In a quiet room of the Paul residence in central Delhi on Saturday morning, rows of calendars, matchbox labels, and fading prints offered a curious glimpse into the history of India—one told through scraps of paper that once adorned kitchens and shop walls. The occasion was The City as a Museum: Delhi Edition, a festival by DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery) that opened private collections to the public.
Arts patron Priya Paul, long fascinated by India’s visual culture, welcomed a small group of visitors to her home. “I started collecting this popular art imagery when I moved to Delhi in 1988–89,” she told HT. “I kept seeing these works on paper being destroyed, so I told myself, ‘let me just buy them’. Even when the collection was small and messy, I kept it open; it was a way for me to learn. There was very little writing about it back then.”
The collection grew quietly over decades before being digitised with the help of archivist Priya Kapoor and the online archive Tasveer Ghar. “Things I was buying for a hundred rupees are now ten thousand,” Paul said. “I didn’t want to keep buying duplicates, so I organised it all. Now it’s neatly stacked, and I get so much more pleasure seeing it like this.”
Among the exhibits were fragile prints of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Subhas Chandra Bose, framed by marching farmers, maps of India, and luminous depictions of Mother India—an idealised post-Independence nation rendered on cheap paper. Nearby, matchbox labels—tiny, vivid stage sets—featured roosters, bicycles, and fish, once guiding uneducated shoppers to the right fabric or soap brand.
Calendars spoke their own language. A 1940s sample placed Gandhi beside tractors and factories, turning a household object into a declaration of national progress. Hindu devotional prints borrowed Bollywood glamour, reimagining film stars as deities, while Islamic posters, in restrained golds and greens, remained devotional but rarely political.
Filmmaker and archivist Yousuf Saeed, co-founder of Tasveer Ghar, recalled discovering such posters near Jama Masjid in 1995. “I knew they existed, but seeing them on the pavement was different,” he said. A fellowship in 2004 rekindled his interest, and by 2006, Tasveer Ghar had begun pooling collections online to preserve these fragile objects.
Paul said she is thrilled to share the archive beyond scholars. “When DAG came to me, I said, why not? This is part of our cultural history and legacy. Some of these works are more than 150 years old. They have artistic merit, and I’m amazed so many people are interested.” Asked about the archive’s future, she added, “People ask me what I’m going to do with it. Maybe it will be a museum one day, I don’t know. But it deserves to be seen.”
For visitors, the morning was a quiet revelation: India’s visual history is not confined to grand museums or official archives. It lives in the prints, labels, and calendars that once brightened ordinary walls—and thanks to collectors like Paul, it continues to tell the story of a young republic discovering its own image.