At this year’s India Art Festival in Hyderabad, two artists offered very different answers to the same urgent question — what does it take to keep a tradition alive?
Every April, the India Art Festival arrives in Hyderabad with considerable force. This year’s third edition at the Jubilee Hills Convention Centre ran from April 3 to 5, filling the building with over 3,000 works from around 400 artists across nearly 100 booths. Collectors moved through the halls alongside students, first-time buyers and people who had simply wandered in out of curiosity. The festival has been running since 2011, rotating between Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and its founding logic has always been straightforward — art fairs should not exist only for people who already know how to navigate them. Within that busy, open-door atmosphere, however, some booths asked for a different kind of attention altogether.
Painting what his great-grandfather painted
Karan Singh comes from Udaipur and makes Pichwai paintings, as his father did, and his father’s father before that, going back four generations to a time when the family worked on commissions for temples and royal courts in Rajasthan. Pichwai is a devotional art form built around the life of Lord Krishna, known for its extraordinary density of detail and the months of patient work each painting demands. Singh did not study this at an art school. He learned by watching the people around him do it, and by doing it himself, over and over, until it became the way he naturally worked.
Seeing his booth inside the convention centre, surrounded by abstract canvases and digital prints and experimental sculpture, is a slightly disorienting experience. Everything around him moves quickly — bold, immediate, designed to catch the eye of someone walking past at speed. His paintings operate on entirely different terms. They reward the kind of looking that most people have largely forgotten how to do, the slow, close kind where detail accumulates gradually and the longer you stand there, the more you see. Singh is not preserving Pichwai as a museum exercise.
When a photographer picks a thread up
A few booths along, Rajeev Rai of Chitraksh is asking somewhat of a similar question. Rai is a photographer and entrepreneur with a background in physics and design, and his work at the festival brought together two things that do not obviously belong together — fine art photography and zardozi, the elaborate gold and silver thread embroidery practised for centuries in Lucknow and across Rajasthan, historically made for the garments and interiors of courts and palaces.
Rather than treating zardozi as a subject to photograph, Rai embroiders it directly onto his photographic prints, stitching the architectural lines of Rajasthani and Lucknawi monuments into the images by hand, so that the buildings appear to have been constructed out of thread. It is an odd, arresting thing to look at — neither a photograph in the conventional sense nor a piece of embroidery, but something that sits uncomfortably and interestingly between the two.
Where Singh is doing what his family has always done, Rai is doing something his predecessors would not recognise — using a traditional craft as material for a contemporary practice that did not exist when that craft was developed.
The zardozi technique remains intact, the same painstaking handwork, the same thread, but the context has shifted entirely, and with it the meaning. Singh’s position, stated simply, is that some things are worth keeping exactly as they are. Rai’s is that traditions find new life by entering new conversations. Both carry risks that are easy enough to see. Singh depends on finding audiences patient enough to value what he makes, and on there being people willing to absorb a practice that demands years of commitment. Rai risks using the prestige of a traditional craft as aesthetic texture without genuinely sustaining it. Neither artist seems particularly troubled by these questions.
What the festival leaves behind
The India Art Festival will pack up and move on to its next city, as it always does, leaving Hyderabad’s Jubilee Hills Convention Centre to return to whatever it was before. But for three days it created the conditions for encounters that would not otherwise happen — a Hyderabad visitor standing in front of a Pichwai painting they had never heard of, or watching closely as someone explained how gold thread gets worked into a photograph.
In a city that has spent the last two decades moving very fast in a very particular direction, there is something useful about a space that briefly asks people to slow down and look at what is being carried forward, and what is being left behind.
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