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Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, A Cookbook and more
A life’s journey involving food, architecture, design, heritage, culture
Speakers
Lucknow’s famous Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb—a melding together of influences—is seen in its food, art, architecture, dance and music. When Sunita Kohli’s parents, Chand and Inder Prakash Sur, first settled in Lucknow after having to leave Lahore following partition, they brought with them only the memories of home. Growing up surrounded by kaleidoscopic influences from across the sub-continent, she has gone on to harness her talents to restore and re-design several historic and iconic structures across South-Asia.
Sunita Kohli will be in conversation with Nita Khanna and speak about and celebrate the fabled Lucknowi tradition of hospitality reflected in its culture of food that she has been uniquely positioned to observe and absorb. She will also reflect on her lived experience with architecture, design, heritage and culture.
Speakers
Sunita Kohli
Sunita Kohli is a globally recognized national award-winning interior designer, furniture manufacturer and architectural conservationist since 1971. Her professional portfolio includes several significant public and heritage buildings, hotels and hotel boats, forts, palaces, libraries, museums and select residences in India, Egypt, Pakistan, Bhutan, England and Sri Lanka. She is the President of K2India, an award-winning architectural and design firm, whose CEO is Ar. Kohelika Kohli.
Sunita Kohli is a former Chairperson of the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal and has lectured and presented several papers at several universities on a variety of subjects in the UK, the USA and South-east Asia. Earlier, for the ‘Millennium Book on New Delhi’ by Oxford University Press, she wrote an extended essay on ‘The Planning of New Delhi and Sir Edwin Lutyens’, and is considered the India expert on Lutyens’ works in New Delhi. Currently four books are under preparation and publication by the Aleph Book Company.
Recently, she co-authored ’The Lucknow Cookbook’ with her mother, Chand Sur, a legendary cook. The Lucknow Cookbook has been launched in almost every premier literary festival in India. Its most recent launch, in end April 2019, was at the Singapore ‘Festival of Indian Arts and Ideas’ where Sunita Kohli also delivered an illustrated lecture on ‘The Syncretic Culture of India’s Tangible & Intangible Heritage’.
In September 2019, Sunita Kohli was the Chief Curator of The Times of India’s first design event, a two day ‘Festival of Art, Craft, Architecture and Design Etymologies’.
In 1992, Sunita Kohli was conferred the Padma Shri, ‘for contribution to national life in the field of interior design and architectural restoration’, by the President of India in
New Delhi. The same year she was presented the Mahila Shiromani Award by Mother Teresa, now St. Teresa, in Kolkata. Most recently, in October 2019, Sunita Kohli was presented the prestigious Hall of Fame Award. Since the AD50 Awards were constituted, K2India has figured on every list of Architectural Digest India.
Nita Khanna
Nita Khanna is an Indo Canadian with an academic background in English Literature, Journalism, Aesthetics and Critical Theory from Bombay University and The University of Oxford, United Kingdom. A cultural entrepreneur and business owner, she has been a writer and producer in advertising and film production in Mumbai, Dubai, and Toronto, and served as a board director of ‘Cinestan North America Inc’, a Toronto based Canadian media company. She is the co-founder of ‘Shastrartha – The Art of Civilized Dialogue’, a New Delhi based live event dialogue series and ‘The Birchbark Collective’, a fledgling curatorial venture based in New Delhi and Toronto. As a third generation successor to her traditional family business, her turnkey implementation of enterprise solutions has helped transform an archaic, labor intensive business in her home state of Madhya Pradesh, and has set the groundwork for an upcoming documentary film on the subject. She divides her time between Toronto, Delhi, Hyderabad and her ancestral home in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh.
