.Husain, and S.H.Raza.

Souza’s 100th birth anniversary in 2024 is still being celebrated with exhibitions of his works including tortured and evocative canvases and line drawings of figures, often nude, and of townscapes, many with religious overtones.

Solomon says he always wanted to draw, or doodle, but he is known for huge murals that he has done from Israel to Goa. Cymroza’s is his first solo show for conventional paintings and is open till February 14. There are about 15 larger works with a variety of materials including oil, acrylic and poster paint on canvas and wood, and 50 smaller works on paper using oil bars, pastels and wax markers. 

“Hard Labour” – pregnancy and manual labour

In some, he clearly has his grandfathers’ iconic works in mind, notably urban roof and cityscapes like the 12ft x 8ft mural, but the title of the exhibition is Hard Labour – “the working man and the labour of birth, building a family”, he says. 

The focal point on entering the exhibition is a dramatically coloured work with that title (left), which combines the double theme with a naked woman who is pregnant and is labouring with a heavy mallet.

In an introduction to the exhibition, Solomon writes “Hard labour is all around us in myriad forms from the raising of a family to the building and maintenance of our cities and societies. Both are foundational in the fabric of existence…My first solo exhibition is about that hidden uncelebrated effort”.

The largest work is Fruits of Labour, a 69in x 48in oil on canvas that he describes as a “tip of the hat” to his grandfather’s famous and visually similar Birth.  Fruits of Labour (below) commemorates the birth of Solomon’s mother Keren, the daughter of F.N. Souza and his influential partner and muse Lisolette, a Czech-Jewish actress who fled from Prague to London in 1939. 

Birth, painted in 1955 (below), portrays Lisolette pregnant with Keren, the first of their three daughters. It has set records twice for modern India art at Christie’s auctions – the sterling equivalent of$2.5m (including buyer’s premium) in London in June 2008 and $4.01m in New York in 2015. It is now in Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

Next to Fruits of Labour is Life (below) that I felt had Buddhist overtones. It celebrates Solomon’s son’s birth and depicts him turning in the womb. Unlike all the other works, it is not, his wife has insisted, for sale. 

Titled “Life”, this marks Solomon’s son turning in his wife’s womb

“Solomon’s work has a unique freshness, showcasing a remarkable artistic talent for drawing,” says Pheroza Godrej who owns the gallery. “While portraying the themes of human birth and manual labour can be challenging, he has successfully accomplished this”.

Tough manual labouring features in many paintings, some seeming to echo the work of Krishen Khanna, 100, a close friend of F.N.Souza, and the only prominent surviving member of the Progressives. 

Solomon says he didn’t realise the full impact of his lineage till he went with his mother in 2010 to a Christie’s auction in London. The squabbling family was selling many of his grandfather’s works in a massive auction of 152 lots. Almost all the lots sold, many doubling estimates with a total hammer price of £4.4m. (I was there and reported it here).

“I went in my school uniform. I didn’t really realise it was a sale of the estate, but the seriousness of the event was a big slap of reality, that all these fancily dressed people had come to see and buy my grandfather’s works,” says Solomon.

Keren took him when he was nine on what he describes as her “spiritual journey” to live in Israel where he grew up in her art studio. Graffiti with a spray can started when he was about 12 on his school walls in a town near Jerusalem. That was “in revenge for detention”. Sometimes he painted marijuana leaf, having “never touched it”.

In his teens, he was sent back to the UK for schooling. Living in Hackney in east London which was “saturated in graffiti”, he knew it was illegal but was rebellious like his grandfather so continued with “naming and tagging” what he painted. 

“As I grew, my sense of adventure grew, and I found myself more and more frequently in trouble with the law, spending many nights in cells, with the burn of the handcuffs still sizzling upon my wrists,” he told Vivek Menezes, an art curator and festival organiser in Goa, who knew his grandfather in New York. 

He returned to Jerusalem age 18 having failed his “O levels” in art because “I hadn’t done my homework. He wanted to go to art school in London, but Keren “begged him not to”, saying she could teach him art. “You don’t need to be told what you are,” she said.

Back in Jerusalem, his views on graffiti changed. “I felt it was a beautiful holy place, and I shouldn’t do graffiti”. He turned to murals and street art, “trying to add value”.

He became famous for spray painting some 300 works over two years on the shutters of stalls in the Mahane Yehuda (Camp of Judah) market. “The souk had seen a lot of violence and hadn’t recovered; there was a sadness and people avoided the area. So, we painted portraits of people who worked there on the shutters, then bars opened and it became a bustling centre”. 

Menezes persuaded Solomon to move to Goa in 2019 and paint what has become a total of 20 murals including the side of a five-storey building (above) that was done in one day. In 2020 he even went stadium-scale in London for the Chelsea Football Club. 

smaller works (on paper below)

He feels at home in Goa with his wife and children though, he says, “I regard myself as Jewish and my heart is in Jerusalem”. He painted most of the exhibition’s works in India where he says he “found a new spark”. 

I watched his energy for two hours or so at the Cymroza in the Breach Candy area of Mumbai when he was painting the large 12ft x 8ft board with poster paint using rollers and small spray guns. “His work has been highly acclaimed for its daring style, technical proficiency, and influence on culture, especially in wall art – mural painting, such as the piece he created at the entrance of Cymroza Art Gallery,” says Pheroza Godrej.

When I arrived, he had completed the basic buildings of the Mumbai urban roofscape on a black background. “I like painting on black and enjoy how the colours jump out. You lose that vibrancy with a white background,” he said as he filled the black sky with short strokes creating a blueish whitish stream. 

Next, he strengthened the outline of the buildings and roofs with sprayed black lines, then blue spaces for windows, images of trees on prepared background and finally yellow for lights and more splashes of colour till finally the city scape was complete. 

There was a lot of his grandfather in the concept and the detail, but it was clearly Solomon’s inspiration, all completed in three to four hours. And he enjoyed it, which he said was important, and that sounded different and happier than his grandfather’s compulsions.

Declaration of interest: I bought two small paper works

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Posted by: John Elliott | January 25, 2026

“Tully Sahib”, the BBC’s voice in South Asia has died age 90

Sir Mark Tully was also once named the “Battered Sahib”

Remembered for the aptly named “Something Understood” radio programme

Perhaps no-one in living memory has spanned the two cultures of Britain and India as sensitively and closely as Sir Mark Tully, the BBC’s veteran broadcaster, who died in New Delhi age 90 today (January 25), a Sunday as he would have wished.

Parthiv Shah took this photograph at a political rally at Delhi’s “Boat Club” on Raj Path in 1991

His loss will be felt throughout South Asia and across the world where listeners to the BBC will remember the rich tones of his warm but powerful voice, not just reporting on India and its neighbours, but also leading Something Understood, a weekly faith and music-oriented BBC radio programme.

I first met Mark in Sri Lanka during the Tamil uprising of 1983 and quickly realised he was a tough and persistent reporter, but with a ready smile for people he met, charming them with fluent Hindi as well as his cultured English. He was a kind, caring and religious man, who once thought of becoming a priest. His broadcasting, and later his books, were often strongly influenced by a deep sense of right and wrong, which partly led to strong negative views about modern development. 

Mark Tully immersed himself in the countries he covered and developed a wide circle of friends and trusted contacts ranging from poor villagers to those at the top of government who frequented his home in Delhi. They all helped him deliver revealing reports that uncovered the stories of a region going through massive change. Later his books, with iconic titles like No Full Stops in India that was published in 1991, vividly portrayed aspects of life in the remotest parts of the subcontinent.

Famous on the BBC’s radio air waves across South Asia, he was scrupulous about his detachment, even though he was specially lauded in Pakistan in the 1980s. People there listened out for his radio reports on the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) that aimed at unseating the country’s military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq. I remember how, in a country where the media had little freedom, the BBC brought hope crackling down the airwaves with news of the MRD’s rallies and protests. 

January 2025 at lunch on Delhi’s Gymkhana Club lawns

The Bangladesh media has remembered how he performed a similar service during the 1971 war that led to the country being created out of what was Pakistan. “His BBC radio reports became the people’s chief source of authentic information,” says The Daily Star. He was named a Foreign Friend of Bangladesh in 2012.

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, described Mark Tully on X as “a towering voice of journalism”. His “reporting and insights” had left ” an enduring mark on public discourse”.

Mark was the BBC’s New Delhi-based bureau chief for 20 years and foreign correspondents were frequently chased by children calling out “Are you Mark Tully, Are you Mark Tully?”. One day, near the Pakistani city of Hyderabad, a colleague and I were asked the question at a chai stall. “Yes, I am!”, I said, exasperated by the repeated questions. Stirring the chai, the stall holder spoke to me in his own language and, when I didn’t reply, declared “You’re not Mark Tully, you don’t speak Urdu!”.

Sometimes the Tully name was used more threateningly. In December 1992, he had become the symbol of all that was resented about the international media by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu extremists who were targeting foreign journalists after demolishing a revered sixteenth century Muslim mosque in Ayodhya. (A new Hindu temple was opened on the site by prime minister Narendra Modi early in 2024). 

Tully escaped with some other journalists, rescued by a nearby temple priest. “We were surrounded by a huge mob screaming, ‘Death to Mark Tully!’ and ‘Death to BBC!’,” he later told the Los Angeles Times for a profile headed “The BBC’s Battered Sahib: Mark Tully has been expelled by India, chased by mobs and picketed. He loves his job”.

His big events ranged from India-Pakistan wars, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the foundation of Bangladesh, to the uprisings in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. I saw him centre stage on stories like the Indian army’s storming of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi, and Union Carbide’s Bhopal gas disaster. He was always aware that what he said on the air waves could have a much more immediate and maybe cataclysmic impact than most newspaper reports.

He irritated and infuriated successive governments and was expelled from India along with other foreign correspondents during Indira Gandhi’s 1975-77 State of Emergency, but was awarded the highest civilian honours. In India he received the Padma Shri (for distinguished service) in 1992 and the Padma Bhushan (for distinguished service of higher order) in 2005. In the UK, he was knighted for his contribution to journalism in 2002, though he rarely used his full Sir Mark Tully title.

Mark was born on October 24, 1935, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where his father was with Gillander Arbuthnot, a British managing agency firm. His mother’s family had worked for generations in what is now Bangladesh. 

He was brought up, colonial style, with a European nanny, then at a British boarding school in Darjeeling north of Calcutta. His teenage school years were spent at Marlborough College in the UK.

with his partner Gilly at Kipling Camp, Madhya Pradesh, for Christmas 2011 – and Kim, the resident labrador

That was followed by Trinity Hall at Cambridge University, where he studied theology, but abandoned the idea of becoming a Church of England priest after two terms at a theological college. 

Mark often said that he didn’t think his lifestyle would have fitted with being a priest, mentioning beer and whisky, and sometimes talking about his complex personal life. “There’s always been a dichotomy in my character – very religious, yet morally really rather bad,” he told The Independent newspaper in 1994. “I simply wasn’t confident of my own moral integrity,” he said in a interview with The Hindu newspaper. “And the Church mattered enough to me — as it still does — so that I didn’t want to let it down.”

He remained married to his wife Margaret after she returned to London from India in the early 1980s, and spent the rest of his life based in Delhi with his partner, devoted assistant, and sometimes co-author Gillian (Gilly) Wright

“It reflects great credit on my wife and on Gillian,” he said in the Independent interview. “After such a long relationship, I didn’t want a divorce and have to write ‘finis’. I wanted to remain friendly with her (Margaret) and my children.” Asked about this in a 2004 interview with the Cambridge University alumni magazine Cam, he replied: “I can’t speak for my wife or Gilly….Of course, I am not comfortable with the situation, not least because it doesn’t conform with the teachings of the Church”.

After abandoning what he saw as his vocation as a priest, he did not know what to do, so taught for a while and then spent four years working with a housing charity in Cheshire.

His life was transformed when he joined the BBC in 1964. A year later he moved to India, initially in management but quickly transferring to reporting, becoming the bureau chief, a post he held for 22 years. Aided by his deputy, Satish Jacob, and in later years by Gilly, he travelled extensively across the sub-continent, building relationships that included top political leaders and covering ordinary people’s miseries and their gradually changing lives as well as the big events.

With Mark at my farewell party as FT correspondent, July 1988

If there has been criticism of his coverage, it is that he was – and remained – too critical and opposed to the development and modernisation that has replaced traditional lifestyles and attitudes. He did not of course advocate continuing poverty or a lack of development, but he refused to accept that western-style consumerism and other forms of change were the way to achieve progress. He was also a virulent critic of the current Indian government’s Hindu nationalism.

No Full Stops had been “didactic”, he later admitted (in the preface to his next book) pleading that, along with economic growth, it was also necessary to “protect the country’s ancient culture, not merely ape….the sterile materialism of the modern Western culture”. 

He was not afraid to air unfashionable views, as he showed over India’s widely condemned caste system on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2003. “We have to look to the good and the bad in the caste system,” he argued. “The good side of it is that it offers security, it offers companionship, a community to belong to and that sort of thing.”

Mark has said that his passion for India was greater than his passion for journalism. He was happiest travelling the country talking to contacts and reporting and commenting on radio  what he saw and heard. 

He did not easily adapt to television and the BBC’s increased commercialisation, and thought change should come by “evolution not revolution”. That led to him resigning from the BBC in 1994 after he was told to stop voicing his criticisms. But he continued to do occasional programmes – in 2017 for India’s 70th year of independence, he and Gilly made a memorable cross-country journey that combined his hobby as a railway buff with reflections on the emerging India, 

Away from the constraints of daily reporting, Mark became a prolific author producing a total of more than a dozen books that vividly explored life in India with titles like India in Slow Motion and India’s Unending Journey as well as No Full Stops. Recently he was in the final stages of editing a memoir-style autobiography that Gilly will now complete.

Mark was also celebrated as the leading host on Something Understood, the BBC Radio 4’s Sunday morning programme of words and music that started in 1995. Listeners tuned in from all over the world. Focussed around faith, spirituality, and human life, this took him back to his original vocation till the BBC ended the series in 2019.

Regretting the BBC’s decision, Mark told the Radio Times magazine that he felt sad because he knew a lot of listeners liked it. “They say two things to me about it – that there is nothing else like it on the radio, and that this is what radio should be all about. And I think that’s true.” So many listeners instantly mention this when they hear the name Mark Tully – and tune in when the BBC runs repeats.

Mark is survived by his wife Margaret and four children, Sarah, Sam, Emma and Patrick, and by his partner Gillian.

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Posted by: John Elliott | January 21, 2026

Jaipur lit fest to cross Ireland’s borders in May from Belfast to Dublin

“Island of Ireland JLF” programme will include India’s and Ireland’s shared colonial history

Reunification of Ireland debated at Jaipur lit fest last weekend

Shared experiences of British colonial rule will come to the fore when India’s Jaipur Literature Festival travels in May from Belfast to Dublin with a band of writers, commentators and artists, staging a total of four lit fests over ten days.

Announced last weekend at the 19th annual lit fest in Jaipur, this will be added to more than 12 destinations where the festival is held including London, Valladolid in Spain, New York and Colorado in the US, the Maldives, and Adelaide in Australia.

It will be the first time that JLF, as it is known, has toured with four linked events, and crossed a border. Called Island of Ireland JLF, it will also be the most politically and diplomatically sensitive festival because of the controversial history of empire. In the wings will be the sensitive issue of Irish reunification that would reverse the 1921 partition when the Anglo-Irish Treaty created Northern Ireland as a separate entity within the UK.

“This will be a platform for dialogue on shared histories and literary and cultural traditions between Ireland and India in what will be almost a caravan of literature moving from the north to the south through the border counties,” says Kevin Kelly, Ireland’s ambassador in New Delhi, who has been a driving force behind plans for the tour. 

At last year’s Jaipur lit fest, there was strong criticism of empire in many sessions. That crystallised last weekend with special emphasis on the similarities between Ireland and India’s experiences with British colonialism and the horrors of partition, expanding to include Palestine and Israel.

Even Arun Maira, an uncontroversial economist and a former member of the Planning Commission, followed the growing trend of criticising British rule when he talked (accurately) about India’s economy being “denuded by the British”. That fits with the piece I wrote on January 10 about the Singh Twins’ art exhibition at Kew Gardens in London that exposes the role of Kew and its botanists in the British empire’s “darker side”.

“If you think the British mucked up India in 1947, just wait till you hear what they did in Palestine in 1948,” declared William Dalrymple, the lit fest’s co-director, referring to Pakistan’s partition from India and the creation of Israel, as he sat down on the festival stage to open a session on the subject.

“Ireland was the UK’s first colony, and it was a laboratory for empire,” Jane Ohlmeyer, a leading historian at Dublin University who is closely involved in the May tour, said during one of the sessions. Repeating what she had said last year at the festival, she explained that British colonisation “began in the 12th century [with mercenaries] and became intense [with direct rule] in the 17th century and then more acute” in the 20th century. “We are victims of colonialism and imperialism,” she declared.

Sanjoy Roy, founder and managing director Teamwork Arts

Referring to Northern Ireland with its alternative name of Ulster, Ohlmeyer said Mahatma Gandhi, India’s freedom fighter, had declared, without success, that he did not want his country to be partitioned as the British had done with “Ulsterisation” in Ireland.  

“We’ll be looking at some of the common issues of colonialism and imperialism, “says Sanjoy Roy, founder and head of Teamwork Arts that has produced the Jaipur festival for 19 years.

“There are the issues of famine and migration,” he added, linking the 1845 Irish potato famine with its mass starvation, disease and migration, with the Bengal famine in 1943 when the Britih prime minister Winston Churchill was condemned (fairly or unfairly) for diverting aid to World War 2 troops instead of helping Bengal.

The common themes seem endless. On top of partitions and famine, there are shared experiences of religious sectarianism, cultural clashes, violence, mass deaths, nationalism, identity, and migration.

There are also many links, some which even surprise those involved. Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s former Taoiseach (prime minster), whose father was born in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, told the festival last weekend that he discovered how his family had suffered from British imperialism when he paid an official visit to India in 2019. 

He was clearly proud that two of his uncles were imprisoned by the British as freedom fighters, and that an aunt was involved in a march to Goa “to liberate it from the Portuguese”. Politics “was clearly in my blood,” said Varadkar, who is a strong supporter of reunification that he believes could happen in his lifetime.

Leo Varadkar is given a birthday cake after he spoke on January 18 – with Ireland’s ambassador Kevin Kelly on the right

Ireland’s past under British rule helped him understand Palestinian sentiments. “When Britain tried to conquer Ireland, it justified its claim through religion. That history gives perspective,” he said, adding that the US finds it difficult to understand the Palestinian issue due to its close ties with Israel. 

Notable Irish writers at the festival in recent years have included Booker Prize winner Colm Tóibín and novelist Michelle Gallen (both last weekend) as well as Jane Ohlmeyer. Earlier names have included Booker prize winners Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle 

Also this year, journalists Finan O’Toole from Dublin and Sam McBride from the north discussed their jointly written book, For and Against a United Ireland, which was published in the UK last October. O’Toole echoed the growing support in the south for reunification and argued it would benefit the north’s declining economic prospects. The UK government agreed in 1998 that “it would go whenever Ulster people wanted it to” after holding a referendum.

McBride however saw “no logical argument” for uniting the country because of the currently manageable soft border, and the risk that extremist gangs could use a referendum “to drive us into violence”. 

JLF’s association with Ireland began about ten years ago when the Arts Council of Northern Ireland urged Roy to stage a lit fest in Belfast, explaining that it would be more likely than a festival from the UK to attract audiences from both the Catholic and Protestant communities. That led to a successful event in 2019 though there were some tensions. 

Roy says it led him to think of having a lit fest as a caravan travelling south from Belfast, as will happen for ten days from May 22, “pitching tents” on either side of the border at Armagh and Dundalk before finishing up in Dublin. “Can the art of conversation and dialogue be a way to explore these differences and overcome the fears generated by different religions?” he asks.

Like all the lively JLF festivals, the more controversial sessions will meld with the rest that will draw on Ireland and India’s culture, fiction, and the arts as well as wider issues.

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Posted by: John Elliott | January 10, 2026

The British Empire’s “darker side” revealed in a Kew Gardens botanical art exhibition

Kew invited the artists, the Singh Twins, to explore Kew’s archives and plants, and track the links to colonisation

The important role played by Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the country’s controversial colonial history is being graphically exposed and criticised by an art exhibition that challenges the image of the peaceful green spaces with their rare plants, magnificent trees and iconic glasshouses. 

Kew Gardens, as it’s usually known, invited the Singh Twins (below), who are established artists of Indian origin living in Liverpool, to focus their critical approach to the British empire on the institution’s massive and rare botanical collection contained both in extensive archives and as live plants.

The result is an exhibition titled SINGH TWINS: Botanical Tales and Seeds of Empire that is open till April 12 in the Gardens’ Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. It reflects the way that museums and other British institutions have become increasingly willing in recent years to look into their collections and expose what the twins call “the darker side of what is revealed”.

Kew’s role in colonisation comes alive with a dramatic series of large back-lit works of art on fabric. These show how plants such as cotton, spices and dyes played a pivotal role in Britain’s colonial expansion as well as more positively in the transfer of botanical knowledge and experience across continents. There are also smaller works on the symbolism and significance of plants in global trade, and a tough film highlighting the negative message.

“The Singh Twins were a natural choice because of their unique ability to combine rigorous historical research with a powerful contemporary artistic voice,” Maria Devaney the galleries and exhibition leader told me.

“Kew’s history is closely entwined with Britain’s imperial past, and it’s important to acknowledge and respond to those complexities. We have a responsibility to engage honestly with our own history and with the wider histories that shape our collections and our work today. This is part of Kew’s ongoing commitment to inclusion and to presenting, plants, science and culture in their full historical contexts”.

Christopher Doyle photographer

The toughest message comes in an allegorical work titled Imperialism: By the Yardstick and Sword that focuses, says the exhibition’s coffee-table style catalogue, on “the impoverishment and enslavement of India under western colonial expansion and in particular British rule”.

The main figure is a female warrior representing Western Imperialism standing above a tiger, piercing it in the mouth.  Smaller images surrounding the figure illustrate the exploitation with a quotation saying, “India was ruthlessly conquered as an outlet for British goods”, which actively contributed to the “destruction of India’s industries”.

“Imperialism: By the Yardstick and Sword” – the main figure symbolises Western Imperialism surrounded by examples of its impact

The Golden Bird: Envy of the West “shows an allegorical figure representing pre-colonial India” before the British arrived. It was a “fabled land of untold riches and prosperity”. 

Dying for a Cuppa deals with the “British colonial history of tea”, highlighting the tea trade’s “links with sugar and opium, commodities inextricably linked to enslavement, conflict, violence, land grabbing, deforestation and drug addiction”.

The Twins say Kew was aware of their work and had seen an earlier exhibition in 2018 on the same theme in Liverpool. This demonstrated, they say, Kew’s “willingness to look at its collections in a different light and bring out those histories….they knew exactly what they were buying into”.  When the Twins pointed out that they would be looking at the “darker side” of Imperialism, they were told “this is actually what we want you to do”.

They were “overwhelmed” by the breadth of Kew’s documentation, processing, and archiving of material relating to plants, but they had already done research and “knew what we wanted to get out of it”. That was to look at colonial links in botany following on from their Liverpool exhibition in 2018 where they focussed on similar narratives connected to India’s historical trade in cotton and other textile links.

“Kew was a central cog in the economic exploitation of plants, playing a key role in the Empire’s collection transportation and cultivation of commercial crops such as cotton, rubber and cinchona,” says Richard Deverell, the Gardens’ director and ceo, in an introduction to the catalogue.

Showing alongside the Twins’ works, under an overall Flora Indica title, is the first-ever public display of 52 rediscovered botanical watercolours (above) by Indian artists who were commissioned by British botanists between 1790 and 1850. Hidden for over a century, the works show how artists helped shape botanical knowledge from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The Twins studied these and other archived works commissioned by Britain’s East India Company that controlled India for a century till 1858.

Over the past 17 years, the Twins have been exploring and exposing what they describe as the “exploitative nature of colonialism and empire”. They are proud of having “always spoken loudly about things we believe”. 

Born in the UK with a Sikh father who emigrated from India in 1947, Amrit Kaur Singh and Rabindra Kaur Singh are identical twins in their late 50s. They always dress alike and talk together, interrupting and finishing each other’s sentences. Their father, and their Sikh background, flow through many of the works.

“The Golden Bird: Envy of the West” – India is personified “with the world at her feet”, along with depictions below of European merchants, soldiers and others who invaded her

The Twins adapt the intricate and colourful style of Mughal miniature paintings into a form of pop art where a series of individual small compositions cluster around a central image, together telling a multi-illustrated story. With up to around 15 images in a single work, the Twins estimate that the Kew exhibition has more than 200 compositions.

That was apparent when I first interviewed them, in 2011, at an exhibition in New Delhi that combined challenging the misuse of power by the Indian and other governments with recording the lives of Indians living in Liverpool and elsewhere in the UK. “They have been fighting convention since they were at university in Liverpool,” I wrote. The show included Partners in Crime, Deception and Lies with US president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair standing on a burning blood-strewn globe of the world after the invasion of Iraq.  

That was the year that they were both awarded an MBE, becoming Members of the Order of the British Empire. Their art had been shown in 2010 at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which describes their work as continuing “a long tradition of artistic interaction and influence between cultures”.

As students in Liverpool, they were told that the Indian miniatures style was no longer relevant and that they should be learning from Matisse, Gaugin and Picasso. “We said that Gaugin and others had been influenced by India and other foreign works, and that we were being denied our own way of expressing ourselves,” was their reply. “There was pressure to conform to Western ideas, but we were challenging accepted notions of heritage and identity”.

A triptych dedicated to the memory of the Twins’ late father, Dr Karnail Singh, in “The Perfect Garden” with “The Arts of Botany” (left) and “The Science of Botany” (right)

Their interest in the negative aspects of colonialism began when they were part of a British Arts Council trip in 2014 to the French city of Nantes in Upper Brittany. There they visited the Château des Ducs museum that has a large section on slavery marking the Atlantic coastal port’s significant role in the international trade, similar to Liverpoool’s.

A detailed picture on the “Science of Botany”

They also found displays of Indian textiles commissioned by French traders to be sold to African tribal chiefs as part of the slave trade, which made them realise the wide range of the trade beyond the transatlantic triangle

That led to the 2018 exhibition, titled Slaves of Fashion, at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery where the Twins developed their criticism of empire by focussing on the history of Indian textiles, especially cotton, enslavement and luxury consumerism. That is “a global story of conflict, conquest, slavery, environmental exploitation, cultural exchange and changing fashion,” they say, relating it also to current debates on ethical consumerism, racism and the politics of trade. 

Another detailed picture on the “Science of Botany” including the words “Disease, Massacres, Enslavement, Displacement, Conflict

The Kew exhibition’s hard-hitting short film King Cotton: An Artist’s Tale was first shown in Liverpool and focusses on textiles. Set to a poem written by the twins and narrated by Amrit, it pulls no punches with lines like: “Torture was used to enforce taxation, and monopoly of salt caused devastation – to the mases steeped in poverty…..so that England’s exports might expand, thumbs were broken on weavers’ hands… …the tools of their trade were seized and smashed while Indian servants were routinely thrashed”.

The film’s rhyming poetry is good but there will be objections to some of the criticisms, notably weavers’ “thumbs being broken” that was first voiced in 1853 by Karl Marx. An earlier report in 1772 by William Bolts, a Dutch-born British merchant and employee of the East India Company, suggested that winders of raw silk were treated so badly that they cut off their thumbs to avoid being forced to work, though that is also represented in the film.

Critics will say that the show does not illustrate sufficiently the world-wide benefits reaped by early explorers and botanists who faced extreme challenges travelling to Asia and elsewhere centuries ago. 

“Cinchona: What’s in a Name” with an “English family unperturbed by the mosquitos encircling their domesticated environment” in the centre, and “competing interests in quinine production” in the surrounding border

The exhibition includes a work, Cinchona: What’s in a Name marking how in 1860 a British expedition to South America smuggled out cinchona seeds and plants that led to the development of quinine to treat malaria. Planted extensively in British India and Sri Lanka those stolen seeds and plants saved millions of lives, until an artificial synthesis of quinine was developed in 1944, but the Twins introduce it negatively saying it was “significant in the colonisation of tropical countries”.

“Plants are an essential resource for human survival and they are also the foundation of practically all life on earth,” says one prominent habitat conservationist. “Yes, exotic plants were collected clandestinely in colonial times, just as they are today. But the efforts of those early collectors also brought huge benefits, particularly in the field of medicine”.

That does not however reduce from the importance of the Twins work, displaying in masses of intricate and highly colourful works, the links between botany and the negative side of empire  

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Posted by: John Elliott | December 24, 2025

Merry Christmas!

To all friends and followers of this blog, Seasons Greetings and all best wishes for 2026 – with this splendid painting by Jabbu, a Gond tribal artist from the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh

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Posted in India

Posted by: John Elliott | December 6, 2025

Putin enjoys a glittering but short state visit to Delhi

Modi and Putin praise each other and the India-Russia relationship

UK France and German ambassadors write in Times of India against Ukraine war

It could have been a tightrope walk, but President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to India during the past two days was so well stage-managed that it was a success both for him and prime minister Narendra Modi. Putin was showing the world that he could still be treated as a global statesman by a significant world power despite the invasion of Ukraine, and Modi was showing Donald Trump that he had alternative powerful friends to the US president. Together, they were giving a signal to the West of a signficant play in global politics.

The display of personal bonhomie began the moment Putin landed in Delhi on Thursday evening and shared Modi’s car to a private dinner. That led on Friday to the best pageantry and hospitality that India could provide, along with joint public statements and a mass of well-meaning agreements with a target set last year of $100bn trade by 2030.

While the visit only lasted just over 24 hours, it was one of the most significant and high profile of the two countries’ 23 annual summits and it gave much-needed fresh impetus to the relationship. But it was knocked off what would have been wall-to-wall television news coverage by pandemonium at India’s airports when over a thousand airline flights were cancelled due to operational problems.

Image: GRIGORY SYSOYEV/AFP/Getty Images

The agreements aimed at developing economic and business ties to expand the relationship beyond its current defence and energy focus. But they did not go so far as Putin might have hoped.

They did not commit India to continue buying controversial Russian oil, which is being significantly reduced having mushroomed after the Ukraine invasion when it caused a rift between India and the US. Nor did they include major new orders for Russia’s S-400 missile defence system, which India is already using, nor joint production in India of Sukhoi Su-57 fifth generation jet fighters. That has given Trump less to complain about at a time when India is trying to finalise a US trade deal. 

The annual summit is usually a bilateral event of only modest international significance. If Trump had not upset 25 years of work by successive US leaders coaxing India gradually to move away from its historic Soviet and Russian allegiances, it would probably not have hit the world headlines this week, apart from the focus on Ukraine. 

But Trump’s imposition of 50% tariffs in July, coupled with criticisms of the Modi regime for buying Russian oil, upset that and led to Modi showing that he could be as close to Putin as he was to Trump in the past. 

“India Today“ tv cartoon video showing Putin and Modi filling a motorcycle from a Russia petrol pump, ignoring Trump at his USA pump

The visit could have turned into a trilateral with Trump interrupting from the US as a social media interloper but he has – so far – remained uncharacteristically silent. (He spent part of yesterday receiving FIFA’s surprise first Peace Prize at the World Cup draw in Washington). That has led to speculation that he knows he cannot now object to Modi being close to Putin when he is trying to negotiate a Ukraine peace settlement with business overtones. There are also signs of the US reaffirming its support for India’s role internationally.

Also in Modi’s and Putin’s minds would have been Xi Jinping, China’s president, who has been developing close links with Russia and is also patching up relationships with India after years of tense and sometimes hostile engagements on their undefined border. Modi has to be suspicious of Putin’s relationship with Xi, especially since China provides India’s hostile neighbour Pakistan with aircraft, missiles and other support.

Putin’s last visit to Delhi was four years ago this week during the covid crisis, two months before he launched the invasion of Ukraine. The visit lasted just five hours. Since then, he and Modi have had a total of 16 conversations, 11 between 2022 and 2024 five times this year.

At a regional summit in China on September 1, Putin ostentatiously invited Modi into his limousine for an hour’s private conversation. Modi said that “even in the most difficult circumstances India and Russia have walked together, shoulder to shoulder. Our close co-operation is important not just to our two countries but for global peace, stability and prosperity”. 

Continuing the upbeat emphasis on the relationship, a detailed Indian government statement issued on December 4 described Russia as a “longstanding and time-tested partner” and said the countries had a “Special and Privileged Bond”. 

Putin in Modi’s car when he’s just arrived (left) and (right) greeting the next day

Putin said in a long 100-minute interview with India Today tv before he left Moscow that Modi was “a person of integrity” who was “very sincere” about “strengthening Indian Russian ties across the whole range of areas, especially crucial issues of economy and defence and humanitarian cooperation, development of hi-tech”. 

“It is very interesting to meet with him,” Putin added. “He travelled here, and we sat with him at my residence and we drank tea for the whole evening, and we discussed different topics. We simply had an interesting conversation purely like humans…. The Indian people can certainly take pride in their leader”. 

Putin also said Russia was “a reliable supplier of oil” to India and was “ready to provide uninterrupted fuel supplies”. The US had continued to buy nuclear fuel from Russia so “why shouldn’t India have the same privilege!”.

At a joint media conference however, Modi said energy security had been a “strong and vital pillar of the India‑Russia partnership”, but avoided the oil purchases and defence deals. Instead, he mentioned the value of the two countries’ long-standing “win-win” co-operation in civil nuclear energy which they would continue to take forward”.

A major focus was on bilateral trade which rose sharply with the oil purchases to a record high of $68.7bn in 2024-25. That was made up by Russia’s (mainly oil) exports of $63.8bn while India’s totalled just $4.9bn. Putin was accompanied by a large business delegation, partly aimed to boosting what Russia buys from India. An India pharmaceutical factory in Russia plus investments in shipbuilding and critical minerals with encouragement for labour mobility and tourism are among the plans and proposals.

Perhaps the most unconventional and controversial diplomatic incident was an article written jointly by the British high commissioner in Delhi and the French and German ambassadors that was published on December 1 in theTimes of India. Titled “Russia doesn’t seem serious about peace”, it said: “Every day sees new indiscriminate Russian attacks in this illegal war, targeting civilian infrastructure, destroying homes, hospitals, and schools. These are not the actions of someone that is serious about peace”.

It is far from clear what the three countries’ ambassadors hoped to achieve, nor who they were trying to influence. They were rebuked by India’s foreign ministry for breaching “acceptable diplomatic practice”, and the Russian ambassador wrote a reply titled “Europe’s Four Treacheries are Impeding Peace in Ukraine”. 

The high commissioner’s and ambassadors’ article presumably reflected the view in Europe that it was unacceptable for Modi to lay on such an unconditionally splendid welcome when Russia is not only failing to negotiate a Ukraine peace deal but is also provoking European countries with military and cyber space manoeuvres. Coincidentally, as he flew into Delhi, Putin was personally blamed by a UK inquiry for the death in 2018 of a Salisbury resident accidentally infected by the Novichok nerve agent intended to kill a former Russian spy and UK double agent. There were also reports of the UK unfreezing £8bn of frozen Russian assets to aid Ukraine.

Viewed however from Asia, which broadly regards Russia’s war with Ukraine as a distant problem for the West to deal with, Modi properly called for a peaceful solution, while Putin in his India Today tv interview mixed support for seeking resolution to the war with a hard line on winning the bitterly disputed Donbas region.

“We will finish it when we achieve the goals set at the beginning of the special military operation – when we free these territories”, Putin said, having just mentioned the Donbas when asked for his red lines. “Either we take back these territories by force, or eventually Ukrainian troops withdraw and stop killing people there”.

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Posted by: John Elliott | November 16, 2025

Modi wins big election victory amid terror tensions with Pakistan

Authorities investigating Kashmiri bomb attack in Delhi 

BJP coalition win in Bihar strengthens Modi’s authority

Narendra Modi’s authority as India’s prime minister has been significantly strengthened by an unexpectedly massive win for his Bharatiya Janata Party’s coalition in the Bihar state elections at a time when he has to deal with relations with Pakistan that are at a tense and terror-related pivotal moment.

Modi’s National Democratic Alliance won 202 of the Bihar assembly’s 243 seats, up from just 125 in 2020 in results announced on November 14. The BJP topped the polls with 89 seats followed by the state-based Janta Dal (United) with 85. Nitish Kumar, the widely respected but ailing 74-year old leader of the JDU, who has been chief minister of this desperately poor state almost continuously since 2005, is to remain in the post. 

The special significance of this victory is that Modi does not need to distract attention and restore support for the BJP. It could have been different if his authority had been weakened by a defeat or marginal result in Bihar.

The explosives blast in Delhi – credit Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

Modi is grappling with how to respond to a massive car bomb explosion near the Red Fort in old Delhi on November 10 that killed 13 people. Earlier this year in April, after a Pakistan-linked terrorist attack at Pahalgam in Kashmir that slaughtered 26 tourists and led to four-days of air-borne battles between the two countries, Modi said any future terror-induced incident would be treated as “an act of war”.

Modi and his National Investigation Agency (NIA) now have to decide whether the November 10 explosion was instigated, encouraged or facilitated by Pakistan. No organisation has claimed responsibility and Pakistan denies involvement, but Indian security sources are pointing to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) that has close ties to the Pakistan military and the ISI security agency.

At the same time, Pakistan is accusing India of staging “state terrorism” with a suicide bombing that killed at least 12 people in the capital of Islamabad a day after the Delhi blast. India denies responsibility but the link stems from officials blaming the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which is allied to the Afghanistan’s Taliban government at a time when it has been growing close to India.

The Indian government has confirmed it is treating the Delhi blast as a “terror incident” perpetrated by “anti-national forces”. Modi has described it as a “conspiracy” and Amit Shah, the home minister, said he would “hunt down each and every culprit behind this incident”.

Pakistan’s defence chief, Field Marshall Asim Munir

This is complicated however because, unlike the earlier terror attackers who came from Pakistan, last week’s explosion involved Indian nationals from Kashmir. Claimed by Pakistan, Kashmir has suffered varying degrees of internally and externally instigated insurgency and terrorism since India’s independence in 1947. 

Indian investigators have linked the blast to what they describe as “an interstate and transnational terror module” that they started tracking last month when posters promoting the JeM appeared in Nowgam, a village south of Srinagar that is at the centre of the disputed Kashmir territory.  

Seven people were arrested including two Kashmiri doctors working in other Indian states. Police said they had uncovered 2,900kg of highly volatile explosives equipment and assault rifles in Faridabad near Delhi, which they now believe were being readied by the doctors and their accomplices for attacks on various targets. They have described the network as a “white-collar ecosystem involving radicalised professionals and students in contact with foreign handlers operating from Pakistan and other countries”.  

The apparent emergence of such a terror group comprising professionals, and especially doctors who are widely trusted in security situations, has caused serious concern, though the radicalisation of white-collar groups has been seen before in Kashmir and elsewhere.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar with Narendra Modi

Complicating and delaying the investigation, the explosives seized in Faridabad were controversially transported 800 kms by mini-trucks to the police station in Nowgam for forensic examination. During handling, some of the volatile materials exploded on the night of November 14, killing nine people including police and forensic staff, and demolishing part of the police station. Officials say this was an accident, not an attack.

While the evidence may seem to point to Pakistan’s involvement, Modi has other issues to consider, notably a change in the triangular India-US-Pakistan relationship. In the past, India could assume that it would broadly have tacit US support for an attack on Pakistan after a terrorist incident, but that is no longer certain.

President Trump has become close to Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir (above), who is being given additional charge of the navy and air force as well as the security forces. This seems to involve powers approaching those of a military dictator, albeit within a (army dominated) parliamentary system. On November 11 Munir was also granted life-long legal immunity by the parliament. 

Trump has entertained Munir twice at the White House and described him as “my favourite field marshal”. This coincided with Trump’s previous close relations with Modi being upset by the Indian prime minister rejecting his claims that he brokered the end of the April four-day battle between the two nuclear powers. India is never willing to accept outside interference in its relations with Pakistan and Modi has repeatedly rejected Trump’s claims.

Trump also imposed 50% tariffs on India after talks on a trade deal floundered, and India continued to be a major buyer of Russian oil despite the Ukraine war. Those issues have now eased, with Trump saying the oil purchases have declined and a trade deal is near.

Trump continues to call Modi a “great friend”, and relations between the two countries remain stable across a range of issues. But if he were to consider an attack on Pakistan, Modi would have to be wary of Trump’s reactions and be ready for the American president to be swayed by Munir. He also has to remember that the April battles led to serious though unconfirmed aircraft losses by India as well as Pakistan.

BJP supporters celebrate in Patna, Bihar’s capital – credit BBC/Reuters photo

In Bihar, it always seemed likely that Modi’s NDA would win, but not by such a massive majority, routing the opposition including the Indian National Congress that won only five seats after alleging widespread election manipulation.

In addition to the pull of the BJP, the result is significantly due to the charisma and political experience of Nitish Kumar who authorised payments just before voting took place of Rs10,000 (£85) into the bank accounts of almost 15m women to start small ventures. 

That is despite what a visiting American commentator has written in the FT , maybe unfairly, about Kumar having “more obvious infirmities than Biden”. An Indian Express columnist has written that “the NDA’s landslide win in Bihar was, above all, about Nitish Kumar and Biharis’ ‘sahanubhuti (sympathy)’ for their leader and what many said was ‘shraddha (respect)’ for his stewardship over the last two decades”.

The BJP’s success is the latest of a series of significant state assembly victories in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi following a mediocre general election result last year. Together with its NDA allies, it is in power in 21 of India’s 31 states and union territories. Modi has said his next target, early in 2026, is West Bengal where the BJP has previously failed to oust the state-based Trinamool Congress.

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Posted by: John Elliott | November 3, 2025

Indian art from the 16th and 20th centuries hits London headlines

Christie’s score classical art records with Aga Khan family auction 

Mrinalini Mukherjee is first Indian to have a show at the RA since 1982 

Two events in London last week illustrate Indian art’s growing importance, both for moneyed collectors and for galleries and museums. Just as previews were starting on October 28 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly for a much-heralded exhibition of works by renowned sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee and her fellow artists, one of the most striking auctions for years was hitting record prices a few hundred yards away at Christie’s. 

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s 7ft high “Pakshi”

Bids were flowing for 95 classical Indian and Islamic works from the personal collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, part of the family of the Ismaili Muslim sect’s spiritual leader. Records were broken with sales totalling £45.76m.

At the Royal Academy (RA), the most striking work on show was Pakshi, Mukherjee’s iconic 7ft high suspended sculpture (left) of voluminous golden-brown to pinkish red knotted hemp resembling both a deity and a human figure. 

At Christie’s, headlines were grabbed for a 12in x 7in painting on cloth of a “family of cheetahs in a rocky landscape” (below), attributed between 1575 and 1580 to Basawan, a famous Indian Mughal artist who was said to have been a favourite of Emperor Akbar.

This established a record for a classical Indian or Islamic painting with a hammer price of £8.5m ($11.16m), an astonishing twelve times the low estimate, and £10.25m including fees.

The works were mostly acquired by Sadruddin and his wife between the 1960s and 1980s, and the sale attracted buyers who have been setting new records this year for 20th and 21st century modern Indian art as well as museums and other collectors from the Middle East and elsewhere. The £45.76m ($60m) total beat the top South Asian art auction record of $40.2m achieved at a Mumbai-based Saffronart sale of modern works on September 27.

Christie’s 16th century record breaking family of cheetah in a rock landscape

“This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire very famous paintings from a highly illustrious collection,” says Hugo Weihe, an independent Indian art advisor. The prices achieved for the many relatively small paintings showed “that it is not always about size, but artistic merit and appreciating the full scope of cultural heritage.”

The overall sale was Christie’s second significant coup within a few months. It lagged behind other auction houses during the South Asia summer sales, but in March it achieved the highest auction price ever for an Indian painting – M.F. Husain’s 1954 Gram Yatra, which sold for $13.75m.

Mukherjee’s RA show, which continues till next February, is significant both for the artist and for Indian modern art at a time when international attention is growing with the high auction prices and increasing institutional interest in staging exhibitions. 

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s “Adi Pushp II” described as “a potent emblem of generative energy and affirming nature as a vital erotic life force”

This is the first exhibition of Indian modern art at the Royal Academy since the 1982 Festival of India in the UK that was driven by the then prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. Benefitting from the political focus, it involved works by 45 artists in the main large galleries (currently occupied by a stunningly dramatic and colourful exhibition of the American artist Kerry James Marshall). With works by seven artists, the Mukherjee exhibition is located on one of the academy’s upper floors. 

Mukherjee’s last UK show was some 30 years ago in Oxford, though she had an acclaimed exhibition titled Phenomenal Nature at New York’s Met Breuer gallery in 2019. Pakshi was among her “deities” shown at the 2022 Venice Biennale. 

With almost 100 works spanning a century, the RA exhibition flows on from a modern art show at London’s Barbican last year, which had a tighter-focussed 1975-98 time span with over 150 works by 30 artists, including Mukherjee and several others who are at the RA.

Sadly, there are on show only a few of Mukherjee’s spellbinding large textile figures like Pakshi for which she is most famous. This is partly because of financial constraints and partly because of what the RA describes as conservation issues with transporting older hemp works (though more have appeared at other exhibitions).  

Leela Mukherjee’s wooden sculptures

Mukherjee’s other bronze and ceramic sculptures along with water colours are also on show, accompanied by works by her mother Leela (left) and five other artists who were friends and who influenced each other’s styles. A very high proportion of the works have not been shown abroad before, including those by her mother.

The friends include husband and wife Gulammohammed (GM) and Nilima Sheikh. GM Sheikh had a memorable retrospective in Delhi early this year and both were included in the Barbican exhibition. Nilima has a softly colourful installation of hanging vertical scrolls (below) not previously seen outside India, Titled Songspace, it uses milk-based casein protein to bind the paint pigments. Other notable works include paintings by Jagdish Swaminathan and K.G. Subramanian.

Nalini Sheikh’s “Songspace” inspired by “tales of wandering mystics, exiled saints, and separate lovers”

The RA says that the main aim has been to show the close relationships and shared learning and support between the artists. This formed a “vibrant creative and intellectual network that influenced the development of modern and contemporary art in South Asia”.

As one of the oldest art schools in Europe, the RA highlights India’s notable art institutions—the Kala Bhavana (Institute of Fine Arts) in Santiniketan, founded in 1919 by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, which are both noted for their artistic learning and styles. They comprise two of the sections of the exhibition, the third being Delhi. 

Notably not included, because they are not relevant to the Mukherjee story, are the Mumbai-based Progressives such as M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza who date from the 1940s and dominate the top end of the auction market.

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s “Ritu Raja” hemp and steel works

Mukherjee’s most memorable exhibition, Transfigurations, opened in Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art just a week before she died in 2015, aged 65. The gallery’s vast spaces were filled with her large and striking textile sculptures as well as metal and other works. I walked through that exhibition with the curator, Peter Nagy of Delhi’s Nature Morte Gallery, and wish I had written about it then.

Tarini Malik, now the Royal Academy’s chief curator for modern art, was also there and met Mukherjee before the artist died. That gave her the ambition to stage what is now on view at the RA, while acknowledging that the show should have been done years ago.

The RA covers the theme of Mukherjee and friends well, with neat division into the three Santiniketan, Baroda and Delhi parts. For many, it is a welcome opportunity to see so many works by respected names that have been loaned from normally hidden private collections. But unfortunately this is neither an exceptional display of a century of Indian modern art, nor an adequate display of Mukherjee’s drama.

Reviews in the UK media so far have been partly critical, reflecting the absence of enough of Mukherjee’s big textile work and the remoteness of the basic theme. The FT tactfully ends a generously positive full page-spread with “the contextual lacunas make this seem more a show, perhaps, for the initiated connoisseur”.

“Bird Trees and Mountain” by Jagdish Swaminathan

The Guardian is most belligerently negative. After saying Mukherjee’s “surreal spins on Indian folk and sacred art are powerfully fascinating”, it asks why the RA has tried “to suffocate her exhilarating works in an incoherent show that surrounds them with mediocre stuff by much less interesting artists”.

TheTimes reviewer says, “In many ways, it’s a beautiful show, aided by soft lighting and pale-pink walls. But I can’t help but wonder whether it would have been better off as a family affair.” The Observer thought the show was “overburdened with the fashionable purchases of private collectors”.

This is not the end of the story. Tarini Malik will be curating a follow-on exhibition next May at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield that describes Mukherjee as “one of the world’s most significant modernist sculptors”. The gallery website says this will be a major Mukherjee retrospective, but it seems that it will also include her mother Leela along with sculptures by other female artists. The critics hope that the focus will be clearer than many see it at the RA. 

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Posted by: John Elliott | October 15, 2025

Book Review: Sam Dalrymple’s “Shattered Lands”

Many accidents of history in Imperial India’s five Partitions

Indian empire stretched from Aden and other Arab States to Burma

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple –  UK: William Collins, London, £25 hardback, India: Harper Collins India, New Delhi, Rs799 hardback 528 pages

For most people, even those well versed in colonial history, the word “partition” mainly conjures up images of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Hindus who were killed in 1947 fleeing between northern India and Pakistan at the time of independence from Britain. Little is even remembered about similar crossings in the east between what is now West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Sam Dalrymple – photo credit Akshay Kapoor

Sam Dalrymple explores these events in detail in his book Shattered Lands and then goes on to break important new ground by taking the story much further to include Imperial India’s little-known total of five partitions. Delhi’s writ stretched from the Indian Subcontinent across the Arabian Sea to what is now Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. That was in addition to India’s neighbours Burma (Myanmar) and the somewhat reluctant protectorates of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. 

The Indian Raj “housed a quarter of the world’s population and was governed by the Indian rupee”, says Dalrymple. He has left out Afghanistan that never became part of the empire, even though Britain fought several wars there and controlled its foreign policy for 40 years.

The Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire, we learn, were usually left off Imperial maps to avoid annoying Constantinople, while Nepal and Oman never officially recognised their protectorate status. Yet they were all legally part of “India” – run by the Indian Political Service and subservient to the Viceroy of India. Defended by the Indian Army, they paid Indian taxes with Indian rupees. 

That establishes the contours that Dalrymple has devised for this wide-ranging book which shows how haphazardly many historically significant decisions were taken. Some were hurried with almost random implementation, creating problems that remain today – notably trouble-torn Kashmir that is divided and claimed by both India and Pakistan. Some claims for partition were rejected – Nagaland has never fully accepted being a state in north-east India and could have become part of Burma (Myanmar).  

The partitions began in 1937 when Burma was separated from India as a crown colony to meet anti Hindu-India nationalist demands and enable London to establish direct links separate from Delhi. Also, that year, the separation of Aden began the Arabian Peninsula partitions that continued till the Persian Gulf states went in 1947.

India’s political leaders did not oppose losing the (Muslim) Gulf states and Dalrymple describes this as “India’s greatest lost opportunity” because of the oil wealth that was discovered later. But for these partitions, he says, the countries “might have become part of India or Pakistan after independence”. That however is surely a most improbable “what if….”, not least because of the unreality of expecting those Muslim nations to accept life run from Hindu India.

The bloody creation of Pakistan in 1947 came next, which Dalrymple presents as an idea that flowed from the partitions of Burma and Aden. After years of discussions Jawaharlal Nehru, who was about to become independent India’s first prime minister, admitted “we are tired men” and said the plan for partition “offered a way out and we took it”. Dalrymple however does not adequately blame Nehru for killing off an earlier “way out”. In a July 1946 speech, he had refused to honour what was known as the widely accepted “Cabinet Mission” plan for a federal set-up, which would have avoided the violent partition and all that followed. 

Next came the fourth partition when the new Indian government headed by Nehru and his tough Home Minister, Sardar Patel, virtually instructed India’s 562 princely states to cede to Delhi. Britain had only directly ruled 60% of the Indian land mass. The rest belonged to these states that were independent, up to a point. They were subordinate to the British crown in foreign policy, defence, and communications, and their maharajas and lesser princely rulers were subject to advice from an often-interfering British Residents (political agents).

Nehru and Patel never recognised them as having any right to independence, but they were less committed about the kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, which had varying treaties with the British raj. Nehru was sympathetic to their Himalayan identity, and they were left off the list. Nepal became a sovereign nation, and Bhutan and Sikkim kept special independent status. (Indira Gandhi annexed Sikkim in the mid-1970s, and China is now trying to undermine Bhutan’s friendship treaty with India,). 

As the empire gradually “shattered”, some colonies became republics, cutting all links with Britain, while others settled for dominion status and became part of the Commonwealth, which later also admitted republican India and others. Dalrymple sadly does not deal with this aspect of international affairs. That may be because he focuses on the gradual decline of empire, rather than tracking later institutions, though the idea of the Commonwealth goes back to the 1880s. 

Within the Indian subcontinent, the colonies of Pakistan (with Bangladesh hived off in 1971 as Dalrymple’s fifth partition) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) did join the Commonwealth, but Nepal and Bhutan did not because they prized their independence. Neither did Burma. The Gulf states were technically eligible but chose the regional Gulf Co-operation Council that was set up in 1981. That was in line with earlier opt-outs by Palestine and others in the region, though Palestine and Yemen did apply for membership in 1997 without any decision. (Palestine’s case and the role of the Commonwealth is now being informally discussed (see this link) at a time of growing international support for its statehood).

Dalrymple vividly covers the collapse of British rule in the Gulf once these countries had lost their role in the Indian raj, and an energised Arab nationalism clashed with fading British imperialism. After almost coming to hostilities, there is the Sultan of Oman’s $3m sale of the important Arabian Sea port city of Gwadar to Pakistan in 1958. The Sultan held the city that lay on the Pakistani coast under a 1783 treaty. (Gwadar, in Balochistan province, is now a key nautical link in the Pakistan leg of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and a centre for Baloch nationalist opposition to rule from Islamabad). 

Significantly, Dalrymple shows how the current India government’s Hindutva focus has roots from these years when the British tacitly agreed that “India belonged primarily to the Hindus” and hived off the largely non-Hindu parts. Hindu nationalism “was a key driving force in those earlier partitions” of Burma and Aden as well as the later divide of India and Pakistan. 

As he weaves his way through this history Dalrymple introduces gems that would not be picked up by most historians. Tracking the rise of Abdel Nasser as Egypt’s president, and the beginning of the Arab oil boom just a few years after Britain’s departure, we hear about Dhirubhai Ambani, father of Mukesh who is now one of Asia’s richest men, arriving in Aden from Gujarat. He was 17 and was soon managing ship refuelling for A. Besse & Co., a French trading firm. As Nasser took over the Suez Canal and Arab nationalism became more violent, Ambani returned to Gujarat at the end of 1957 with his wife and eight-month-old Mukesh to found what became Reliance, now India’s biggest conglomerate.

On a different wavelength, we hear early in the book about the “open marriage” of “pretty Dickie” Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain’s last Viceroy, and his wife Edwina. Her most widely researched and analysed relationship was with Nehru, which had “raised many eyebrows” within just ten days of the Mountbattens arriving in Delhi in March 1947. Later, when writing about the Nagaland people’s call for independence in north-east India, Dalrymple has an aside that mentions Edwina again, just after logging Indira Gandhi’s alleged affair with a possible CIA plant in Nehru’s office. Watching Naga dancers in Delhi, just two weeks before she died, Edwina exclaimed to a friend, “Don’t they have beautiful bottoms!”.

Such light-hearted references add to this magnificent (and massive) first book by Sam Dalrymple. It misses out or underplays one or two turning points; and could have usefully included the evolution of the Commonwealth. But it does add a new perspective to the region’s history, and the accidents of history, covering a wide canvas with an appealing writing style that makes for compelling reading.

Since he is the son of author and historian William Dalrymple, many of whose books explore the Indian Raj, there is inevitable curiosity about family involvement. Sam told The Indian Express that the book began as a documentary project with National Geographic until Covid prevented filming. His father then suggested turning it into a book, and read the first and final drafts, but his mother, the artist Olivia Fraser, was “the real editor-in-chief, reading everything meticulously”.  

This is an expanded version of a Book Review published by Taylor & Francis in “The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies” on October 15, 2025, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/D42SVVFYPANTHT3ITTNY/full?target=10.1080/00358533.2025.2568597

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Posted by: John Elliott | October 1, 2025

Indian art boom generates $96m in two weeks’ auctions

Saffronart hits $40m for a single auction

Indian art galleries on show in London’s Frieze exhibitions

There’s a boom in the modern Indian art market with sales recently totalling £96.2m at international auctions in a period of under two weeks, and with a significant number of Indian galleries showing at the Frieze London and Masters exhibitions in the UK capital this month.

The strong prices have revived memories of the first boom in 2005, which was partly triggered by newly-rich Indian buyers working in New York financial services. That fell away with the 2008 financial crisis. This time, the boom has a stronger base, leading to 10 or more galleries showing at the Frieze exhibitions. There are many new buyers of all ages, even though the boom is partly fueled by individual collectors competing for the top lots.

“Indian art is now being accepted as an asset, like gold or real estate, that you buy and hold because of its long-term value, rather than trading,” said Dinesh Vazirani, who founded the Saffronart gallery with his wife Minal in 2000.

F.N.Souza’s “Houses in Hampstead”

Leading the sales, Saffronart almost doubled the maximum total for an Indian auction to $40.2m, while Sotheby’s and Pundole each totalled $25.5m and $18.3m with Christie’s trailing at $12.4m. All four were celebrated as “white glove” sales, where all the lots were sold. 

Top prices were achieved for a variety of artists. They were inevitably led by members of the ultra-safe Bombay-based Progressives Group, which began in the 1940s, with names such as F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain and V.S. Gaitonde. Records were also set however for later artists including Bhupen Khakhar, Mohan Samant, Arpita Singh Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani who have been attracting increasing interest at auctions, though there were few works from contemporary artists.

Competition between two top collectors helped to boost prices for some prime lots, notably at Sotheby’s auction in London on September 30 where Manjari Sihare-Sutin, co-head of South Asian art, said the £18.9m ($25.5m with premium) achieved was the department’s highest total in its 30-year history.

Two Souza works created a new record for the artist after a contest between Shankh Mitra from the US, who is a relatively fresh collector and was in the auction room, and Kiran Nadar who bids down the telephone for her large art museum in Delhi. 

M.F.Souza’s “Six Gentlemen of Our Times”

Bidding against Mitra, Nadar won the Emperor at a hammer price of  £4.2m, ($6.9m with premium), beating the artist’s previous $4.89m record set at Christies in New York in March 2024.

A few lots later, in another tussle that began with nine bidders, Mitra set a higher record with Houses in Hampstead (above) at £4.6m ($7.57m with premium). This followed a Christie’s New York contest between th two collectors last March for a notable Husain work that Nadar eventually won for $13.75m. Mitra has also been buying extensively in other auctions, challenging Nadar’s success for many years at acquiring the best works by top artists. He is the ceo and chief investment officer of Welltower Inc, a real estate investment trust working in the healthcare sector. 

A comparable Souza Belsize Park, London, 1961 is coming up in an on-line auction at London-based Roseberys auctioneers on October 24. It is a little under half the size of House in Hampstead , so could get bids far far above the unrealistically modest £15,000 ($20,000) top estimate.

Another Souza record came in the Saffronart sale on September 27 in Delhi for a unique collection (above) of six 10in x 8in pen and ink on paper drawings titled Six Gentlemen of our Times. This sold for an unexpectedly high hammer price of Rs170m ($2.30m including 20% buyers’ premium), which was the highest auction price ever paid for a South Asian work on paper. 

M.F.Husain’s “Morning Bath”, painted in his 20s

Delhi-based art critic Geeta Kapur has described these heads as “a combined portrait of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, sly, evil and at the same time terrified.” The next lot was a similar single man’s head by Souza. It went even more surprisingly at a hammer price six times the top estimate for the rupee equivalent of $67,797 (including the premium). 

All four auction houses pitched many of their estimates low – at Sotheby’s 94% of the lots exceeded their top estimate. The aim was to draw in bidders at a time when art is being increasingly seen in India as a strong investment, pulling in new collectors – a third of Sotheby’s buyers were new to the auction house.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Saffronart packed its 85-lot auction so successfully with top priced works that the leading ten lots alone went for a total of over £25m. The total $40.2m beat a $25.2m all-India record that Saffronart set in April.

The low estimates brought some remarkable multiples. 

Pundole’s Rs1.62m ($18.29m) auction of 81 lots on September 25 in Mumbai had a dramatic start with memorable early works by members of the Progressives Group, all painted when they were in their 20s. They were part of a collection assembled by Emanuel Schlesinger, an Austrian emigre who fled from Europe in the 1930s to escape Nazism and became a patron of young Bombay artists.

“Bombay from Malabar Hill”, painted by S.H.Raza in his 20s

A figurative 32in x 31in oil on canvas, Morning Bath, by M.F. Husain (above) fetched eight times the top estimate at a hammer price of Rs190m – $2.46m including Pundole’s 15% buyers’ premium. Three watercolour landscapes by S.H. Raza included a 12in x 18.5in panoramic view across Bombay’s Marine Drive and city from Malabar Hill (above) that went for 14 times the top estimate at a hammer price of Rs22m ($248,000 including premium).

Works by Mohan Samant, a lesser-known member of the group, who mostly lived in New York, had several successes with a personal record of Rs5.5m ($62,000) hammer price, seven times the top estimate, for a 33in x 27in watercolour, Red Carpet.

Arpita Singh’s record “With and Without Shadows”

“We saw increasing emphasis on artists outside the more predictable names,” says Dadiba Pundole. “Collectors are also more aware of works of academic importance, and are willing to fight for these, irrespective of medium or scale.”

Arpita Singh’s record came in at Rs165m ($2.14m with premium) at the Pundole auction for a colourful 68in x 68in oil on canvas titled With and Without Shadows (above).  The veteran artist had a highly successful retrospective exhibition in London during the summer, which brought fresh attention to her work.

Pundole’s top lot was a 45in x 36in oil on canvas by Tyeb Mehta depicting a female labourer from 1983. It sold for a hammer price of Rs260m ($3.37m including premium). Also in this auction, Bhupen Khakhar achieved a record work-on-paper price of Rs42m ($544,839 with premium) for an erotic gay form of puja, with the artist in the crowd. 

V.S.Gaitonde’s record work painted in 1971

Gaitonde’s record came in the Saffronart auction for a glowing gold coloured untitled 55in x 40in oil on canvas in the artist’s iconic misty style (right). This was an early work, painted in 1971, and it fetched a hammer price of Rs560m ($7.58m including the premium) exceeding Gaitonde’s previous record of Rs420m at a Pundole auction in 2022.

Bidding was slow for the top lots at Christie’s $12.34m auction on September 17 in New York where a V.S. Gaitonde achieved a top price (including premium) of $2.39m and a Tyeb Mehta Trussed Bull went for $2.03m. 

By contrast, another work in Mehta’s Trussed Bull series was sold (to Shankh Mitra) for Rs470m ($6.37m including the premium) at Saffronart’s auction, following a record $7.2m set for a similar work at Saffronart in April.

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