Lalit Kala: The Art Journals of India's National Academy of Art
Lalit Kala is the name carried by the art journals of the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s National Academy of Art, published from New Delhi. The Akademi’s publishing programme includes the bi-annual journals Lalit Kala Contemporary in English, Lalit Kala Ancient in English and Samkaleen Kala in Hindi, alongside monographs, catalogues and other art publications. The original journal, Lalit Kala, described itself on its early title pages as “A Journal of Oriental Art, Chiefly Indian”. Together, these journals form one of the longest-running records of Indian art scholarship and contemporary art criticism published by a national cultural institution.
This profile traces the journals’ place within the Akademi that publishes them: an autonomous national academy set up by the Government of India on 5 August 1954, headquartered at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi and funded by the Union Ministry of Culture. It explains the journals’ history from the 1950s issues edited by Karl Khandalavala and Moti Chandra, their editors and contributors, their English and Hindi readerships, their suspension and revival in the 2010s, and their continuing role in documenting Indian visual art.
Overview
The Lalit Kala journals are scholarly and critical art periodicals rather than commercial magazines. Lalit Kala Contemporary addresses contemporary art practice and criticism; Lalit Kala Ancient addresses the art of the past — the “ancient” strand of the Akademi’s publishing; and Samkaleen Kala carries contemporary art writing in Hindi, its title being the Hindi rendering of “contemporary art”. Reference summaries of the Akademi describe the three as its bi-annual art journals, two in English and one in Hindi.
The journals sit within a larger publishing output. The Akademi publishes and promotes literature on art including monographs, journals, books and portfolios in ancient and contemporary series, exhibition catalogues including those of its National Exhibition of Art and Triennale, reproductions, and a magazine titled Kala Samvad. It also maintains a library on Indian and world art, described in institutional accounts as having grown from 140 titles to around 9,000 books and volumes on painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, graphic art and architecture, with collections of art reproductions and archival records. The journals are the periodical heart of that programme: the place where scholarship and criticism appear serially, issue after issue, rather than as one-off books.
The Publisher: Lalit Kala Akademi
The Lalit Kala Akademi, or National Academy of Art, is an autonomous organisation established in New Delhi in 1954 by the Government of India to promote and propagate understanding of Indian art within and outside the country. It was inaugurated on 5 August 1954 by the then Minister for Education, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and is described as the youngest of the three national akademies founded by the Government of India, established in pursuance of the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for a cultural and national identity. It was given statutory footing as a registered society in 1957 under the Societies Registration Act 1860, is fully funded by the Ministry of Culture, and works through a General Council, Executive Board and committees.
The Akademi’s headquarters are at Rabindra Bhavan on Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi — the building it shares in the capital’s cultural complex with the Sangeet Natak Akademi and Sahitya Akademi — and it maintains regional centres at Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Garhi in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow and Shimla, with camp offices also noted at Patna. Its activities include scholarships and fellowships, exhibitions in India and overseas including Triennale India and the National Exhibition of Art and of Photography, cultural exchange programmes, and publication. The journals emerge from that institutional setting: they are edited and issued by the national academy itself, from Jaipur House in the earliest years — the 1959 issue was published by Barada Ukil, Secretary of the Akademi at Jaipur House, New Delhi — and from Rabindra Bhavan thereafter.
History and Founding
The journal Lalit Kala began in the Akademi’s first decade. Surviving early issues show a journal of oriental art, chiefly Indian, already at its fifth number by April 1959 and its ninth by April 1961. The 1959 issue names Karl Khandalavala and Moti Chandra as editors — two of the most distinguished Indian art historians of their generation — with a consulting board that read as a roll of the field’s founding figures: V. S. Agrawala, A. Ghosh, D. P. Ghosh, Pupul Jayakar, Rai Krishnadasa, T. N. Ramachandran, U. P. Shah and C. Sivaramamurti, identified by their posts at Banaras Hindu University, the Archaeological Survey of India, the Asutosh Museum in Calcutta, the Bharat Kala Bhavan, the Oriental Research Institute in Baroda and the National Museum in New Delhi.
The early journal set scholarly terms for contributors. Its editors’ note stated that contributions would be accepted only from those with specialised knowledge of their subjects, that articles must contain original matter or a new treatment of matter already published, and that authors would receive an honorarium — Rs. 50 per thousand published words in the 1959 terms, revised to a per-page basis by 1961. Helen Chandra worked on the layout and production of the 1959 issue and is named as assistant editor in 1961. In other words, from its first years Lalit Kala was run as a refereed-feeling journal of record for Indian art history, published by the national academy and edited by the scholars who were defining the discipline.
Over the following decades the publishing line differentiated: the contemporary strand became Lalit Kala Contemporary, the historical strand Lalit Kala Ancient, and the Hindi journal Samkaleen Kala carried the contemporary conversation to Hindi readers. Numbering for the Contemporary series ran continuously — issue 35 of Samkaleen Kala appeared in 2008 and issue 48 in February 2016 in the Hindi line’s own sequence, while Lalit Kala Contemporary reached number 49 in 2004 and number 55 in 2012.
Editorial Content and Character
The content of the journals is art writing in its several forms: scholarly articles on Indian art and architecture, essays on contemporary practice, art criticism, and writing connected with the Akademi’s exhibitions and programmes. The contemporary journal’s editorial ambitions are visible in its 2003-era issue 48, whose publisher’s note and editorial discussed the international art world, the place of Indian contemporary painting within it, the showing of Henry Moore’s sculptures in India, and the relevance of art criticism in the public’s reception of a work of art. The aim stated there — to view Indian contemporary art with enhanced insight against an international backdrop — is a fair summary of the journal’s critical project.
The physical format of recent decades is consistent: paperback issues of roughly 64 to 96 pages, in a large 11 by 8.5 inch format, with colour and black-and-white illustrations throughout — the plates being essential to art publishing, since the writing is about objects readers need to see. Issue 49 of Lalit Kala Contemporary, dated September–December 2004, ran to 64 illustrated pages; issue 53 ran to 96 pages; issue 55, published in 2012, also ran to 96 pages with colour illustrations throughout.
Notable Editors and Contributors
The founding editors set the standard: Karl Khandalavala and Moti Chandra, supported by the consulting editors named above. Later issues record a succession of editors drawn from Indian art scholarship and criticism. Bibliographic records for Lalit Kala Contemporary name Santo Datta as editor of issue 49 in 2004, Amit Mukhopadhyay as editor of issue 53, and K. K. Chakravarty — scholar and former senior cultural administrator — as editor of issue 55 in 2012. The Hindi journal Samkaleen Kala records Jyotish Joshi in its publication credits for issue 35 in 2008.
The contributor principle announced in 1959 — specialised knowledge, original matter — continued to shape the journals: they publish art historians, curators, critics and artists writing at length, rather than news reporting. That is why the back run of Lalit Kala is used as a reference source: an article in its pages was, by design, a considered scholarly or critical statement, published by the national academy and preserved in its library system.
Language and Readership
The journals are bilingual in strategy. Lalit Kala Contemporary and Lalit Kala Ancient are in English, the language of international art scholarship and of much Indian academic publishing. Samkaleen Kala is in Hindi, carrying contemporary art discussion to the large Hindi-reading art community — students, teachers, artists and critics for whom Hindi is the language of study and debate. The Akademi itself describes its journal as bilingual in character, and the parallel English and Hindi titles make that concrete.
Readers are correspondingly specialised: art historians and students, curators and museum professionals, artists, critics, collectors and libraries. The journals are sold through art-book channels — surviving issues are catalogued by specialist Indian art booksellers — and held in institutional libraries in India and abroad; digitised early issues, including the 1959 and 1961 numbers, are available through the Internet Archive, which has extended the readership of the print run far beyond its original subscribers.
Suspension and Revival
The contemporary journal’s run was interrupted in the 2000s. A design account of the revival records that Lalit Kala Contemporary, issued thrice yearly in that period, was suspended in 2006 after issue 51, and that a revival was planned for 2012 with issue 52, titled Depth of Field — a special issue on photography as art and practice in India, described in Akademi publicity as the 52nd issue of the journal dealing with photography in India. Because no existing templates survived, a completely new design was commissioned: a 96-page, full-colour issue, deliberately sober and academic in design, projecting the journal as a serious art journal rather than a glossy magazine, with black-and-white photographs printed in four-colour or duotone.
The revival continued with further numbered issues — 53 under Amit Mukhopadhyay and 55 under K. K. Chakravarty in 2012 — while Samkaleen Kala continued its own numbering into the late 2010s: a new issue of Samkaleen Kala was launched at the inauguration of the first International Print Biennale India at the Akademi in 2018, in the presence of the biennale’s commissioner Anupam Sud and its steering committee. The journals thus remain tied to the Akademi’s exhibition calendar, launched and circulated at the events whose art they exist to discuss.
Print and Digital Presence
The journals are print publications first, issued from New Delhi and distributed through the Akademi and the art-book trade. Their digital presence is chiefly archival and institutional: the Akademi’s website at lalitkala.gov.in carries its publications programme and press material, booksellers catalogue current and back issues with full specifications, and the Internet Archive holds digitised texts of the early journal. For a scholarly periodical, that pattern — print issue, library holding, digital archive — is a durable form of publication, ensuring that an essay published in Lalit Kala remains citable decades later.
Role in Indian Art Culture
The Akademi’s stated purpose is to foster and coordinate activities in Indian fine art, to promote study and research in creative arts such as painting, sculpture and graphics, to coordinate regional and state akademies, and to promote understanding of Indian art within and outside the country. The journals serve each of those purposes in print. They give Indian art a national journal of record; they carry scholarship between regions and, through English, to international readers; and through Samkaleen Kala they sustain art writing in Hindi, an essential democratic function for an art culture as multilingual as India’s.
Their longevity is itself the point. A journal line that begins with Khandalavala and Chandra in the 1950s, continues through the contemporary series to numbered issues in the 2010s, survives a six-year suspension and returns with a redesigned special issue on photography, is not merely a magazine backlist — it is the printed memory of the national academy, and one of the places where the history of Indian art writing can be read as it was written, issue by issue.
