Ancient Web: Kamat's Potpourri Made Indian Body Art a 2001 Picture Exhibit

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Kamat's Potpourri preserves something modern web galleries too often leave out: a photograph, a carefully chosen label, and a place within a larger cultural argument.

Visit The Human Body as a Medium of Art

The picture essay calls itself The Body Canvas. It was first online December 8, 2001, according to its own header, and now notes a later update in December 2024. It assembles Indian practices of henna decoration, tattoos, sacred ash, forehead markings, jewelry, and painted devotional faces as forms of art made directly upon the body.

The index doesn't pretend all those traditions are interchangeable. Its individual photographs have labels including The Henna Art of the Feet of a Bride, Tattoos of the Baiga Tribe, Ash Covered Face of a Fortune Teller, and When the Ear Speaks. The related Holy Dot essay considers the meanings of a bindi or tilak in particular religious and social settings.

Family labor made a Web museum

The parent site's colophon tells the more remarkable publishing story. Kamat's Potpourri is a project of the Kamat family, including Krishnanand, Jyotsna, Vikas, and Hiryoung Kim Kamat. Its photograph collection is attributed to Krishnanand.

The colophon says that during an earlier period, Krishna and Jyotsna prepared written material manually and sent it by postal mail to Vikas, who scanned the pictures, retyped articles, and uploaded everything. A note from February 2006 records that Jyotsna had acquired a PC and volunteers were now helping to type and scan.

It even lists the equipment behind the collection: cameras including a 1964 Exakta, film stocks such as ORWO NP-55 and Kodachrome, and manuscript captions typed on a 1959 Remington. The archive is a bridge from analog fieldwork and paper to linked HTML.

The site has a broader scope than this article: history, portraits, women's lives, painting, mythology, temples, and photography. This particular 2001 body-art collection deserves its own examination because it organizes images around ephemeral forms of artistic expression.

As with any archive of living cultural traditions, captions and classifications are the authors' presentation and may not encompass every community's understanding. The original images also remain copyrighted, not free stock photographs.

Explore The Body Canvas and the family's production history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.