Every cultural tradition requires financial resources to survive and thrive. What we call Indian, or Hindu, civilization is a product of a long history of patronage provided by either kings or wealthy merchants. Great scholars and artists are not made when…

Karnataka has an astonishing number of archaeological and inscriptional records which provide us with a glimpse of the flourishing temple traditions of the early medieval period under the patronage of devout kings and merchant guilds. Particularly interesting…

This essay is an attempt to understand how Hindu devotional dance and art forms that were, for a thousand years, nurtured in the great temples as an offering to the Gods and nourished by the prolific corpus of Pauranic stories, deal with the changed…

This essay is the first in a series consisting of some of my personal reflections gathered over many years of travelling and meeting stakeholders engaged in the preservation and promotion of our cultural heritage. These stakeholders are individual artists,…