Reimagining the Muraqqa

What happens when paintings gathered over years of chance encounters come together in one place? Reimagining the Muraqqa brings together traditional paintings from the personal collection of Waswo X. Waswo, generously gifted to the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP). Writer, photographer, and artist, Waswo began collecting paintings after settling in Rajasthan from local painters, workshops, and bazaars. His collection grew organically through curiosity, conversation and inspiration for his practice. Many of the paintings he encountered were inexpensive works sold as “antiquities”, or what he came to call heritage paintings . Over time, these seemingly modest objects revealed a complex visual record of a changing India. The collection brings together portraits of royals and aristocrats, depictions of lesser-known sects, tantric imagery, mythological subjects, Nathdwara paintings of Shrinathji, and eclectic works that resist straightforward classification. Royal patronage thinned, but painters did not stop. They found other avenues and other buyers: emerging elites and devotees who wanted paintings to possess rather than courts to please. The traditions changed form and purpose rather than ending. The exhibition draws on the muraqqa—a pre-modern album in which individual paintings, photographs and other fragments are assembled into a larger whole. Here, around 50 works come together across broad categories. Similar to the pages of an old family album, they do not necessarily follow a linear story. Instead, connections emerge through proximity, annotations, anecdotes and the act of looking. Reimagining the Muraqqa is accompanied by a new publication that examines the connections between these works and includes an essay on collecting by Waswo X. Waswo.