Puja Vaish

Vaish holds the directorial reins at Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. She has led several milestone projects here, like a retrospective on the late abstractionist Nasreen Mohamedi. Vaish combed through Mohamedi’s family collections to uncover rarely seen artworks, piecing together fragments of her life through handwritten letters and oral histories. She has also curated solo exhibitions of some of India’s most admired artists and photographers, including Nalini Malani and Dayanita Singh. As a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, and the Delhi College of Art, she has mentored emerging talent. Her transition into curatorial work began at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, where she was instrumental in shaping the institution’s exhibition and programming. Here, she researched colonial India’s rare art and design collections from the 1800s to early 1900s. She also conceived and launched Movies at the Museum, a programme which brought world cinema to the museum’s doorstep. Traditionally, museums have been seen as austere spaces, full of rules and “Do Not Touch” signs. Vaish has been working hard to dismantle that image. “Exhibitions come alive through audience participation,” she says. For CSMVS’s centenary show, she curated Ancestors, where the gallery was turned into a make-believe post-human archaeological crypt, populated by sculptural installations, paintings and drawings by multidisciplinary artist Sahej Rahal. “We made the decision not to have any labels in the show,” she recalls. Instead, visitors were invited to write their own labels responding to Rahal’s work and telling the history of human beings. “It was a way to get people to think about how history is written—and what often gets left out or erased,” she explains. “Museums are not just keepers of art, but spaces of encounter.”

— Radhika Iyengar. Photo: Kartikeya Manan

Mayank Mansingh Kaul

At 15, Kaul encountered an exhibition that would shape his imagination. It was Minakar: Spun Gold and Woven Enamel by Rahul Jain, staged at Delhi’s National Museum in 1997 as India celebrated 50 years of independence. “Fourteen jewelled textiles, all black, glistening in gold and silver, in a small gallery,” Kaul recollects. “Their weavers—the minakar—stood next to them in starched white kurtas. Visitors were handed magnifying glasses to see the intricacy of detail. I was transfixed.” Over the years, he has unleashed the potential of textiles to be multiple things: myth, politics or performance. Today, when Kaul takes you through an exhibition, it isn’t a tour but a pilgrimage. In his practice across nearly 20 exhibitions, including Red Lilies, Water Birds (Hampi, 2022); Textiles from Bengal: A Shared Legacy (Kolkata, 2025); Pehchaan: Enduring Themes in Indian Textiles (National Museum, New Delhi, 2025); or Surface: Indian Embroideries and Surface Embellishment as Art (Jodhpur, 2025), the textiles he works with become living companions, bearing the memory of their makers, the pulse of their histories and the possibility of their reinventions. “When we were doing a show on indigo, Meanings, Metaphor - Handspun, Handwoven in the 21st Century (Bengaluru, 2018–19), by the third day, every member of the team was wearing indigo,” he says. “That, to me, was a successful thesis.” For him, preservation isn’t about sealing things away, but letting them breathe. Unless uniquely fragile, fabrics are draped across scaffolds, cascading down walls, stretching across canvas. “Textiles are not inert,” he insists. “They are meant to fall, to touch, to move.” In Hampi, that philosophy became an environment. Bamboo frameworks rose lightly against weathered stone; draped saris in Ilkal weaves and kasuti embroidery responded to shifting sunlight. The exhibition unfolded as a meditation on material and time—where cloth seemed to remember and stone seemed to breathe. Such freedom invites risk. “Most people would say I’m just some young guy trying something new,” he laughs. But beneath the poetics lies politics. Cloth, he reminds us, is second skin— marked by who weaves it, who wears it, who inherits it. Through his tactile exhibitions, Kaul makes cloth a site of democratic awakening, where touch becomes thought. Next, he prepares for an international curatorial project—an exhibition in Paris slated for January 2026. It will extend his lifelong inquiry into how we might not just look at textiles, but live through them.

–Aastha D. Photo: Harshita Nayyar

Deepika Sorabjee

Sorabjee’s quiet leadership has shaped one of India’s most vital art conservation efforts. She took on the role of heading Tata Trusts’ arts and culture portfolio in 2014 and later, within its broader cultural mandate, she launched the Art Conservation Initiative (ACI). It’s a programme driven to cultivate skilled conservators and enhance the competency of art conservation centres across the country. “In India, the arts ecosystem has suffered due to a lack of strong institutions and structured methodologies in training and programme design,” Sorabjee shares. “The ACI looked to professionalise the conservation sector through thorough training, and developing curricula and faculty for centres.” Though a trained medical doctor, Sorabjee’s long-standing love for the arts began organically. She started writing extensively on the subject and served as the founding trustee of Mumbai Art Room, a non-commercial art space and curatorial lab established in 2011. She also trained briefly at the conservation wing of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai. “My intent and approach has always been to build institutions and through them, nurture long-term programmes.” She went on to set up conservation labs across the country: in collaboration with the Museum of Art & Photography in Bengaluru, Himalayan Society for Heritage and Art Conservation in Ranibagh, Uttarakhand, the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, CSMVS in Mumbai and the Mehrangarh Museum Trust in Jodhpur. These initiatives didn’t just decentralise conservation, they democratised it. “So, if a daily-wage carpenter wanted to become a wood conservator, he could apply,” explains Sorabjee. A brief stint as a selector at the Mumbai Film Festival also deepened her understanding of film preservation in India. Through Tata Trusts, she partnered with the Film Heritage Foundation to fund restoration workshops and prepare aspiring archivists. She also commissioned the publishing of India’s first specifications for built heritage conservation, which is today used by architects, contractors and government institutions alike. Whether it is funding a new conservation lab or preserving reels of endangered celluloid, Sorabjee’s focus is intentional: building systems not spotlights.

– Radhika Iyengar. Photo: Harshita Nayyar

Deepthi Sasidharan

In 2009, Sasidharan set up Eka Cultural Resources and Research, cofounded with Pramod Kumar KG. Alongside the 130-odd projects undertaken by Eka, Sasidharan is also a writer—among her credits is the book Treasures of the Deccan: Jewels of the Nizams coauthored with Usha R Balakrishnan—and an independent consultant for collectors. In her early years, between 2003 and 2006, she worked with the legendary Martand Singh, lovingly remembered as Mapu, who, at the time, led the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. Her initial big projects under him were the restoration of Chowmahalla Palace and Falaknuma Palace, both in Hyderabad, followed by the Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing in Jaipur, led by Faith and John Singh. What was undoubtedly fortuitous, though, was the timing. Following the successful Festivals of India initiative by the Indian government, the early 2000s saw a tremendous renewal of interest in archives, restoration, museums and exhibitions. This surge ranged from erstwhile royalty and private collectors to corporate giants. That’s where Sasidharan comes in: to go into these collections, decipher the value of various kinds of objects, organise, conserve, coax out stories and finally display them for public consumption. Her skill also lies in the diverse subject matters she takes on—for instance, the Rezwan Razack’s Museum of Indian Paper Money in Bengaluru in 2020, Dr. Savitadidi N. Mehta Museum set up in Porbandar in 2022 based on the Manipuri dancer and educationist’s life, and the Emami Legacy Centre in Kolkata in 2025, in addition to private collections, including at the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust and the Piramal Art Foundation. “We work to preserve memory that’s embedded in the community,” she says. And part of her self-imposed brief is to free this space of its colonial hangover. Formal museums being a British legacy, Sashidharan says, “We are yet to make a museum the Indian way. We need an army of museum professionals going forward, and more imagination, more daring!”

— Sumana Mukherjee. Photo: Shreya Jain

Ally Matthan

“While in Nalgonda, the heartland of ikat weaving in Andhra Pradesh, I was wearing a blouse I’d made by chopping up my grandmother’s telia rumal,” recalls Bengaluru-based Ahalya Matthan, better known as Ally. “That’s how little I knew. A local gentleman came up to me with tears of joy in his eyes. He’d recognised the motifs as something his family had woven,” says Matthan. “That was the turning point for me.” In 2015, she went on to set up The Registry of Sarees (TRS), “as a registry not only of sarees, but of skills, weaves, motifs,” she says. Ever since, Matthan has found a slow but certain shift towards archiving and documentation, a monumental step towards recording the informal, inherited knowledge of Indian weavers. To that end, TRS is the custodian of two magnificent compendiums of textile legacy: Meanings, Metaphor - Handspun, Handwoven in the 21st Century —with pieces that were commissioned for Khadi: The Fabric of Freedom curated by the late Martand Singh in 2001-2002—and Red Lilies, Water Birds, a collection of 108 sarees and draped garments representing close to a century of Indian weaving excellence. TRS also hosts exhibitions to further the textile heritage conversation. In the past year, it has displayed a collection of archival risha, the upper-body cloth woven on backstrap looms by the women of Tripura, and a recreation of Kalidasa’s Meghdootam, with musical Vankar weaves, embroidered Rabari textiles, three-dimensional topographical frames and more. “TRS looks for new definitions of design, artistry, craft. We want to break the stuy concept of a museum, make it flexible, agile and contemporary. The idea is to benefit craft and get it to a point where India can establish itself as a country of leadership. Because that’s what we were.”

— Sumana Mukherjee. Photo: Abin Varghese

Mortimer Chatterjee

For over two decades, Chatterjee has pursued a parallel mission, serving as a guardian to some of the finest Indian corporate and institutional art collections—a calling that long precedes his career as a gallerist. The man behind the Mumbai-based Chatterjee & Lal gallery has been responsible for maintaining, cataloguing, evaluating, restoring and preserving the artistic treasures belonging to institutions as The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Hindustan Unilever and the Jamshyd & Pheroza Godrej Art Collection. It all started in 2001 when Mort—as he’s aectionately known in the art world—and his wife, Tara Lal, were working for the auction house Bowrings, which had undertaken the valuation for The Taj Mahal Palace’s art collection. Home to nearly 4,000 paintings, objects and artefacts, including some highly sought after works by modern masters like MF Husain, SH Raza, Ram Kumar, Jehangir Sabavala and VS Gaitonde, the hotel’s cultural legacy is deep. In the wake of the 26/11 terror attacks, when the heritage wing of the Taj was damaged, this legacy was at stake, and Mort and Tara were confronted with one of the most arduous conservations—a task they successfully accomplished. Since then, he has curated exhibitions showcasing works from this collection and regularly hosts walkthroughs for art lovers. His engagement with the TIFR archives continues, having authored a book on it as well as curated a show at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai in 2011 that reflected TIFR’s role as a tireless champion of post-independent art. “Working with TIFR has informed my own writing and worldview in a major way,” admits Mort. Through his work, he is not only preserving memory but also ensuring cultural continuity by bringing these historical archives to public glory and safeguarding them for the future generations.

— Shaikh Ayaz. Photo: Shubham Mandhyan