For someone who shuffles between being a professor, art historian, curator and a writer, Vidya Dehejia plays each role to perfection. Dehejia was inclined towards anything that was vintage and artistic from a very young age. “Our holidays were different. My father would choose a district in India – we would drive around and explore ancient Hindu, Jain or Buddhist temples. I grew fascinated with inscriptions,” she says. After graduating in ancient Indian art and culture and archaeology, she went on to do a PhD in art history from Cambridge University, New York. Now, she holds the Barbara Stoler Miller Chair in Indian Art at Cambridge.

In a career expanding over 30 years, she has more than 20 books to her credit, the latest being Delight in Design – Indian Silver for the Raj. The idea for the book originated when she chanced upon silverware in the house of a private New York collector who had at least a 150 pieces. It took Dehejia almost two years to collate information and numerous trips to the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The book showcases various tea service sets, dessert sets, hand mirrors, card cases, in different regional styles like Madras and Swami Silver, Kutch, Kashmir, Lucknow, Burmese, and Calcutta. “What moves me most about the book is the amalgamation of tastes; how Indian silversmiths created silverware for exclusive colonial usage without letting go of the Indianness in their designs.” Delight in Design… spotlights our rich artistic tradition and sensibilities and makes you wish that you hadn’t melted down your grandmother’s silver artefacts without giving them a second glance.

CHINESE WHISPERS

To listen to Bei Dao reading his epoch-making poetry in a hall in cosy, prosy South Mumbai is to feel like a world traveller. It’s not just that his work draws influences from English modernism, which owes a debt to traditional Chinese poetry through its roots in European Symbolism. It’s not just that you are listening to a man whose work, shaped in the crucible of the Counter-Revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, and, later the brutal putdown of the Student Revolution of 1989, because in his lines you read both the grief and the inestimable value of exile, a cornerstone of the modern human condition. ‘The man who gets gunpowder in his dreams,’ as he wrote in At The Moment in ’89, ‘also gets salt in his wounds.’ And yet, “I am tired of talking about exile,” he says frankly in response to a question about the recurring theme of his work. He chooses to leave his oblique, introspective poetry to speak his mind. And he prefers to look on India as a gracious and friendly host, one with much in common with his own China, and with lessons to learn on the price exacted by power.

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