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As is being discussed worldwide, the age of digital technology has given a new lease of life to analogue photography. The ability to scan and make digital files out of old fragile negatives and paper prints has given impetus and ease to the facility of making visual archives. Here are two presentations that are a valuable gift to the connoisseur of the not so recent cultural history of the Indian subcontinent that have been made possible by the effort of The Alkazi Collection of Photography.

Robert Elgood presents high-quality photographs of some two hundred items from the armoury of the Jaipur Court accompanied by technical descriptions and comments on the provenance of each. Sample, ‘hilt with the baluster grip with off-centre knop and projecting pommel’; or ‘nephrite “jade vert bronze” hilt … decorated with volutes, with two buds serving as vestigial quillons’. The author’s comments provide not only deeply-researched historical information but absorbing trivia for the curious browser.

This was a story that was waiting to be told, a personalized documentation of three decades of theatre in Bombay from the sixties to the nineties. This mapping is done through the three spaces which became a catalyst for a certain kind of theatre to bloom. Significant theatre actors and directors emerged from that period, learning as they experimented and engaged with text and space that did not fit the conventional template. This inadvertently created an alternative vision of how performance could be viewed

I happened to be reading A. Mangai’s book, Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards’ during the run-up to what promised to be high drama at the Shani Shingnapur temple in Sonai, Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra. Trupti Desai of Pune’s Bhumata Brigade had announced her plan to storm the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, forbidden to women, with an army of 1000 women. If the police debarred them from marching in, she planned to drop down on the open sanctum from a helicopter.

In 1983 the noted scholar of early Indian textiles and trade routes, Lotika Varadarajan wrote a seminal book on South Indian Traditions Of Kalamkari, published by the National Institute of Design & Perennial Press, It covered all three traditions of South Indian Kalamkari—Macchlipatnam, Srikalahasti and the lesser known Sikkinaikenpet.

To a Kolkata-Bengali to the core like me, who unfortunately has lived out of the city for almost a quarter of a century now and in this period has been to the city only once during the Pujas, that too more than a decade back, and yet who is aware of the fact that it is exactly during this period that Durga Puja in Kolkata has completely metamorphosed, and is vaguely aware of what he has missed out on, this beautifully produced book came quite literally as godsend. Beautiful the book certainly is—shaped, sized, priced, and in looks as it is like a coffee table book—with glossy pages, a wonderfully designed dust jacket, and almost five hundred full-colour photographs, and yet it is not your usual coffee table book.