Mythology

From the collection of:  National Museum, New Delhi   What is it: A brass sculpture of a goddess holding a ladle in the right hand and a jewelled bowl full of rice in her left hand. Her bowl...

Visiting the Mahabalipuram group of monuments, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was on my bucket list and I finally got to put a check against it.  The group of monuments have served as backdrop for classical dance...

Who doesn't love a great story? Now imagine, the story takes form of sculptures and caves - and 19 of them in the same vicinity. No wonder, Mahabalipuram is a UNESCO World Heritage Site....

Having been brought up in a Bengali household, the run up to Durga Puja & Dussehra would always be full of Mahisasur-Mardini stories, and it is only on Diwali that I would revise the little I knew of Ramayana.  Working in the crafts space for 8 years now, I’ve seen how different episodes and Rama stories inspire artists not only across India, but various South-east asian countries. And then, the other night I went for my first Ram-Leela. The story was told slightly differently from the one I kne

WHAT IS IT?   This sculpture of Ganesha, made of muscovite biotite schist  is believed to belong to the early 11th Century's Pala Art School, and finds its origins in Bihar. "Pala" refers to the suffix in the...

WHAT IS IT? 'The Nataraja' is one of the most important, visually thrilling forms of the Hindu god Shiva. Artists in Tamil Nadu, India began to make this form of Shiva in the early tenth century,...

Around 1000 years ago, a scribe called Sujātabhadra, penned the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra or 'Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 lines'. It is believed to have been completed in the year 985 during the reign...