The Modern Chapter
The same devotion that built schools and hospitals now works in art, archives and heritage. Kalakriti India carries the family’s cultural life into a new century — a gallery, one of the country’s most significant private archives, a café where art is lived with, and a foundation that gives it all away for free each January.
The Group
Each has its own home on the web. This page is the doorway from the family history into the work being done now.
Archives
One of the most significant private repositories devoted to the history and visual culture of the Indian subcontinent — rare maps, early photographs, prints, illustrated books and albums. Through exhibitions, publications, research collaborations and institutional loans it has become a resource for scholars, curators and museums in India and abroad.
Gallery
Hyderabad’s long-standing contemporary art gallery, showing established and emerging artists from across India, and the room in which much of the Krishnakriti Festival takes place.
ArtCafe
Where the collection meets everyday life — a café built inside a gallery, and a room the city has come to treat as its own.
Foundation · 2003
The non-profit behind the festival and the student support programme, founded in memory of Shri Krishnachandra B. Lahoti. It supports more than fifty students each year and organises twenty to thirty free public events every January.
Where It Comes From
Every January Since 2004
Hyderabad’s oldest annual festival of art, culture and heritage. Twenty to thirty events across four to five days, free and open to all.
The festival →Chevalier, 2012
Founder of Kalakriti India and the Archives, managing trustee of the family trust, and the bridge between the historical chapter and this one.
The profile →Since the 1860s
A century and a half in the Deccan — from a Rajasthani trading house to the mills of Gulbarga, and then to twenty institutions given away.
The family story →