India is Fast becoming Asia's Art & Literary Hub by Abhay K

India is fast becoming Asia's art and literary hub. India Art Summit and Jaipur Literary Festival are two significant art and literary events that took place back to back this January in India's capital Delhi and Jaipur respectively. Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, is located 281 kilometers from the national capital Delhi in the Western India state of Rajasthan. Delhi and Jaipur along with Agra, where the famous Taj Mahal is located, form the Golden Triangle of India's tourist hotspots.


India Art Summit started in 2009 while Jaipur Literary Festival started in 2006. Since then both the events have been gaining wide popularity in India and abroad. These are two pan-Indian events that bring together art collectors, artists, curators, art-critics, publishers, writers, poets, book-lovers from all over India with many foreign visitors.

This year India Art Summit showcased works of 84 galleries from India and abroad (from 20 countries) under 8,500 square feet of space at New Delhi's premier exhibition space Pragati Maidan from January 21-23. The event had additional attractions such as Sculpture's Park and special Video Lounge besides the exhibition space.

The first India Art Summit attracted 10,000 visitors and this time the event witnessed a much higher turnout.

Jaipur Literary Festival, proclaimed to be Asia-Pacific's largest literary event, ran for five days long at the 19th century mansion Diggi Palace, beginning January 21st. Many luminaries of the literary world were present at the event. Nobel Laureates in Literature Orhan Pamuk & J.M. Coetzee were a great attraction, as were the icons of the Indian film industry Gulzar & Javed Akhtar, Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, and great literary figures such as Vikram Seth, Ian McEwan among others. The event drew a large crowd of literature lovers.

India is fast becoming the publishing hub of the world with many large publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press, Random House and others setting up their offices in India.

India's burgeoning art market has led to the foundation of an Indian online auction house Saffronart in 2000 on the lines of Sotheby and Christie.

India's art and literary scene looks vibrant and growing at unprecedented pace. This certainly adds to India's traditional soft power that comes from its ancient civilization, dynamic democracy, its amazing geographical and cultural diversity, unparalleled Bollywood and re-energized world of Yoga & Ayurveda.

Elements: Exhibitition of artist Abhay Kumar at the Door Gallery, St. Petersburg

Elements: Exhibitition of artist Abhay Kumar at the Door Gallery, St. Petersburg
           - Andrey Khlobystyn-noted art historian, St. Petersburg Dec5, 2009-Jan17 ,2010

Elements’ is another exhibition by a St. Petersburg artist Abhay Kumar, who is playing an active part in the cultural life of our city. Mind you, it is not a misprint; the Indian Consul did say in one of his interviews that it was St. Petersburg that has turned him into an artist. But, first and foremost, his paintings have this strictly Petersburg feel.

Abhay Kumar fits well into St. Petersburg ‘titanism’ with denial of one-track specializations: if you feel yourself to be in an elevated and balanced state of mind, then you can easily express yourself through different types of art. Abhay Kumar is a diplomat by profession; he has already published several books of poetry and prose, participated in a number of exhibitions and festivals as an artist and started collecting art-pieces as well. Striving to understand Art on a larger scale, trying to combine the social service, philosophic poetry, symbolical painting and cosmic-scale of thought remind us of the Silver Age, Roerich, Ciurlionis, etc. If we put this into a more Indian perspective, we will get Rabindranatha Tagore, naturally.


In the small format of Abhay Kumar’s work, the St. Petersburg traditions can be easily spotted, through the images of the Russian ‘Avant-garde’ art of the early XX th century. The geometry of Malevich and the musical coloured vision of Matyushin gain typically Indian colour vibrancy and even somewhat folklore inflections in the abstract and half-abstract works of Abhay Kumar. These creations are truly minimalist and are aimed at the elementary components of our perception. Elements, or ‘natures’ as they are called in European tradition, are placed into five lower chakras of the human body, according to Indian tradition, and through them the projection of the world around us is created. Chakras hold the five basic elements – Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Ether.


But the main Petersburg trait, the one that we can all understand and sympathize is the spontaneous and direct approach to the material and the traditions in the works of this artist, who has bravely picked up a brush about three years ago and started painting on chocolate boxes at first. Such approach, it can be said, has been suggested to Abhay Kumar by the local artists of the 80’s generation among others, since from these people you can always pick up a positive charge of existential expression.


Nowadays, when the Consulates of the Western countries have grown weary of St. Petersburg art and started treating it formally, even though during the Cold War and Perestroika they have been actively participating in the artistic life of the city, Abhay Kumar, an Indian diplomat, has become a prominent figure in the cultural life of the Northern capital and is doing some real work, trying to lead the contacts of the two great cultures to the new frontiers.