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Artist Talk

September 27

 Namaste Hall, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Andrew Ward - Hushangabad: Portrait of a North Indian Village 50 Years Ago

SACHI, Society for Art & Cultural Heritage of India and California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) are honored to Present Andrew Ward
Essayist, novelist, scholar artist, and historian of British India, American slavery, and the Civil War
In an Illustrated Talk
Hushangabad: Portrait of a North Indian Village 50 Years Ago Photography by Andrew Ward

Presentation of Andrew Ward photography will be followed by a Conversation between Andrew Ward and
CIIS Professor Debashish Banerji

RSVP: info@sachi.org; Tel. 415-221-0338 The event is Free and Open to the Public

From 1968 to 1970, future historian Andrew Ward worked as a photographer in India, where he had spent five years of his childhood. One of his assignments was to cover a year in the life of a North Indian village. He chose the little hamlet of Hushangabad, an hour’s drive southwest of New Delhi, and set out to document the village and its inhabitants. His photographs lay dormant for some forty years as he pursued a career as a writer, but upon turning seventy he scanned his negatives for a 2019 one-man exhibition at the University of Texas in Arlington.

Ward’s photographs, an impressionistic record of his experience of Hushangabad and its people, remain his ‘’most cherished subject”. Projecting a video of his entire portfolio of village pictures, Ward will talk about his transformative years he spent photographing the village, his continuing relationship with its inhabitants, and his enduring love of India.

Andrew Ward was born in Chicago in 1946 and moved to India when he was eight years old. After studying photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, he returned to India to pursue assignments for the Ford Foundation, National Geographic, and Encyclopedia Britannica. He produced an archive
of North Indian sites and photo essays on Brindaban and Mathura, Old Delhi, Nizamuddin Complex, and the Pushkar Fair. In 1970 he came back to the States and became a writer: a contributing editor at The Atlantic; a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, a columnist for the Washington Post, a contributor to most of the nation’s major magazines. He has published a dozen books, including Our Bones Are Scattered, a history of the Indian Uprising of 1857.

He resides in Davis, California but has returned to India numerous times on assignment and for research, and to touch base with a country he will always regard as his second home.


Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Banerji has curated a number of exhibitions of Indian and Japanese art. These include a recent display of photographs of India taken by German-born British photographer E. O. Hoppe in 1929. He is the editor of a book on the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (2015); co-editor of Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (2016), and author of two books: The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (2010) and Seven Quartets of Becoming:
A Transformational Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo (2012). He earned his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

SACHI and CIIS extend gracious thanks to Helen & Rajnikant Desai for generous program support.

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