In an age of distraction, where the present clutches tightly at our gaze, Dr. Kanika Gupta chooses to look back, deep into the crevices of time, where myths still flicker like oil lamps and forgotten hands etched divinity into stone. Art historian, dancer, filmmaker, and author, Gupta is a rare constellation of intellect and intuition, scholarship, and sensuous storytelling. Her work does not merely study history. It animates it, allowing ancient forms, symbols, and silences to rise again, cloaked in contemporary urgency.
Dr. Gupta’s scholarship finds its roots in the classical yet rebellious soil of ancient Indian art. Trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, and later completing a PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University, her research delves into ancient Indian motifs, often unearthing the voices of those long erased from the margins, especially women, forest-dwellers, and the nameless artisans who shaped sacred spaces across the subcontinent. Her 2019 book Lupadakhe: Unknown Master Sculptors of Ancient India, co-authored with Professor Kannal, is a luminous inquiry into these very silences.
Lupadakhe the title is as enigmatic as the subjects it embraces and moves beyond the temple’s façade into the shadows where anonymous hands chiselled gods from stone. With a deep awareness of stylistic evolution and historical nuance, the book investigates the artistic genealogy of Indian sculpture, drawing on the formal methodologies of Heinrich Wölfflin, yet moving fluidly between Western frameworks and Indic aesthetics. Gupta and Kannal’s narrative resurrects the past in prose. The sculptors here are not faceless labourers, but custodians of cosmic memory. Their anonymity, rather than a mark of erasure, becomes a space of reverence.
The forest, in her hands, becomes both setting and subject—an archive of the feminine, wild, and divine.
But Gupta is not only an archivist of stone. She is equally attuned to the rustling forests, murmuring rivers, and sensual poetry that pulse through India’s oral and literary traditions. This fluidity of form, between solid and ephemeral, history, and performance, culminates in The Cursed Land of Lustful Women, a 2023 publication that emerged from a devised performance created during her participation in the TAKING CARE Project at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum. As the only Indian artist-in-residence selected for the initiative, Gupta’s voice became both anchor and vessel for a world in danger of vanishing.
Drawing from Jātaka tales, the Gāthāsaptasati, and the ancient Indian motif of the woman entwined with the tree, The Cursed Land of Lustful Women is neither mere text nor theatre, it is invocation. A poetic lament for the forests we have sacrificed at the altar of concrete dreams, the work reimagines women and nature not as passive backdrops, but as agents of beauty, resistance, and wisdom. The stories reawaken an erotic, ecological memory buried deep in classical literature and folklore, reminding readers that to desire the tree is to recognize the divine.
“There is so much of this beauty,” Gupta writes, “we have exchanged today for an artificial idea of luxury.” Her performance and its resulting text breathe life into that lamentation. Through storytelling, commentary, and ritualistic imagery, she invites us to remember the sacredness of soil, bark, and breath. The forest, in her hands, becomes both setting and subject, an archive of the feminine, wild, and divine.
“To desire the tree is to recognize the divine.”
Gupta’s recent appearance at Ananke’s Festival of Literature 2025, as part of a panel discussion on climate change, further reveals the arc of her evolving inquiry. There, she shared how her research into goddesses and Yakshinis led to a deeper understanding of nature as not merely a setting for myth, but it’s very origin and sustainer. For Gupta, ecological degradation is not only a material crisis, but a spiritual one, born from forgetting the sacred intimacy between human and earth, the feminine and the fertile. Her work, whether scholarly or performative, thus becomes a subtle activism—a return to wonder as resistance.
Beyond the written word, Gupta’s engagement with public history is equally immersive. She conducts heritage walks across Delhi, leading participants not through dry chronology, but through living stories inscribed in sandstone and shadow. These walks are oral history, myth, and pedagogy braided into experience. Each monument becomes a portal; each alley a whispered poem. In Gupta’s world, history is not a linear path but a labyrinth—one that must be wandered, not merely studied.
“The gods, the trees, the storytellers, the dancers, the forgotten—each has a voice in her work.”
Such is the essence of her creative vision: porous, plural, and profoundly embodied. Whether studying the chiselled lines of ancient sculpture or scripting performances under a canopy of imagined forests, Dr. Kanika Gupta traverses disciplines with the grace of someone who knows that all true knowledge is interwoven. The gods, the trees, the storytellers, the dancers, the forgotten—each has a voice in her work, each is called upon to speak once more.
In a time of fracture, her art is a call to remember—to remember not only the past but the living breath of what endures. The stone and the seed. The woman and the tree. The myth and the memory. In the quiet, if one listens, they still whisper.
Namrata is the editor of Kitaab, a South Asian literary magazine based in Singapore. Since 2018, she also runs a creative agency called Keemiya Creatives where she works with authors and publishing houses in different capacities. She is a published author who enjoys writing stories and think-pieces on travel, relationships, and gender. Namrata is also an independent editor and a book reviewer. Her writings can be found on various sites and magazines like the Asian Review of Books, Contemporary South Asia Journal of King’s College-London, Mad in Asia, The Friday Times, Daily Star, The Scroll, Feminism in India, The Brown Orient Journal, Inkspire Journal, Moonlight Journal, The Same, Chronic Pain India and Cafe Dissensus among others. Find her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/privytrifles
