“History informs us what we are today,” says Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, director, Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum, who has conceived and curated the exhibitions, The Doubled Frame: Interrogating Identity and POI/Bharat Ke Log, where the latter responds to the former exhibition by artist Archana Hande.

Hande, Archana, POI/Bharat ke Log (installation detail) 2014, video, sound, clay and plaster models, mosquito net. Pic courtesy/Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum

Both exhibitions are triggered by the idea of how Indians started looking at themselves differently since the British colonised the subcontinent. A case in point is the clay models that Mehta draws attention to. “They are Europeanised in their execution. They are frontal figures like the photographs taken at that time. Realistic conception was never there in Indian art as Indians have always conceived idealistic features, such as of deities, including the toys which were sculpted in a generic way.”