Divyāmbara

This is a worthy addition to the publications of the National Museum, New Delhi. The novelty of the textile collection in the National Museum is that unlike the Indian Museum, Kolkata and the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum Jaipur, it has no heritage collections upon which it can draw. This has its advantages. The collections based on gifts and purchase offer a heterogeneity which a scholar can utilize while alluding to the continuity between the past and present. As the catalogue is devoted to the master pieces of the costume from the collection, pagris, head gear have not been included and the same applies to the unstitched garment, the sari. However, India has a vast continuum from which it is possible to elicit information and the costume collection mirrors this.0While Lotika Varadarajan, as Tagore Fellow, brings her wide knowledge of textiles to bear on the subject, Sushmit Sharma adds another dimension to the work by his understanding of visual language in its many dimensions. This has opened up further avenues of investigation adding additional depth to the subject. The work has been envisaged keeping in mind the transformation of the role of museum in modern times from being geared to the needs of a research scholar to that of translating works of art into quotidian language.