Intellectuals, the Society and the State

Published in Triveni, January - March 1974, pp. 53-59

There is a phrase of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which has almost become a cliche in our time, describing the poet as “the unacknowledged legislator of mankind.”

The fact that Shelley felt constrained to define the writer's position in this

Birth of Lalit Kala

Published in Lalit Kala Contemporary, June, 1962, pp. 3-7

The inauguration of the first issue of Lalit Kala Contemporary magazine is a suitable occasion for raising the question of aesthetic theory and such other considerations from which we look at the objects produced in our time.

For there

Approaches towards an Aesthetic of Humanism

Published in Kala Darshan (Complete magazine of Indian arts and culture volume 1, no.4 Oct-Dec 1988), pp.15-19

About Contemporary Indian aesthetics, there has not been much thought since the Seminar in the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Of course, there are appreciations

Thoughts on poetic parallelism

I first heard of W.G. Archer in Patna, before the Second World War, as an eccentric Englishman of the Indian Civil Service, who was prone to wander about in Santhal villages, collecting folk songs. Our common friend, Verrier Elwin, showed me some of the renderings of tribal poems by this eccentric and

The four initiators of the contemporary experimentalism

Already in the midst of the Bengali revival, there were troubled voices. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had been one of the patrons of the revivalist movement, in its early years, wrote some significant words, which foreshadowed his later conviction about the disabilities of imitating the past. The

The Erroneous Concept of Obscenity

If we go back to the earliest surviving beliefs of the people who inhabited the sub-continent now called, India we find that in their first confrontation with human destiny, they were intense, open and unashamed like children finding out for themselves the facts about life. 'Where go the stars by day?'

The artist as hero

There is a certain appropriateness in the issue, by the Lalit Kala Akademi, of a special souvenir number of our contemporary magazine to celebrate the occasion of the First Triennale of World Contemporary Art, sponsored by us in New Delhi during the spring of 1968.

I was asked to add a foreward to

Jamini Roy

I think there are few countries of the world where the position of art in its relation to the artist, to the community, to science, religion, politics and other departments of life is being more eagerly revaluated than in contemporary India. All these conferences, symposiums, art annuals and prolonged