Institutions · Hyderabad · Archive
Banjara Hills, Hyderabad · Collecting from 2002, institutionalised 2015
The newest of the twenty institutions this family has built, and the only one it did not give away. Seven centuries of how the Indian subcontinent has been mapped, photographed and imagined — assembled privately over a decade, then turned into a public resource, and the first private archive in India to partner with Google Arts & Culture.
2002 → 2015
In 2002 Prshant Lahoti began buying antique maps and vintage photographs. It started as a personal engagement with the visual history of his own city and widened, over a decade, into one of the most substantial private holdings of Indian cartographic and photographic material anywhere.
In 2015 it stopped being a collection and became an institution. Kalakriti Archives was established to preserve, study and share the Prshant Lahoti Personal Collection systematically — not simply to hold objects, but to connect them with researchers, exhibitions, publications and people who had no idea such material existed.
A map is never only a description of territory, and a photograph is never only a record of appearance. Each preserves a way of seeing, and the world that produced it.
Much of this material would otherwise have dispersed. Maps of a princely state that no longer exists, photographs of streets long rebuilt, scrolls from a folk tradition with fewer practitioners every decade — these are objects with no natural custodian. Private collections of this kind are usually broken up and sold on. This one was turned into something with a reading room and an email address.
Maps of India
Ten thousand maps is a number. What makes the holding significant is that it covers eight quite different ways of representing space — the colonial surveyor and the Jain cosmographer were both making maps, and they were not doing the same thing at all.
Colonial urban surveys of Hyderabad, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Lahore — India’s great cities mapped street by street.
Territorial maps of the Nizam’s Hyderabad, Mysore, Baroda, Travancore and others — the political geography of a India that no longer exists.
Jain Jambudvipa maps, Hindu Mount Meru diagrams, Buddhist cosmological charts and Indian astronomical star maps — the geography of the universe rather than the earth.
Routes to the Char Dham, the ghats of Kashi, the Vrindavan parikrama paths and temple-town plans — devotional cartography, drawn to be walked.
Survey maps of Kashmir, Ladakh, Darjeeling and the North-West Frontier — the Great Game in cartographic form.
Pre-colonial Mughal-era cartography, folk maps in the Warli, Gond and Pattachitra traditions, and village settlement plans — spatial knowledge from inside rather than above.
Coastal trade maps, river systems, railway network surveys and Deccan plateau cartography — the commercial and infrastructural geography of the subcontinent.
Early European maps of India from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Indian Ocean trade charts and Survey of India national sheets.
Held together, these are eight incompatible answers to the same question: where are we, and what is worth recording about it?
Beyond Cartography
The archive reaches well past maps. Taken together its holdings form a layered visual record of cities, landscapes, communities, sacred traditions, political territories, popular culture and ordinary life.
01
Over ten thousand sheets across the eight traditions above, from city surveys to cosmological diagrams.
02
Roughly nine thousand nineteenth- and twentieth-century images — cityscapes and panoramas, architectural records, ethnographic portraits, archaeological documentation and Himalayan landscape studies.
03
Aquatints, lithographs and decorative prints, alongside hand-painted and lithographed Bollywood posters from the golden age of Indian cinema.
04
Telangana’s narrative-scroll tradition, through which the Nakashi community have carried mythological epics across generations. Rare examples of a living but endangered practice.
05
Early travel accounts, illustrated natural-history volumes, colonial gazetteers, explorers’ journals, atlases and geographical compendia of the subcontinent.
06
Deccani Bidri ware — the inlaid metalwork tradition of the region — and a collection of signed cricket memorabilia.
Collection Spotlight
In September 1908 the Musi river broke its banks and destroyed much of Hyderabad. In the reconstruction that followed, the Nizam’s administration commissioned one of the most remarkable urban surveys ever undertaken in India, led by Leonard Munn, Chief Inspector of Mines under the Nizam’s government.
The survey ran through 1912 to 1915 and produced 848 sheets. What makes it extraordinary is the resolution. Every street is named. Every landmark is recorded. Property by property, the sheets carry the names of the residents.
It is not a map of a city. It is a portrait of the people who were living in it.
Kalakriti holds the most significant private body of Munn material in existence. Approximately 650 sheets have been digitised with Google Arts & Culture and made freely available — so that anyone, anywhere, can find the street their family lived on in 1913 and read the name that was written against the door.
It is the clearest demonstration of what an archive is for. A private collection lets one person look. A digitised archive lets a city look at itself.
On the World Stage
Material from the collection has been shown at museums, biennales and festivals in India and abroad, placing South Asian cartography alongside art history, urban studies, religious tradition and the global history of knowledge.
2014–15
2015
2015
2016
2017
2017–18
2018
2021
Ongoing
In Print
An exhibition closes. A book does not. The archive publishes so that the research around an object survives after the wall label has come down.
2006
The growth of Secunderabad from cantonment to English town, illustrated with vintage photographs from the archive.
2015
By Vivek Nanda and Alexander Johnson, tracing Indian cartography from medieval cosmological manuscripts to colonial scientific survey. Published with the National Museum and the Ministry of Culture.
2017
Fifty archival photographs and maps set against contemporary images — a continuous visual history of Hyderabad from the late nineteenth century to now.
2019
Catalogue of the sixteenth Krishnakriti Festival, built around the idea of the city as an archive in its own right.
Research & Collaboration
The archive welcomes scholars, historians, researchers, photographers, artists and institutions working in South Asian history, cartography, photography, ethnography, architecture and cultural heritage.
It offers internships for young scholars and fellowships to work on specific areas of the collection. Material may be used in exhibitions, publications and artistic work under appropriate copyright and licensing arrangements.
Research access is by appointment. Enquiries go to ea@kalakriti.in.
A collection nobody can consult is a possession. A collection anyone can consult is an archive.
The Twentieth Institution
For a hundred and twenty years this family endowed institutions and then let go of them. A law college at Gulbarga, given to the HKE Society. A polytechnic at Latur, handed to the Government of Maharashtra on the single condition that it keep a name. Schools, hostels, a hospital wing, an eye centre inside somebody else’s network. The pattern was consistent: pay for it, name it for someone worth remembering, and give the running of it to people better placed to run it.
Kalakriti Archives breaks that pattern, and the break is deliberate.
You cannot endow an archive and walk away. There is nobody to hand it to.
A college has a governing society waiting for it, and a state education department behind that. A collection of ten thousand maps has neither. Given away in the usual manner it would have been broken into lots and sold, which is what happens to almost every private collection of this kind. Building an institution around it — the cataloguing, the fellowships, the digitisation, the email address — was the only way to make the gift outlast the giver.
So the instinct is the same and the method is its opposite. In 1960 the family’s contribution was money and a name. Here it is two decades of custody, and a decision to make a private holding public.
It is also the first of these institutions to distribute something other than education or medicine. What this one gives away is memory — a city’s record of itself, returned to the people whose grandparents are named on the sheets.
1960 · Gulbarga
The law college was funded by the family and handed to the HKE Society, which has governed it ever since.
1962 · Latur
The polytechnic was transferred entire to the Government of Maharashtra, on the sole condition that it keep the founder’s name.
2015 · Hyderabad
There was no society and no ministry to receive a private collection. So the institution had to be built around it instead.
Continue
The Founder
The collector who began in 2002 and spent a decade assembling what became the archive.
The profile →The Group
The gallery, ArtCafe and the Krishnakriti Foundation, of which the archive is one part.
Kalakriti India →Twenty Institutions
A century and a half of the family endowing institutions across the Deccan — of which this is the newest.
The institutions →