This edition of Domus India looks at India and its tryst with a Modern past and an ever-changing contemporary, straddling art as well as architecture, and the negotiating of ourselves between social and national spaces in these complex times.

It explores the journeys of buildings and ideas, monuments and cities, all playing their roles in the exploration of grounds that constantly shift between the familiar and the unfamiliar. What is the self looking for in the spaces we inhabit — from the home or the Taj Mahal in Agra, to Gandhi’s Ashram in Ahmedabad, or the erstwhile — now-demolished — Hall of Nations in New Delhi? Through a suite of poems by Tishani Doshi, this issue draws us to the edges of landforms, where worlds of varying mediums and content meet and depart, share and exchange. The poems are replete with the sensual experience of the coast, the osmotic membrane between land and sea. The poet invites us into the textures of the beach, wind, and tide, and unfolds the human drama of being on the cusp, at the edge, at large, at bay.