A Moving Line:1500 Years of Indian Visual Storytelling, The Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru

Sugar and Milk and a few other works included in A Moving Line:1500 Years of Indian Visual Storytelling, at MAP Bengaluru, 25 July – 15 November 2026.

Curated by the graphic novelist Amruta Patil, A Moving Line gathers more than 250 works to trace how India has told stories in sequence across fifteen hundred years. In this exhibition we witness both the creation of new visual identities and the evolution of a nation through a vast body of works across time and space. Here, the kaavad and pattachitra scroll sit alongside Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle. Chacha Chaudhary meets the Phantom, while contemporary graphic novels and web comics continue conversations that began centuries ago. While they may seem like unlikely companions, together they tell a much larger story on the history of visual storytelling in India.The title speaks to this movement, a progression, and to the capacity of a line to move us, physically and metaphorically. It nods, too, to the marks artists use to convey motion, emotion and sound within an otherwise flat, two-dimensional medium.

and so they merged, like sugar and milk:

… “her heartbeat
(a vanished soldier)
I had not heard for weeks, butterflies
…chafed my throat,
saving me from disgrace.
she knelt before me, wove spiderwebs
around our eyes (as always
the juggernaut) rattled beneath her bones.”