When I first started on my ‘collecting’ journey, the questions that popped into my head-I asked myself the question-‘who?’. But then I reached the point where the most important question was ‘why?’ That then becomes a way of unpacking Indian art history and reveal a lot of the debates that were happening at that time. Art for me has always been a way of decoding a particular culture and access ...

When in the early 70’s, Rabin Mondal’s drawings were exhibited for the first time at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, celebrated art historians such as Hermann Goetz and Heimo Rau discerned in them an unexpected cultural twirl which was difficult to define. It has been said that all art is an attempt at self actualization. Rabin Mondal’s earlier paintings were mainly concerned with the group identity of man-people trapped by ...