Immersive visual journeys annotating artworks, themes, and histories that merit a closer look.

A specialist in Islamic and Indian arms and armours, art historian Rachel Parikh traces the evolution of the katar, from its origins as a close-combat weapon to its transformation into a symbol of power, and artistic expression. She explores how the katar transformed while moving across regions and contexts, from battlefields and hunting grounds to royal courts, religious ceremonies, and finally to popular culture.

Art historian Pika Ghosh looks closely at a select few historic kantha from the Karun Thakar Collection, to reveal what these textiles tell us about women’s domestic lives, world-views, and narrative imagination. She has worked extensively on kantha beginning with Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal, an exhibition for the Philadelphia Museum of Art to her monograph, Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in Colonial Bengal, and beyond.

Art historian Dr Beth Citron explores the life and work of half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), whose practice reflects a continued effort to negotiate her dual cultural inheritance, while forging a distinctly personal artistic language. The questions that Sher-Gil’s art posed — on identity, gender, and social reality — came to shape, in many ways, the direction of modern Indian art. Despite her brief life and career, Sher-Gil is considered a pioneering and exceptional figure in modern Indian art history.

Eighteenth-century Awadh’s painted cityscapes reveal how art, architecture, and politics intertwined to shape power and perception. Painters like Faizallah, trained in the Mughal court idiom, worked with new patrons in Awadh to develop a complex genre of painting with its own conventions — conveying messages in layers, both in composition and meaning.