An Asian Art department was created at the Rijksmuseum1 in 1952, when the Royal Asian Art Society donated their collection to the Museum.2 Today, a number of objects from the Asian Art department are still on display in the main…
In lieu of the growing and expansive culture of product (and profit)-making, it can be argued that the postmodern experience of consumerism for the average individual is increasingly becoming a manufactured necessity. Consumers are inevitably confronted with mass-produced goods that…
The Indian subcontinent in 1947 was divided into two countries and three parts: India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan. My essay aims to look into the development of the film industries of the subcontinent, with a focus on Pakistan. Moreover,…
The growth of inter-cultural encounters in the Africa-Asia region of the world have instigated the creation of socially, politically, and ethnographically diverse spaces. The waters of the Indian Ocean, carrying remnants of the coast of Africa and the Middle East…
In the recent past, there has been an influx of counterfeit art of Pakistani modern masters; M.A. Chughtai (1894-1975), Ustad Allah Bux (1895-1978), Sadequain (1930-1987), Ahmed Parvez (1926-1979), Ismail Gulgee (1926-2007), Bashir Mirza (1941-2000) and Eqbal Mehdi (1946-2008), just to…
In 1990 Arjun Appadurai wrote a seminal article called “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”; expanding upon the ramifications of a global village within a cultural context, Appadurai introduced readers to the dynamic diasporic strands of globalization that…
Manuscript making and illumination in the Indian Mughal courts has been a well-recognized high-art form in South Asia between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emperors, such as Akbar (b.1542-1605) and Shah Jahan (b.1592-1666), frequently posed on terraces of their…
A. R. Nagori once proclaimed that he had “earned the distinction of being the first painter in the Subcontinent to be censored.”124 He certainly wasn’t the last. How a state attempts to censor and censure artists ultimately reveals not only…
Questions of power, privilege and power relations are seldom asked in craft development. Paradoxically enough many craft development projects with artisanal communities are labelled as ‘empowerment’ yet fail to recognise power can manifest in the very act of craft making…
Language and its usage in Pakistan is a contentious issue; while Urdu is recognized as the national language