Inheritance of Light, Geographies of Loss: Rewriting the Indo–Dutch Gaze
- Aakshat Sinha
- 6 minutes ago
- 5 min read
by Aakshat Sinha
At Travancore Palace in New Delhi, a remarkable exhibition is unfolding that reframes one of Europe’s most influential visual traditions through South Asian eyes. Inheritance of Light, Geographies of Loss brings together more than forty artists working across painting, textiles, glass, photography, fashion, sculpture, architecture, video, and artificial intelligence to examine how light has travelled between India and the Netherlands, from the era of Mughal miniatures and Dutch Golden Age painting to today’s digital and globalised world.
The exhibition is presented on the occasion of a cultural delegation from the Netherlands, and has been specially curated to introduce the Directors of the prestigious Mauritshuis and the Drents Museum Ms Martine Gosselink and Mr Robert van Langh, to newer ways of seeing and thinking about museum exchange across long, entangled and culturally rich histories with South Asia. A closed preview evening hosted by Marisa Gerards, Ambassador of Netherlands to India and Myna Mukherjee, Director Engendered who is also the curator and cultural producer of the exhibition. The evening will include a panel discussion and a fashion presentation by JJ Valaya; the exhibition then remains open to the public until the 14th, with Valaya’s couture installations available to view for those unable to attend the live show.
Curator Myna Mukherjee frames the exhibition’s premise succinctly:
“Inheritance of Light understands illumination not as spectacle, but as a form of ethical attention. It is shaped by material exchange, shared histories, and the quiet ways cultures learn to see one another.”
The exhibition opens not with Rembrandt or Vermeer, but with the Mughal miniatures that inspired them. Rembrandt’s fascination with Mughal figures that are now preserved in drawings and prints in European collections and marks one of the earliest moments of visual globalisation. Here, those miniatures are placed alongside Dutch Bengal goddess paintings and Raja Ravi Varma’s oleographs, tracing how European chiaroscuro entered Indian devotional culture while Indian pictorial intimacy reshaped European ways of seeing.
Mustard Field by Puneet Verma, Acrylic on canvas, 36" X 108”
For directors of the Mauritshuis that is home to the world’s most refined studies of interior light, still life, and psychological portraiture, the exhibition offers perhaps an unfamiliar but deeply relevant mirror. Dutch painting’s quiet windows, glowing fabrics, and intimate rooms are revealed here as products of global material histories: indigo from Bengal, carpets from Mughal courts, glass from transcontinental trade. Artists such as Puneet Kaushik and Piyali Sadhukhan recover these materials as archives of exchange and labour, while Reshmi Dey’s graal glass works with Swedish artist Phillip Hickok return light to the breath and heat of the furnace. This material lineage is further enriched by the textile light boxes and embroidered miniatures of Manisha Gera Baswani, and by Puneet Kaushik’s indigo-dyed carpets and Ajrakh works, where stitch, pigment, and illumination become carriers of shared Indo–Dutch visual histories. This material and spiritual inquiry is deepened by Dutch artist Paul Beumer, whose textile-based practice developed through years of working with craftspeople across India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Borneo and treats colour, fibre, and weaving as vehicles for both transcultural exchange and spiritual abstraction.
The Drents Museum, known for its attention to archaeology, migration, and material culture, finds a parallel inquiry in works like Ajay Singh Bhadoria’s fractured terracotta and porcelain sculptures, which link Indian craft to Chinese ceramic histories, and Seema Kohli’s Silk Route painting, where camels and poppies trace centuries of trade and desire. M. Sovan Kumar’s truck paintings extend this to the digital present, where culture migrates at algorithmic speed. These histories of movement are echoed in the practices of artists such as Rabiul Khan, Maksud Ali Mondal, and Santosh Jain, all of whom have either studied, exhibited, or are preparing for residencies in the Netherlands turning the exhibition itself into a living corridor of Indo–Dutch exchange.
As Ms Dewi van de Weerd, Ambassador for International Cultural Cooperation, notes:
“This exhibition demonstrates how culture travels through materials, ideas, and people. Inheritance of Light shows that artistic exchange between India and the Netherlands is not only historical, but ongoing. It is continually reinterpreted through contemporary practice, collaboration, and shared responsibility.”
Artificial intelligence introduces a new chapter in this story. Harshit Agrawal’s AI-generated flower paintings, trained on Dutch still-life traditions, ask whether a machine can inherit beauty, mortality, and aesthetic memory. Natasha Singh’s AI line drawings transform yogic breath into light, while Satyakam Saha’s time-lapse videos alongside his 3D-printed sculptural forms that track flowers decaying and sunlight moving across classical sculpture, suggesting that even data now carries the legacy of still life and memento mori. The exhibition’s ethical centre lies in its portraits. Asha Thadani’s images of Dalit communities - Joginis, Musahars, Mallah boatmen, coal-mining families use light with the restraint of Vermeer’s interiors: attentive and dignifying. Anupam Sud’s black-and-white prints and Moutushi Chakraborty’s coffee-stained courtesan portraits extend this lineage of psychological and social attention. Adil Khan’s still-life paintings of birds and vegetables many of them staples of Indian kitchens yet shaped by histories of global trade quietly reflect on identity, migration, and vulnerability through careful observation and light. This ethic of witness is further deepened by Maksud Ali Mondal’s luminous photographs of microbial life, where transformation, decay, and regeneration become a microscopic counterpart to human vulnerability. Senior modernist voices including Arpana Caur, Sanjay Bhattacharya, and Rahul Arya further extend these traditions of interiority, chiaroscuro, and ethical looking into distinctly South Asian modern visual languages.
In the end, Inheritance of Light is about celebrating exchange, but also recognising its history and cost. From Supriyo Manna’s woven work of almost extinct reeds as a pivot to Rembrandt’s burning weeds to Shilo Shiv Suleman’s monumental Dhwani installation where beaten brass craftsmanship is activated through contemporary technology to awaken Kundalini energy—and JJ Valaya’s luminous couture, light becomes a force that both reveals and heals.
As Valaya reflects:
“Light has always been a carrier of memory revealing not just form, but history, emotion, and cultural exchange. In this presentation, couture becomes a lens through which craftsmanship, empire, and inheritance are examined, reminding us that the hand-made is both an archive and an act of continuity.”
Rabiul Khan’s bullet-pierced tent, shaped by his background in a gunmaking family and his forthcoming residency in the Netherlands, brings this tension between violence, survival, and illumination into stark architectural form.
For the Mauritshuis and Drents Museum, the exhibition is not a detour from their collections but an expansion of their meaning: a reminder that the quiet glow of Dutch interiors was always entangled with global histories of trade, labour, faith, and imagination.
The show Inheritance of Light, Geographies of Loss will be on view at the Travancore Palace from 12th to 14th January 2026.
(All images are courtesy of the curator Myna Mukherjee and the respective artists.)
Aakshat Sinha is an artist and curator. He also writes poetry and has created and published comics. He is the Founding Partner of artamour.
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