Detail from MF Husain s Portrait of Ibn Zainab (1979). | cea + (CC BY 2.0)
In our smartphone-saturated times, with every scrap of information you might want to know seemingly already at your fingertips, what good reasons could possibly exist to publish any whacking great 960-page doorstopper that weighs full three kilos?
It turns out there are many. And all are embodied in the distinctive and rather wonderful English translation of
Originally published in Marathi in 2013 as
Drishyakala Khand by Hindusthan Prakashan Sanstha, this meticulously compiled encyclopedia is edited by Suhas Bahulkar and Deepak Ghare, with the eminent artists Sudhir Patwardhan and Dilip Ranade as associate editors. It spans from the year 1765 (the birth date of Navgire Gangaram Chintaman Tambat, the first artist from Maharashtra to “acquire proficiency in the Western style of painting”) right to the present day (its five youngest inclusions were all born in 1960).