Zee Jaipur Literature Festival Mumbai Curtain Raiser 2018

B.N. Goswamy, a leading Indian art historian, is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Panjab University, Chandigarh. His work covers a wide range and has significantly influenced thinking on Indian painting. A recipient of several honours, including the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan, he is the author of more than 25 books, including Nainsukh of Guler and The Spirit of Indian Painting. His most recent work is on the painter, Manaku of Guler.

Rima Hooja: Archaeologist, historian and university professor, Rima Hooja is the Managing Trustee of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation, Faculty Director at NYSICCSI, Faculty at St. Lawrence University, former member of the National Monuments Authority and former director of MSID USA. She has a 100 cats and runs Animal Care Trust. She is the author of Ahar Culture, Prince, Patriot, Parliamentarian and History of Rajasthan.

Robert Elgood: Robert Elgood has a BA in Islamic History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he is now a Research Associate, and a DPhil from Oxford University in Indian Anthropology. He worked for some years in the 1980s as Sotheby’s Oriental arms expert and from 2007 to 2013, he was Research Fellow, Eastern European, Islamic and Asian Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London. He catalogued the arms collection at Belmont House, Kent and wrote the arms section to a catalogue for Jodhpur’s exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. He has lectured at SOAS on the Asian Arts Diploma since the 1980s, at seminars such as the ICOMAN Conference in Oman in 2012, in Cairo in 2014 and at many of the major museums of Europe, America, the Arab world and India including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, The Islamic Art Museum, Qatar and the Dar al Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait where he was a guest scholar. He is a previous speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He has also advised museums, dealers and collectors. He a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Asiatic Society. He commissioned and edited Islamic Arms and Armour and is the author of Arms and Armour of Arabia in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Firearms of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum, Kuwait, Hindu Arms and Ritual: Arms and Armour from India 1400-1865. Articles include three for Macmillan’s’ World Dictionary of Art and another for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam. In 2008, he wrote an introductory essay to a new edition of Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke’s Catalogue of the Collection of Indian Arms and Objects of Art at Marlborough House, originally published in 1898 and his Arms and Armour at Sandringham, published in 1910. ‘The Arms of Greece and her Balkan Neighbours in the Ottoman Period’ appeared in Greek and English editions. More recent publications are Arms and Armour at the Jaipur Court and his two volume catalogue, Rajput Arms and Armour: The Rathores and their Armoury in Jodhpur Fort. He is currently writing on Indian firearms in Jodhpur Fort.

William Dalrymple: William Dalrymple is a bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Nine Lives, and most recently, Return of a King: An Indian Army in Afghanistan. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d’Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone/Crossword Award for nonfiction, and has, prior to the shortlisting of Return of a King, been long listed three times for the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Italian edition of Return of a King won the 2015 Hemingway Prize and the prestigious Kapuściński Prize for Literary Reportage. In September 2016, a Hindustani translation of The Last Mughal was released as Aakhri Mughal, and in December Juggernaut published his new book, Kohinoor, co-written with Anita Anand. Dalrymple is one of the founders and a co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.