The Bikaner Theatre, Art and Cultural Festival: Jan 15th to 30th, 2021

Manot – The dust that raised a Jawahar in the desert – Bikaner – In conversation with Shanane Davis and Graf Adhiraj Singh https://olkaannishtah.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Shanane-Davis-and-Graf-Adhiraj-Singh.mp4 The sublime usage of iconography to portray power and politics in South Asian Painting – In discussion with Shanane Davis, Graf Adhiraj Singh and Vinit Vyas Continue Reading

Colonial-Period Court Painting and the Case of Bikaner

Molly Emma Aitken, Archives of Asian Art, Volume 67, April, 2017. ©2019 Duke University Press. All Rights Reserved. Nineteenth-century court painters in India’s princely states reconfigured traditional portraiture to address British, Indian courtly and local values and conventions. At Bikaner, a father and son, Rahim and Chotu, experimented with a Continue Reading

The Laud Rāgamālā Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting

The Laud Ragamala Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting is a tale of two present-day “Indiana Joneses”art historian Professor Molly Emma Aitken and Connoisseur Shanane Davis who made an extraordinary discovery regarding the most famous Indian muraqqa (album book with miniature paintings and calligraphy) found in a European Continue Reading

Old Methods in a New Era What can Connoisseurship Tell us about Rukn‐Ud‐Din?

Molly Emma Aitken, Shanane Davis, Yana van Dyke Book Editor(s): Rebecca M. Brown, Deborah S. Hutton First published 26, July, 2012 – Copyright 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Chapter available for purchase following the below link   https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444396355.ch10 Olkaan Nishtah

The Bikaner School Usta Artisans and Their Heritage

Foreword (2008) Molly Emma Aitken Ph. D. Between the late-15th and the mid-19th centuries, the Hindu courts of present-day Rajasthan, which were ruled by a warrior caste calling themselves Rajputs or “sons of kings,” patronized an extraordinary tradition of paintings on paper. Executed in mineral and vegetable pigments, these paintings were Continue Reading