The Living Chapter
Collector, cultural patron, archivist, author, TEDx speaker and institution-builder
It began with an antique map shop in Scotland in 2002. Two decades later he had assembled one of India’s largest private archives of historic maps and vintage photographs — and had built the gallery, foundation, festival and archive that made it public. Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Usually written Prshant K. Lahoti, the K. standing for Krishnachandra, his father’s name. Also written Prashant Lahoti — both spellings refer to the same person, and Prshant is the form he uses himself.
Portrait to follow from the archive
Background
Prshant Lahoti was born and raised in Hyderabad, and describes growing up among the trees and deodis — the old mansions of the city — that gave him an early attachment to art, heritage and the built environment. He was schooled at the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet.
He trained as an engineer and took a postgraduate degree in business administration. Neither led where you might expect.
What did was a shop. In 2002, in Scotland, he walked into a dealer in antique maps. He came out having bought one, and having acquired something more durable than the map — the question of what a map of India, drawn by someone who had never been there, was actually recording.
Two decades of collecting followed from that afternoon, and so did a gallery, a foundation, a festival and an archive.
The context matters. The Lahotis are a Maheshwari Marwadi family — one of the merchant communities of Rajasthan — who came to the erstwhile Hyderabad State some five generations ago from Gullar, in the Nagaur district. They made the Deccan both their Janma Bhoomi and their Karma Bhoomi: the land of their birth and the land of their work.
They were part of the wider movement of Marwari merchants who settled across the Nizam’s dominion and built much of its commercial life — bankers, cotton traders, oil millers, later mill-owners. But trade is only half of what the family carried south. Both sides of his ancestry produced men who went into the independence movement, and both were seated in the first Parliament of the Republic. That is the subject of the next section.
For generations the family has endowed schools, colleges and hospitals across the region.
The family had spent a century giving away buildings. He gave away access to a collection.
That is the thread. What his forebears did with schools and hospitals, he has done with maps and photographs — acquire, then institutionalise, then open to the public.
A Rare Inheritance
When the Republic assembled its first Parliament in 1952, it seated two chambers: the Lok Sabha, elected directly by the people, and the Rajya Sabha, the Council of States. Prshant Lahoti has a forebear in each.
On his father’s side, Seth Puranmal Lahoti sat in the first Rajya Sabha, representing Hyderabad State. On his mother’s side, Seth Sheodas Daga — also written Shivdas Daga — sat in the first Lok Sabha, elected from Mahasamund. The Lahotis were Maheshwari Marwadis of Nagaur; the Dagas, Marwadis of Bikaner. Both houses left Rajasthan for trade. Both ended in the independence movement.
Paternal
Rajya Sabha — the Council of States
Maternal
Lok Sabha — the House of the People
Two houses of traders from the Rajasthan desert, two men who took part in the freedom struggle, two seats in the first Parliament of the country they helped make — and neither of them lived to finish the term.
It is worth pausing on how uncommon that is. India in 1952 had a population of some three hundred and sixty million. The first Parliament seated a little over seven hundred people across both Houses. To descend from one of them is unusual. To descend from two — one on each side of the family, one in each House, both of them freedom fighters — is a coincidence of lineage that very few Indian families can claim.
It is not a distinction anyone can earn. It is simply what happened when two Marwadi merchant houses, one from Nagaur and one from Bikaner, both sent their people into the independence movement, and the new Republic seated them both.
The archive Prshant Lahoti has spent two decades building — the maps, the photographs, the visual record of a subcontinent — sits at the meeting point of those two lines.
The Work
In 2002 he founded Kalakriti Art Gallery in Banjara Hills with Rekha Lahoti, to build a platform for artists and art lovers in his own city. Over the following two decades he curated more than 250 exhibitions, showing artists including Jogen Chowdhury, K. G. Subramanyan, Shuvaprasanna and Anju Dodiya.
The same year he began collecting antique maps and vintage photographs. What started as a private interest in technologically reproduced images became, over a decade, one of the most extensive private records of the visual history of the Indian subcontinent. In 2003 it was formalised as Kalakriti Archives, holding the Prshant Lahoti Personal Collection: over ten thousand historic maps and plans, and roughly nine thousand photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, alongside etchings, prints, Cherial scrolls, rare books and Bidri ware.
The collections form a pictorial and cartographic record of the major colonial cities — Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, Madras — of princely states such as Hyderabad, and of Himalayan regions including Kashmir, Ladakh and Darjeeling, together with pilgrimage geographies and cosmological traditions.
Kalakriti Archives became the first private archive in India to partner with Google Arts & Culture, digitising the Leonard Munn survey maps of Hyderabad and making them freely available to researchers worldwide.
Est. 2002 · Banjara Hills
A contemporary gallery showing established and emerging artists from across India, and the room in which much of the Krishnakriti Festival takes place.
kalakritiartgallery.com ↗Est. 2003 · The Collection
Ten thousand maps, nine thousand photographs, and a mandate to acquire, preserve and interpret — then make it all publicly accessible.
kalakriti.in ↗Est. 2011 · Accessible Art
Founded on the conviction that original art should not be the preserve of galleries and collectors alone, but part of ordinary homes and offices.
artcafe.in ↗Trusteeship
He is managing trustee of the Krishnakriti Foundation, founded in 2003 in memory of his late father, Shri Krishnachandra B. Lahoti. The foundation widened the family’s philanthropy from education and medicine into art and culture. It supports students each year, and organises the Krishnakriti Festival — held in Hyderabad every January since 2004, free and open to all.
He is also managing trustee of the Franco-Indian Educational Trust, a joint initiative with the Embassy of France established in 2017 and unveiled during the French state visit to India the following year — a bilateral platform for educational mobility across disciplines. It grew directly out of the cultural work that had earned him the Chevalier five years earlier.
Alongside these he is a trustee of the family’s own instruments: the Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti Trust — the 1956 charitable will through which a quarter of the family estate was set aside in perpetuity for hospitals and schools — and the Rajasthani Samaj Seva Trust.
2003 · Managing Trustee
Founded in memory of his father; the body behind the annual festival and the student support programme.
The foundation →2017 · Managing Trustee
With the Embassy of France — a bilateral platform for educational mobility, unveiled during the 2018 state visit.
The trust →1956 · Trustee
The founding charitable instrument of the family, still funding schools, colleges and eye care across three regions.
The founding trust →France · Fifteen Years
The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres was instituted by the French Ministry of Culture in 1957 to recognise significant contribution to the arts and letters, or to their diffusion in France and the wider world. Chevalier is its first grade, and it is conferred on comparatively few people outside France.
His appointment as Chevalier was announced in December 2012 and the honour formally bestowed in January 2013, at the Taj Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad, in recognition of his work promoting cultural ties between France and India.
It is the third of three honours held across three generations of the family — and the first to come from outside India, and the first given for cultural rather than commercial life.
The longer relationship
2010
2017
2018
Exhibitions & Publications
Works from the Prshant Lahoti Personal Collection have been shown in India and abroad, frequently in partnership with public institutions. A selection:
The most significant public showing of the collection. Curated by Vivek Nanda and Alexander Johnson at India’s National Museum, the exhibition presented more than seventy-two maps — of which roughly seventy came from this collection and only two from the National Museum’s own holdings. Inaugurated in the presence of the Union Minister for Culture and the United States Ambassador to India.
The first public exhibition drawn from the collection, at one of Asia’s foremost contemporary art festivals — historic cartography set alongside contemporary practice. Everything that followed began here.
Twenty works from the collection shown at the Adil Shah Palace, Goa.
Fifty photographs and maps presenting Hyderabad across past, present and future, at the Bordeaux biennale of architecture, urbanism and design. He is the credited author of the hardback volume developed from it.
Held at IISc and attended by close to two thousand schoolchildren — the clearest instance of the collection working as a teaching resource rather than a display.
Maps from the collection shown at France’s foremost national institution for Asian art and culture.
Held with the Embassy of France in Singapore, bringing together treasures from institutions and private collections including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée Guimet and the École française d’Extrême-Orient.
Kalakriti Archives became the first private archive in India to partner with Google Arts & Culture. The Munn survey of 1912–15, from the collections of Prshant Lahoti and Karen Leonard, is digitised there and freely available to researchers worldwide.
On the published side, he is the credited author of Kal Aaj Aur Kal: A Journey of Hyderabad — Past, Present and Future (2017). Cosmology to Cartography (2015) was written by Vivek Nanda and Alexander Johnson and co-published by Kalakriti Archives and the National Museum — a book drawn principally from this collection rather than one he wrote.
Institutional Associations
The civic work started long before the cultural work did. He was president of a service club in Gulbarga in 1986 and of another in Secunderabad in 2001, the year before Kalakriti opened — and he is a trustee of an educational association founded in 1926 that reaches its centenary this year.
President · 2001–02
He led one of the city’s older service clubs a year before the gallery opened — the civic apprenticeship that preceded the cultural work.
President · 1986
His first presidency, in the town where the family’s Deccan story began — taken up in his twenties, four decades before the rest of this page.
Trustee
Established in 1926 in Secunderabad, and reaching its centenary this year. He serves as a trustee of one of the family’s oldest educational associations.
Charter Member
The Indus Entrepreneurs, the global entrepreneurship network.
Founding Member & Chair
The Hyderabad chapter of the development organisation.
Heritage Restoration
A tripartite agreement with the Telangana State Government and QQSUDA to restore the Nizam-era palace near Charminar as a living cultural destination.
Interviews, Lectures & Coverage
He speaks and writes regularly on cartography, collecting and the visual history of the Deccan, and has given interactive sessions and lectures at universities and institutions in India.
Speaking
2018
2016
Talks on record
A talk at the Hyderabad festival of arts and entrepreneurship, held on 30 and 31 August 2014 — then among the largest gatherings of its kind in India.
Watch ↗On devotional cartography — the Char Dham routes, the ghats of Kashi, the Vrindavan parikrama paths, and maps drawn to be walked rather than measured.
Watch ↗For Sahapedia, the open resource on Indian arts, cultures and heritage — on why a private collection is worth turning into a public archive.
Watch ↗A selection of authoritative references:
Google Arts & Culture
The official partner page for the collection, including digitised exhibits on the Nizam’s army and the Munn survey of Hyderabad.
artsandculture.google.com ↗India Art Fair
The archive’s profile at India’s leading art fair, describing the collection of antique maps, photographs, etchings, prints, miniatures and rare books.
indiaartfair.in ↗Deccan Chronicle · 2018
On Space-Time and Place at the State Art Gallery during the fifteenth Krishnakriti Festival, and the launch of the Munn survey maps on Google.
deccanchronicle.com ↗FLAME University · Lecture
Hosted by the Centre for South Asia. Note the listing uses the alternate spelling Prashant in its title and Prshant in its text — both refer to the same person.
flame.edu.in ↗ALANA · Asia
A description of the archive’s scope across colonial cities, princely states and Himalayan regions.
alana.asia ↗His personal account, carrying the alternate spelling of the name.
instagram.com ↗Continue
The Modern Chapter
The archives, the gallery, ArtCafe and the foundation — the whole cultural ecosystem in one place.
Kalakriti India →1860s to Today
Where this profile sits in the long line — fourteen milestones from arrival in the Deccan to the present.
The timeline →Seventeen Members
The root, the founding generation, and the three branches that came before this one.
The people →