Two outsider visions from Jaipur take centre stage in New Delhi

In early February 2026, the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi becomes the unlikely meeting point for two singular artistic worlds shaped by the same city. The Enigma of Jaipur and The Jadugar of Jaipur, presented by The Crites Collection in collaboration with ICA Gallery, Jaipur, bring together works by the late Nannu Singh and the contemporary artist Nagdas. Shown across the Visual Arts Gallery and the Open Palm Court from 3 to 9 February, the exhibitions propose a conversation across generations, materials and inner cosmologies, while keeping Jaipur firmly at the centre of the story.

At the India Habitat Centre, twin solo exhibitions trace the mystic intensity of Nannu Singh and the spellbound imagination of Nagdas

The curatorial framework has been developed by indigenous art scholar Minhazz Majumdar, collector and researcher Mitchell A. K. Crites, and Vijendra Bansal with his son Abhinav of ICA Gallery. Between them sits decades of lived knowledge. Crites, an American who has spent over fifty years working with folk, tribal and tantric artists in India, first encountered Nannu Singh through a single image. “When I saw the first painting of a howling demon done on handmade paper with stone ground colours, I knew that he was possessed of a rare and esoteric talent,” he recalls. That initial recognition grew into a long-term commitment to preserving Singh’s work, much of which remained unseen during the artist’s lifetime.

Nannu Singh, born in 1905 in Hathras and settled in Jaipur after Independence, lived and worked beyond institutional frameworks. Entirely self-taught, he painted on old handmade paper using stone-ground mineral and vegetable pigments, often late at night and largely in private. His imagery draws from tantric ritual, folk memory and personal turbulence, producing figures that feel at once archaic and unsettled. Majumdar situates Singh’s practice between inherited visual languages and a strikingly individual modernism. “What is truly amazing is how he brought together all of these traditions and transcreated them into a unique and vibrant style that was very much his own,” he says, noting Singh’s exposure to abstraction and Cubism through his association with the Jaipur artist and educator Ramgopal Vijayvargiya.

The exhibition presents Singh as an artist whose work resists tidy art-historical placement. Ancient symbolism collides with present-day emotion, and devotional motifs fracture into raw, sometimes uneasy forms. Majumdar describes this temporal tension with clarity: “Because you see in his art, ancient tantric ritual at play along with visions of present day life and his own emotional turbulence.” The result is a body of work that remains open-ended, inviting interpretation rather than offering resolution.

If Singh’s paintings unfold as inward meditations, Nagdas’s works operate as acts of conjuring. Born in 1987 in Jalore, Rajasthan, and now based in Jaipur, Nagdas is likewise self-taught, having begun painting after encountering working artists as a teenager. His large-scale black-and-white compositions are populated by therianthropes, hybrid beings that merge human, animal and mythical forms. Executed without preparatory sketches, his process privileges instinct, rhythm and repetition, producing densely layered surfaces that feel performative and alive.

The ICA Gallery first encountered Nagdas through a handful of small, vividly coloured works. Vijendra Bansal remembers the moment clearly. “I immediately sensed that this artist had a great talent,” he says, explaining how Nagdas was invited to work within the family karkhana and given access to materials and mentorship without stylistic constraint. That approach reflects the Bansal family’s three-generation engagement with Jaipur’s artists and their deep archive of manuscripts, miniatures and ritual objects, which continue to inform the visual vocabularies of the artists they support.

While the tonal registers of Singh and Nagdas differ, their pairing reveals shared impulses. Both draw from tantric thought, oral traditions and esoteric symbolism. Both favour humble, often found materials. Both operate outside academic systems, guided instead by personal necessity. Crites notes that their paintings ask something of the viewer, requiring patience and curiosity rather than immediate legibility.

Staging the exhibitions in New Delhi rather than Jaipur is a strategic gesture. As Abhinav Bansal puts it, “We wanted to show the important art world in Delhi just how remarkable Nannu Singh and Nagdas are and also to promote the legacy of Jaipur which has nurtured and supported artists for nearly 300 years.” That legacy is central to the exhibitions’ underlying thesis: that Jaipur remains a living, evolving city of artists, capable of producing radical visions across centuries.

For collectors, critics and scholars, The Enigma of Jaipur and The Jadugar of Jaipur offer parallel journeys into artistic worlds shaped by devotion, imagination and place. Together, they suggest that outsider practices in India are not peripheral but deeply embedded within the country’s cultural fabric, waiting, sometimes patiently, to be seen.

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