Review by New York Times Review
FLIPPING through INDIA SUBLIME: Princely Palace Hotels of Rajasthan (Rizzoli, $65), it's easy to see why the post-backpack foreign set - not to mention India's own increasingly affluent traveling class - has made this northwestern province a necessary pit stop on the country's tourist itinerary. Not that any of the establishments in Melba Levick's elegant photographs could remotely be described as a pit. These ancestral properties, converted into luxurious heritage hotels, cater to all manner of aristo fantasies: drifting off to sleep in a giant silver bed, lulled by the sound of your own personal indoor fountain; contemplating the desert horizon from your pillared marble pleasure pavilion in the middle of your vast green lawn, sprouted from imported Kenyan seeds planted in two million donkey loads of dirt; admiring thousands of reflections of your very own self in the glass mosaic ceiling of a maharaja suite, an experience the book's writers, Mitchell Shelby Crites and Ameeta Nanji, liken to "being inside a huge glittering kaleidoscope." What you won't see in this kaleidoscope is other people. Out of roughly 250 pictures, I counted only six with an actual human presence, and all of them were servants. So I amused myself by mentally transporting a jolly old peasant woman from Fredric Roberts's HUMANITAS II: The People of Gujarat (Hylas Publishing/ Abbeville, $60) to the courtyard of the Hotel Mandawa Haveli, whose intricate frescoes of the Hindu classics tell stories she's probably heard since childhood. Roberts, a former investment banker, wouldn't argue with the notion that the villagers he spent five years photographing could use a bit of princely largesse, but his work is based on the conviction - amply demonstrated in vibrant images of sadhus and cowherds, women harvesting wheat and little girls dancing in the dust - that these lives are spiritually wealthy. So are those in Ketaki Sheth's BOMBAY MIX: Street Photographs (Dewi Lewis/Sepia International, $45), whose title comes from a savory snack in which, she explains, the taste of "each crunchy, spicy grain" lingers like the "disparate and unlikely blend of humanity" in this multifarious community. Even in black and white, even in the nastiest slums, these views of India's largest city are full of colorful contrast. Color of a different sort - refined and detached from the bustle of daily life, but no less energetic - is the draw in THE MAJESTY OF MUGHAL DECORATION: The Art and Architecture of Islamic India (Thames & Hudson/Norton, $65), in which George Michell glides through a brief history of the empire that filled northern India with so many of the elaborate forts and palaces that are now being conquered by upscale tourists. But here the buildings themselves are less important than the details of their ornamentation. Instead of stepping back, the book's close-focus photographs home in on the geometric patterns in a filigreed stone screen or the arabesque motifs of a carpet. Some of the designs (flowers on wall panels, glass bowls, even the hilts of daggers) are faithfully lifelike; others (the calligraphy on the sides of a throne, the web of interlocking facets on a plaster ceiling) so abstract as to seem like modern art. "Humanitas II," by Fredric Roberts. It's no wonder, then, that when the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, the daughter of a Sikh scholar and a Hungarian opera singer, left Europe for India in 1934, she resolved to combine her Western training with the inspiration she found in the traditions of her family's homeland. AMRITA SHER-GIL: An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century (Schirmer/Mosel/ Prestel, paper, $49.95), by Deepak Ananth, presents a rare look at a woman who's been called the Frida Kahlo of India. Published as the catalog to accompany the first solo exhibition by an Indian artist at the Tate Modern gallery in London, the book presents Sher-Gil's oil portraits as well as photographs by her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, an eccentric polymath with a fondness for (and a startling resemblance to) Tolstoy. A third family member, Amrita's nephew Vivan Sundaram, pulls both father and daughter into the 21st century through high-tech digital manipulation, joining images from their work to create his own. These wonderfully surrreal photomontages provide a vivid reminder of the inescapability of India's past - and a hint of the twists that legacy might produce in the future. ALIDA BECKER
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by New York Times Review
