Art & Culture

Kalakriti Archives (KA), one of largest private archives of vintage maps of Indian Subcontinent. It also comprises a significant collection of rare photographs, prints and artifacts primarily of South Asian countries. It includes the Prshant Lahoti Personal Collection (PLPC), which has over ten thousand vintage maps spanning five centuries, as well as over nine thousand vintage images from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

KA has quickly become a leader in the visual record of South Asian history, politics, and culture.

The maps, which range from pre-survey painted cosmological and pilgrimage route-maps to modern scientific maps with greater plane metric accuracy, are mostly about India and other South Asian countries and regions, revealing the changing modes of terrestrial vision and imagination over a long period of time. 

Maps: Our wide collection of Indian maps can be broadly categorized into the following categories:

Pre-Survey Traditional Painted Maps: We have an outstanding collection of early painted maps depicting Hindu sacred geographies as well as sites and routes to religious sites, or Tirtha. Although the maps with traditional artistic styles and cosmic imagination reflect the devotee’s experience rather than the topographical portrayal of the actual locales, they exhibit significant geographic coherence.

Early Scientific Maps: Following Vasco Da Gama’s arrival in the subcontinent in 1498, European maps depicting India with ever-greater planimetric features represented a break with the spiritual heritage of geographic vision. In these early trade maps, the familiar pattern of modern India can be seen gradually taking shape.

Early Colonial Maps: These are the maps that detail the complicated and contentious ties that existed between many European powers and significant Indian states in order to gain control of the Indian Subcontinent. The strong graphic depictions tell the highly ambiguous story of ambition, bravery, conflict, cunning, and intellect as India was forcibly opened up to the rest of the globe.

British Colonial Maps: The collection has civil and military maps and plans depicting Britain’s engagement with India, the mercantile and political history of the East India Company, and the history of British imperial authority gradually consolidating up to 1947.

City Survey Maps: The valuable collection of municipal survey maps of Hyderabad produced between 1912 and 1915 under Leonard Mann’s direction, a mining engineer with the Nizam’s Government, shows the revitalized city spaces following the devastating Musi river flood in 1908.

Photographs: KA’s collection of Photographs contribute to research on the history of early photography in India, as well as ethnography, architecture, and archaeology. Rare cityscape pictures of India’s major colonial and princely cities are very well represented in the collections.

Rare images by early European photographers, such as Samuel Bourne and Francis Frith, who traveled to India in the second half of the nineteenth century and professionally captured India’s natural and geographic beauty, as well as its anthropological and archaeological history, are among them. Aside from European images, we have a vast collection of Indian photographs. The original, authentic images of Raja Deen Dayal, the most famous Indian photographer in colonial India, form the foundation of the Indian photographic collection.

Popular Prints: We have over 300 popular oleographs and chromolithographs by Raja Ravi Varma, M. V. Dhurandhar, Bamapada Banerjee, and many other lesser-known artists of the so-called ‘Calendar Prints’ from 19th and 20th century India. We also offer some rare chromolithographs issued by the Poona Chitrashala Press, one of India’s first fine art lithography studios recognised for historical portraits, iconic prints, and mythological prints.

Etchings: