अशोक कुमारसिन्हा

Forty books. Two directorships. A museum to build. The biography of a man who has spent half a century in the company of artisans, poets and presidents.

From the Rashtrapati Bhavan to a studio in Niigata — a partial index of the lives that have shaped, and been shaped by, these decades.

Novels in a Bihar that still tastes of the soil; poetry as elegy and argument; biographies of the country’s quietest important lives.

A platform for the artisan, the archivist and the grandchild who hasn’t yet needed the vocabulary. Four pillars, plainly stated.

Chief ministers and Padma Shri painters, book launches and prize days — seventy-five photographs from four decades in Indian letters.