Reading Corner Wall Art

Reading Corner — 59 museum-grade prints sized and toned for the room. Aipan is the ritual floor- and wall-art of the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, drawn traditionally by Kumaoni women with white rice-paste (biswar) applied by fingertip onto a geru (red-ochre) earth ground. This fusion piece carries an everyday Pahari monsoon scene into that same two-tone line, anchoring it with the lotus chowki and swastika marks of the tradition's vocabulary. Cheriyal scrolls come from Cheriyal village in Telangana's Siddipet district, painted for generations by the Nakashi artist community. They were long narrative cloth scrolls unrolled episode by episode by travelling balladeer-storytellers — the kaki padagollu and allied story-telling castes — who sang the epics and caste-origin legends to village audiences through the night. Gond painting comes from the Gond Adivasi communities of central India, with its best-known school formed by the Pradhan Gond of Patangarh and the wider Dindori region of Madhya Pradesh. The contemporary form is largely the legacy of Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962–2001), whose distinctive line-and-in-fill manner — every form bounded by a bold outline, then filled with rows of dots, dashes, commas and scales — became known as Jangarh Kalam and was carried on by his family and students.

Updated 22 Jun 2026