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British Museum’s Free Exhibition
Given to the British Museum in 1905 by Perceval Landon (a friend of Rudyard Kipling), the museum is exhibiting the Vrindavani Vastra woven textile from the 21st of January until the 15th of August. This is a free exhibit and open to the public.
This late 17th century silk textile is woven with a technique that no longer exists in India today. Extending over a length of more than 9 meters, the textile shows different scenes of the life of Krishna and a verse from the Bhagavata Purana, a 10th century text.
Additional items from this period will also be displayed alongside the textile.
More information can be found by clicking the following link : Indian Textile at British Museum
Cheers,
Elisabeth and Natasha
Strange and Wondrous
Prints of India from the Robert J. Del Bonta Collection
October 19, 2013–January 5, 2014
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian Institution
http://www.asia.si.edu/explore/del-bonta/default.asp
As global travel boomed from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Europeans and Americans became increasingly fascinated with Indian culture. Merchants, soldiers, and missionaries documented their visits to India and other foreign lands in illustrated accounts. Created using such techniques as engraving, aquatint, lithography, and photogravure, these subjects and designs were easily duplicated, and copies circulated widely. Publishers regularly edited, amended, or simply reprinted them in publications as varied as atlases, memoirs, and history books.
The spread of these images led to broader knowledge and interest in Indian culture—but also to the creation and proliferation of negative stereotypes. Ascetics, or religious figures who renounce material comforts, were depicted over the years as supernatural beings, devout penitents, militants, tricksters, and beggars. Religious ceremonies were interpreted within a Christian framework instead of a Hindu one, leading to misconceptions of devotees as sinners or fanatics. With the aid of Indian art, deities were catalogued as lovers, drug users, and creators of the cosmos, which fed generalizations of India as a sensual, spiritual land.
The fifty artworks in Strange and Wondrous, from the encyclopedic Robert J. Del Bontà collection, show how certain ascetics and Hindu practices became emblems for all that Europeans and Americans found exotic, repulsive, or remarkable in India. By tracing how these images were interpreted and reproduced over time, the exhibition also demonstrates how perceptions of Indian culture shifted through the centuries, from the Enlightenment to the colonial period and Christian missionary movement, and into modernity. Together these prints reveal structures of the European and American imagination as much as they encapsulate conceptions of India.
RADICAL TERRAIN : MODERNIST ART FROM INDIA
JALIS — OR OPENWORK CARVINGS — FROM MUGHAL INDIA
DIWALI FESTIVAL OF LIGTHS
Art for a Modern India
TWENTY TONS OF TIBETAN SOIL TRANSPORTED TO DHARAMSALA
TWENTY TONS OF TIBETAN SOIL TRANSPORTED TO DHARAMSALA

LADAKH IN THE NEWS
LADAKH IN THE NEWS
PHOTOGRAPHS by Linnaeus Tripe!
IF YOU MISSED BEING IN INDIA AND BURMA IN THE MID 1800’s here is the next best thing —PHOTOGRAPHS by Linnaeus Tripe!
Sotheby’s London to offer important newly discovered and unseen early photographs by Linnaeus

TORSO OF THE BUDDHA
Nelson-Atkins Museum loans its priced TORSO OF THE BUDDHA to Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St.Louis for is exhibition REFLECTIONS OF THE BUDDHA