Whispers of Calm: A Day at DAG

Fridays are usually frenetic with crowded inboxes, crammed calls, caffeine on the hour. But this past Friday, I craved a different kind of rhythm. Something slow. Something silent. Something that wouldn’t rush to fill my mind, but gently allow it to breathe.

So I walked into DAG at Windsor Place, a quiet enclave on Janpath, just before 7 PM. The reason for my visit: A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings c. 1790–1835.

The gallery was dimly lit with intent; focused beams spotlighting each painting, leaving shadows in all the right places. A hush filled the room. Not silence exactly, but the kind of quiet that art knows how to command. The kind that doesn’t shout for attention, but waits for you to listen.

The exhibition was curated like a meditation. Company paintings from the late 18th and early 19th centuries with renderings of flora, fauna, architecture, daily life. Each canvas told a story without uttering a word. And yet, they spoke.

A jackfruit tree, impossibly detailed. Squirrels and birds rendered with such gentle accuracy you could hear their world rustle and chirp. A tomb stood beneath a dusky sky painted by an unknown artist but soaked in reverence. Artisans, merchants were captured mid-motion, mid-thought. I didn’t know their names, but somehow I knew them.

At 7 sharp, Giles Tillotson, the curator, began the walkthrough. His voice was calm, precise, like a tanpura behind a vocal line, never overpowering but always grounding. He spoke of patronage and perspective, of East meeting West not in conflict but in collaboration.

Maybe it was the way they were painted in soft, flat strokes that invited stillness. Maybe it was something deeper. I don’t know.

What I do know is that somewhere between the pigment and the paper, between the colonial gaze and the Indian brush, I found a quiet.

It was like I had stepped inside the painting, or maybe it had stepped into me.

By 8 PM, the tour ended, but I lingered. There was no rush. No feed to refresh. Just one last glance at a botanical study and the soft echo of the curator’s words:

“Company paintings were never just documentation. They were devotion.”

And that word stayed with me. Devotion. To detail. To nature. To stillness. To life, as it is.

I stepped out into the Delhi night, and for once, it didn’t feel loud. The honks had rhythm. The streetlights blinked like distant stars. Even the traffic exhaled in slow motion.

Not every day holds serenity. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, it finds you in the quietest corners, in the stroke of a squirrel’s tail, or the way a leaf remembers its shape.

Till next time.

Akash.