[1] It is widely considered as a landmark book in the Indian art scene that brings together a large corpus of Abanindranath's work for the first time.

In the books R. Siva Kumar states, 'The social space that Abanindranath narrativized as an artist-flaneur is thus the subject of the Orientalist artist/writer read from the obverse.

Along with E. B. Havell, Coomaraswamy, Sister Nivedita and other nationalists he brought an attitudinal change in the Indian response to traditional art.

Although he aligned with the nationalists in the early years of his career he transcended it very soon to develop something more akin to a Baudelairian aesthetics of modernism with a subjective response to the world rather than an unmediated representation of things.

The present book brings together a large body of his work for the first time in an attempt to fulfill a glaring lacuna in our picture of this early master of modern Indian art.