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Marg Magazine

A magazine of the arts

In 1946, novelist and activist Mulk Raj Anand, along with a group of 14 artists, art historians and architects, founded MARG (Modern Architectural Research Group) in an India on the threshold of Independence. Over the last 75 years, our magazine and books have been a forum for pioneering research in Indian art and are acclaimed for their standards of production and editorial content.

08/07/2025

“In 1957, Badri assumed leadership of a group of artists working at Vitrum Studio (later Hexamas Studio) on Bombay’s Cumballa Hill, egged on by the studio’s director, Simon Lifschutz, a Jewish artist of Polish origin who had sought refuge in India during the Second World War. It was at this studio that Badri, along with friends such as ceramist Sharad Palande, chanced on the exciting new medium of ceramics. Working with this challenging, yet tactile, material which has fired the imagination of the world’s earliest artists, helped the young painter to hone his craftsmanship, excavate his memory for deeply buried shards of fantasy and forge the visual vocabulary that he would deploy in the years to come on canvas, tile and paper.”
Excerpt from Badri Narayan: Portrait of the Artist as Storyteller by Prema Viswanathan.

& bring us ‘A Glazed History: Badri Narayan and the Vitrum Studio’, on displayat the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery until the 31st of August 2025 . Curated by Puja Vaish, the exhibition highlights the interlinked legacies of the artist and the studio. The Marg book Badri Narayan: Portrait of the Artist as Storyteller, is available for purchase at the CSMVS Shop on the 1st floor.

exhibition | Mumbai | painting | ceramics | art history | art book | Indian art | studio | Badri Narayan | event | art magazine | art and culture | artist |

09/06/2025

29/05/2025

| BENGALURU |
The Marg Foundation and Atta Galatta invite you to a talk on Marg’s recent publication Video Games: Lila/Maya! We will be joined by Souvik Mukherjee - the Guest Editor of the volume, Padmini Ray Murray and Prabhash Tripathy on the 27th of June, at 6:30 PM.
Please make sure to register to attend via the link in bio. We can't wait to see you there!

You can also purchase the volume from the Marg website.

| Event | Video Games | Bengaluru | new volume | publication | art history | art | digital art |

14/05/2025

Like cinema or literature, video games allow players to inhabit a character’s reality. And even though this reality is circumscribed by the plot of the narrative, it is framed as a mutable entity shaped by the player’s choices and experiences within the gameworld. Agency/identification is especially significant in autobiographical games, where it not only satisfies the thrill-seeking impulses of players but also facilitates deeper emotional and psychological immersion.

That Dragon, Cancer, for instance, mirrors real-life grief as players embody parents navigating their child’s terminal illness, with no way to alter its course. Among Indian indie titles, Missing: The Complete Saga places players in the shoes of Champa, a kidnapped girl, forcing them to confront the brutal realities of trafficking. In both games, agency is redefined—not as mastery over the gameworld, but as a reckoning with the emotional weight of lived experience. Play is transformed into an act of witnessing, drawing players into deeply personal—often painful—narratives, where illusion and reality collapse, and catharsis emerges not from victory, but from the experience itself. Images above: As Champa searches for a way home in Unrest, players navigate the confines of the brothel, interact with its inhabitants—both captors and victims— and make difficult choices that determine her fate, and their own, in the gameworld. Forced to confront the realities of human trafficking, they experience the threat of forced sexual labour, the desperate need to escape and the ever-present risk of re-capture.

Read all about video games in India in Marg’s latest issue Video Games: Lila/Maya. Link in bio!

Images: Courtesy Satyajit Chakraborty of Flying Robot Studios.

09/05/2025

Historical specificity often lies at odds with the subjective nature of memory. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, for instance, when the prince falls to his death, he protests, “No, no, this is not how it happened.” Video games too mimic this tension between history and memory. They toy with temporality— each replay alters the gameworld, while mechanics like losing or regaining a life allow for repetition, revision and rebirth, ultimately altering the player’s fate. Many games embed the constructed, incomplete and fallible nature of memory into their gameplay and narratives. For instance, The Return of the Obra Dinn allows players to step into the frozen memories of others—through the use of a pocket watch—in order to reconstruct the past from these disjointed fragments.

1-2. Somewhere (a series of games by Studio Oleomingus) explores Kayamgadh, a surreal town of storytellers. Here, people—merchants, swindlers, kings—exist only as they are remembered in others’ stories. Each character that the player embodies is a figment of someone’s memory. But as its landscapes shift, the game questions whether a place must be real to be remembered or whether memory alone is enough to keep a city, and its imagined beings, alive.
Courtesy Dhruv Jani of Studio Oleomingus.

3-4. Forgotten Fields follows the story of Sid, a struggling writer, who returns to his childhood home. He reconnects with old friends and revisits familiar but forgotten spaces—an abandoned courtyard, a quiet seashore. His past folds into his present. The process allows him to break through his writer’s block, and gain the clarity to move forward.
Courtesy Armaan Sandhu of Frostwood Interactive and Amer Ahmad of Dino Digital.

02/05/2025

From The Encyclopedia of Minor Conflicts (Bengal Famine 1943) to A Museum of Dubious Splendors, the essays in this volume discuss games that comment on the nature of historiography—how history is told, interpreted, and contested in contemporary society. As immersive worlds, video games also serve as portals into alternate realities—shaped by historical events and figures—which invite players to inhabit history. Svoboda: 1945 Liberation uses interactive dialogues, live-action videos and archival material to enhance personal engagement with Eastern and Central European history—particularly, the post-WWII expulsion of the region’s German inhabitants. Some video games generate new representations of the past, and even offer counter-narratives. The Cat and the Coup, for example, presents an idiosyncratic challenge for the student of history as it playfully follows, and subverts, the history of 1950s Iran. In India, historical video games like Unrest and Antariksha Sanchar open up new game spaces for engagement.
Read about video games in India in Marg’s latest issue Video Games: Lila/Maya. Find it on our website or through the link in our bio.

IMAGES
1–2. An “ancient” kingdom is at the brink of disintegration in Unrest, drawing its players into the complexities of historical processes— cultural and political pressures—that drive change and govern the fate of empires. Characters embody different social agents, from peasant to princess, who witness and navigate this process from distinct perspectives.
Courtesy Arvind Yadav of Pyrodactyl Games.
3–5. Antariksha Sanchar, literally meaning space transmission, reimagines the arc of modern Indian history. It speculates the existence of the famous mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan alongside Tamil Punk, pushpaka vimanas, Bharatanatyam and temple towns—constructing a story in which flight emerged not from industrial modernity, but from a distinctly Indian confluence of dance, music, mathematics and myth.
Courtesy Antariksha Studio.

30/04/2025

Aesthetics are fundamental to the experience of video games. The essays in this volume examine the elements that shape gameplay and game spaces, including camera angles, scenography, character design and the stylistic choices artists and designers make with regard to rendering techniques. They define a game’s visual identity and affective impact. Some games, however, are about art itself and its role in shaping cultural and social narratives.
The Palace on the Hill follows a boy who discovers ancient ruins near his village and embarks on an exploration of Pahari painting traditions, learning to paint in those styles. Raji, on the other hand, integrates South Asian and Balinese myths, artistic influences—including shadow puppetry—into its scenography and narrative. The Indian gaming industry employs artists trained in various painting traditions, who bring their diverse disciplinary backgrounds and cultural influences to bear upon game design. Reimagined through digital media, video games extend the visual arts—expanding established modes of spectatorship and the discourse of art.

To read the new Marg volume Video Games: Lila/Maya edited by Souvik Mukherjee, click the link in our bio or visit the Marg website!

Image 1: Raji wields weapons such as the trisula, sharanga bow and nandaka sword to fight demons against a backdrop of chhatris, l Mughal arches, and temple shikharas—a world steeped in South Asian visual culture. Meanwhile, performance traditions of Southeast Asia—Balinese and Javanese wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre —are employed to play out the storytelling sequences.
© 2025 Nodding Heads games. all rights reserved.

Image 2-4: As the protagonist of The Palace on the Hills encounters murals, ruins and Pahari paintings, he starts to see the world in a new way. Quotidian objects—flowers, handpumps
and grainfields—become imbued with personal memory as he sketches them in his notebook; and the gameworld itself transforms—unfolding around him like a folio from an illuminated manuscript. courtesy Mridul Kashatria of Niku Games.

23/04/2025

📢Reprint Alert📢
The Story of Early Indian Advertising, a landmark Marg volume from 2017, has been reprinted as a soft cover book. For those who don’t have it on their bookshelves yet, here’s your chance - click the link in our bio to get it!
The book explores Indian advertising in the 19th and 20th centuries through varying visuals that came to define it. The book explores the arrival of western goods and their publicity campaigns alongside the indigenous responses to these. Richly illustrated, the essays explore a vast archive of material, including print ads, calendars, cards, posters and matchboxes.

16/04/2025

📢We’re excited to announce the release of Marg’s new issue Video Games: Lila/Maya, guest edited by Souvik Mukherjee.
Essays in this volume address the growth of the video game in India as an artistic medium, their diverse influences and stylistic approaches, and the question of what constitutes an “Indian” video game. The volume also shows how contemporary artists like Somnath Bhatt and Afrah Shafiq incorporate digital games aesthetics—the pixel, for example—in their practice, and how games themselves can serve as discursive spaces by critiquing traditional institutions and contemporary politics.
This publication charts a history of “indie” games, reflective of changing contemporary culture, as well as the institutions that have showcased or facilitated them. Indie video game developers in India have increasingly started using aspects of Indian cultural traditions such as language, music, art, architecture, costumes, dance and iconography. Each of these is an inexhaustible avenue to create a setting for the games’ narratives. How they are used, which elements are selected—these choices often reflect dominant political and cultural ideas current in that age.

To check out the volume and read more, click the link in our bio!

10/04/2025

Meet the Speakers!
The Asiatic Society of Mumbai and The Marg Foundation present a talk on Marg's recent publication, The Third Side of the Coin.
Join us on the 23rd of April at 5:30 PM, at the Durbar Hall, The Asiatic Society of Mumbai. We're excited to see you there!

08/04/2025

|MUMBAI|
Marg and The Asiatic Society of Mumbai are excited to announce a talk on Marg's recent volume The Third Side of the Coin, by Dr. Shailendra Bhandare and Dr. Sanjay Garg.
Join us on the 23rd of April at the Durbar Hall, The Asiatic Society of Mumbai. The event will start at 6 PM, and refreshments will be served at 5:30 PM.
Please make sure to register via the link in bio. We hope to see you there!

02/04/2025

In AD 697, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik introduced the first truly Islamic coins, replacing the images used earlier with Islamic religious inscriptions. His coins were inscribed with the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith: “La illah illa allah wahdahu la sharika lahu (There is no god but Allah; He is one, He has no partner)” on the front, and “Muhammad rasul Allah (Muhammad is the messenger of Allah)” on the back. Later coins across the Islamic world continued to feature this declaration or a shorter version until the early Mughal period. This statement of belief was seen as having spiritual power and so, harnessing the “third side” of coins, or their proclivity to becoming talismans and charms, coins bearing the statement of faith transformed into devotional objects. In the later Mughal period, Akbartankas— imitations of the coins of Emperor Akbar—were made for personal devotion and as protective amulets. On Akbar’s coins and on the Akbartankas, the shahada was often accompanied by the names of the first four caliphs. Alongside these inscriptions, some devotional coins have images of a mosque, particularly Muhammad’s mosque in Medina, or of the buraq, the mythical beast which carried Muhammad to Jerusalem and up into heaven. Shia Muslims also made use of such devotional coins, but with the addition of the names of Muhammad’svson-in-law, Ali, as the servant of Allah, and of his sons Husayn and Hasan.

Read more in Marg’s latest volume “The Third Side of the Coin” edited by Joe Cribb. Link in bio.

IMAGES
5. The shahada and the names of the first four caliphs on a silver Islamic devotional coin in the name of Akbar, northern India, 19th century.
© classical numismatic group.

6. The Medina mosque and the names of the first four caliphs on a gold Islamic devotional coin, northern India, 19th century.
courtesy heinz bons.

9. Buraq, mount of Muhammad, and the name of the caliph Ali, on base silver Shi’ite devotional coin, northern India, 19th century.
courtesy heinz bons.

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Our Story

Marg is a Mumbai-based not-for-profit publisher whose mission is to encourage an understanding of Indian art in the broadest sense of the term. It strives to light up “many dark corners” in India’s cultural landscape and to spark debate on all aspects of heritage among academics, critics and interested general readers.

Since its inception in 1946, our quarterly magazine has reflected new trends, new research and new scholarship, from both upcoming and established art historians and scholars. The magazine is aimed at a wide audience and seeks to forge a connection between art and life.

Marg’s quarterly books, published simultaneously with the magazine from 1977 to 2009, have since diverged into independent publications, each a landmark contribution.

Among other avenues we pursue, Marg has been publishing special books outside the quarterly series in a variety of formats.