Collections Tour: A for Akshar. India through its Letterforms!

A for Akshar: India through its Letterforms is an online tour celebrating the visual and linguistic diversity of India through its rich typographic heritage. From palm leaf manuscripts and multilingual movie posters to vintage type specimens and everyday ephemera, the tour showcases how letterforms across scripts have shaped—and been shaped by—culture, politics, and technology. With over 22 official languages and a variety of writing systems, India’s graphic landscape is layered, expressive, and ever-evolving. Join us to explore the beauty, complexity, and history of Indian scripts, and discover how they continue to inform design practices and storytelling across the subcontinent.

Our docents for this online tour are Tanya George and Sidharth Jaishankar.

This tour was made possible by a generous grant from Hauser & Wirth.

Tanya George is a Mumbai-based designer and educator with a wide-ranging freelance practice that includes designing letterforms for brand identities as well as fonts across different Indian scripts. She also conducts type walks around Mumbai, along with typography workshops, and writes about type.

Sidharth Jaishankar is a type and graphic designer originally from Chennai, India. Having started reading at a young age, he has wanted to be a writer for as long as he can remember, but somehow got distracted by the design of the books he was reading. He now aims to balance both interests, using writing and research to study the intersection of design with books, language, and culture. He enjoys designing systems, including typefaces, publications, identities, and interfaces. He also likes exploring printing techniques and coding, and holds out hope of writing an epic fantasy novel at some point.