Defining tomorrow: Four voices shaping a new cultural ethos

Harper’s Bazaar India spotlights the bold, uncompromising voices shaping tomorrow—artists, writers, musicians, and photographers who are redefining their fields with vision, courage, and conviction. From reimagining tradition to challenging norms, they offer a glimpse into the future of creativity in India and beyond.

JAYATI BOSE—Artist

When Jayati Bose speaks about her first encounter with art, it is not a gallery or a museum she recalls. “[It was] the limewashed walls of our ancestral home in Asansol (West Bengal), where the contractor’s uneven indigo patches turned into accidental abstractions,” she remembers.

Art was never a rarefied category for Bose. In fact, it was everywhere. Growing up, she was surrounded by a world filled with images, be it the paintings of Abanindranath Tagore and Hemen Majumdar, the jewellery pattern books of her mother, the annual Kali calendar in Bengali script, the jamdani and tangail saris drying on the terrace with their motifs shimmering like secret codes. “All of it left its mark on me long before I knew to call it art,” she says. That sensibility—of finding form and rhythm in the ordinary—continues to shape her practice today.

What makes Bose’s trajectory striking is how late she entered the field. She did not go through art school. She did not grow up aspiring to be an artist. “I came to art only three years ago, teaching myself along the way,” she reveals. Yet in this short span, her work has carved out a distinct space. She moves between two very different media: Watercolour and terracotta. “Watercolour allows me to linger with what is fragile and fleeting, the unfinished edges of memory, while terracotta grounds me in Bengal, a material that feels ancestral, drawn straight from the earth.”

Her influences span across disciplines—cinema, literature, and visual arts. She cites Satyajit Ray’s silences, Mrinal Sen’s urgency, Ritwik Ghatak’s raw lyricism. She draws as much from Mahasweta Devi’s political ferocity as from Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness or Ismat Chughtai’s subversive humour. In the visual field, she feels kinship with Louise Bourgeois and Mithu Sen. Her works—faceless women, tongued goddesses, watercolours of women at rest—carry that eclecticism. “Texture and rhythm, for me, are never surface embellishments; they are the grammar through which women’s inner lives, their rituals and refusals, are given form.”

In her pieces, women often appear without faces, not as erasures but as acts of resistance. “By withholding the face, I resist the familiar iconography and the demand for identity, yet the form remains recognisably anchored in inherited rituals.” It is this tension—between honouring tradition and unmaking it—that marks her work. “What matters to me is not whether a form is preserved or shattered, but how it can be stretched until it discloses another truth.”

To make art in India today is to be caught inside contradictions. “We inherit extraordinary craft lineages, but we also witness their erasure in the name of speed and consumption. We live among images of goddesses, yet women’s bodies are still policed, silenced, and violated.” Her works emerge from this fracture. “It is impossible to be neutral here; even silence becomes a political act.”

Bose admits that “making” is both a reckoning and an attempt to imagine forms of endurance and grace. “In that sense, being an artist today is less about producing beauty, and more about producing ways of seeing that can hold our dissonant realities together, however provisionally.”

The artists do not paint neat pictures of a perfect world ahead. “The future is not a destination but a question. In my practice, I am less interested in predicting tomorrow than in unsettling the narratives we inherit today.” When asked what tomorrow looks like through her eyes, she offers no blueprint, only a possibility. “So perhaps the work is all three,” she reflects, “documenting what persists, disrupting what confines, and dreaming a space where other forms of seeing might become possible.”

MEENA KANDASAMY—Author

Meena Kandasamy has never written for applause. She writes to disturb. To her, the writer’s role is one of responsibility—to confront, to risk, to keep alive the ferocity of resistance in the face of erasure. A poet, novelist, translator, and activist, Kandasamy refuses to play it safe or dilute her themes for palatability. This refusal to perform, coupled with her fearless engagement with caste, gender, patriarchy, and power, is precisely what makes her one of the most urgent voices of tomorrow.

But Kandasamy resists being reduced to these themes alone. “When you write about caste, resistance, women’s oppression, class struggle—everyone views you like you are a card-carrying member of a militant communist or Dalit outfit. It is not a wrong image...but somehow it also carries an implicit message: ‘This work is not literature’.”

Her fight, then, is not just with oppressive systems, but also with the literary landscape that often dismisses political writing as too polemical, raw, and inconvenient. “More than a fair share of my time and effort does go into claiming that space of Literature with a capital L—by questioning narrative frameworks, by being experimental, by writing across genres and registers, by fighting the system, by claiming intellectual ground.”

Kandasamy is not in denial about the cultural shift of our times. “We will be deluding ourselves if we believe that the primary mode of consumption of information/material/ leisure today is not visual as opposed to textual,” she insists. And yet, she is convinced that “words will endure”. For her, what matters is depth. “Nine-tenths of the writing process is thinking—regardless of how culture is consumed. You need to do that deep work, you need to sit with ideas, you need to battle out your arguments, you need to find the passion to convince, to argue, to seduce. As long as we bring that depth, credibility, tenacity, fierceness and ferociousness to our work, the readers will keep coming.”

At the same time, she understands the grammar of the social media-influenced world very well (she does political communication as a day job and once even ran the Tamil Nadu campaign for a national party). But for her literary work, Kandasamy insists on an old-fashioned romance. “I want you to find a copy of my work as a LibGen PDF or in a dusty pavement bookshop. I want you to learn of me from a lover who read it at university. I’m very romantic that way! I refuse to market myself.”

The author insists that the future lies in literature. It is shaped in the silences we break, the stories we dare to tell, and the risks we take. “I see them as a dialectical process: Only the storyteller with the most arresting, captivating tale can disrupt a silence,” Kandasamy insists. For her, storytelling and disruption are inseparable. “Some silences in our society have stayed put for so long through complicity and violence, that even to speak about that silence you have to unearth a thousand stories.”

Her biggest transformation came with motherhood. “I used to think it would make me very tame or too soft—I realised that when you have brought life into this world and you are responsible for two young children, you want to not compromise at all. I do not want my kids to ask me tomorrow—‘Amma, why haven’t you written about Gaza, why were you silent in the face of a genocide?’ Children are uncompromising bullshit detectors, and I think my risk-taking impulses have become heightened because of them.”

What qualities should define the literary icon of tomorrow? For Kandasamy, the answer lies in courage. She admires Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian writer and revolutionary who was assassinated for his politics. “Writers have to be actively involved in the struggles of their time,” she insists. She also cites Sally Rooney, who has refused to let celebrity blunt her politics. “From a careerist point of view, so many people tend to become fence-sitters and cats on the wall—and the few who resist that temptation, often at grave danger to themselves, I salute them. They are the icons we need.”

Kandasamy believes that the boldest ideas in literature are coming from within the country. “I can say with a lot of certainty and a great deal of pride that it is in India that experimental ideas, pathbreaking ideas, difficult ideas are easy to find a patient ear,” she notes. In contrast, she is wary of the American literary landscape. “America is banal—you take the careers of brilliant writers, and then they move to America, and then the Great American Tragedy overtakes them. Their writing becomes insipid; they follow this bell curve or five-act structure so religiously that you can clock the climaxes, and the politics becomes frustratingly tame. I hope such a fate does not befall me, ever!”

GAYATHRI KRISHNAN—Singer

In Gayathri Krishnan’s world, the traditional and the contemporary coexist effortlessly. Born into a South Asian family with a deep connection to classical art forms, Krishnan began training in Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam when she was four. “They’ve become like a language that I think in,” she confesses. “Even if I don’t consciously add Carnatic elements to every song, my training gives my melodies and performances a unique character.”

Rather than feeling limited by her classical roots, Krishnan finds in them a source of constant inspiration. Her work doesn’t strive to be “fusion” in the conventional sense, but feels intimate and expansive, all at once. It’s a delicate balance—one that many young artists from diasporic backgrounds struggle to navigate. But for Krishnan, that negotiation is second nature. “My music honours my roots, but I don’t feel it boxes me in,” she explains. “My culture is a part of me, but it’s not the whole story. I just pour my soul into the music and try to make something that moves me, regardless of the genre.”

Krishnan says she always wanted to be on stage. “But my dream of becoming an artist came to me in pieces,” she reflects. Her earliest performances weren’t on grand stages but in the everyday school talent shows, and playful photo booth videos filmed on a family MacBook. “Expressing myself through music and performance has always felt natural,” she adds. “By high school, I knew I wanted to go to music school and fully commit to it.” That commitment wasn’t just to music as a craft, but to creation as a holistic process. She approaches every part of her artistry with care. “I love creating from scratch,” Krishnan reveals. “It’s what really drew me to this path.” While Krishnan’s sound is layered and textural, her lyrics form the emotional core of her work. “My lyrics are my anchor,” she shares. “They’re the part I spend the most time on.” Whether she’s exploring themes of self-growth, emotional healing, or introspection, her words feel lived-in and intentional. “I’ve heard from people that my songs are played in yoga classes, healing circles, or just as a way to start the day,” she says. “That’s so cool to me.”

Her writing often also serves as a mirror, reflecting her own journey of self-discovery and inviting others to do the same. If there’s a thread running through all of Krishnan’s work, it’s transformation. “I always listen back to my discography after a release,” she says. “To see how my sound has evolved, but also to see what’s stayed the same. And I think the common thread is introspection— that ability to reflect and grow.”

For Krishnan, the visibility she’s gaining now isn’t just personal—it’s political as well as powerful. “Growing up, I didn’t see much, if any, representation in magazines for South Asian musicians,” she reflects. Which is why being hailed as an icon of tomorrow feels like a possibility to her. “Maybe someone who looks like me, has a similar background, and is trying to pave their own path will come across this page and feel inspired and seen—and I think that’s amazing.”

But Krishnan refuses to play the identity card for the sake of it. She simply allows it to be part of the creative fabric. She is not interested in using tradition as a museum piece. She sees it as something alive—something that can stretch, shift, and reimagine itself. Her music folds the past into the present. And in her ability to hold the classical and the contemporary in the same breath, she makes a strong statement: The future doesn’t require abandoning the past—it requires understanding it deeply enough to play with it freely. “When you create from the heart, people can feel it,” she adds.

There’s something radical in how softly Krishnan imagines tomorrow. Her vision begins with self-awareness and her compass includes sincerity and introspection. “My music is a reminder that change happens in your soul and reflects out into the world,” she concludes.

AISHWARYA SRIDHAR—Wildlife Photographer

At 27, Aishwarya Sridhar is among India’s most compelling voices in wildlife photography and filmmaking today. She insists that photography must move beyond spectacle and towards storytelling that demands responsibility. “Wildlife storytelling today isn’t just about wonder,” she says. “It’s about awakening.”

Sridhar belongs to a generation that has inherited both technology and crisis in equal measure. She could, with her skill and access, easily pursue drama and spectacle—the snarling tiger, the hunt in motion, the thrill of proximity. Yet she resists the lure. “No image is worth causing stress or altering natural behaviour,” she insists. It is this sensitivity, this insistence on empathy over intrusion that defines Sridhar’s work and her vision for the future of Indian wildlife photography. “If you respect them, they sense it—and in return, they allow you into their world in ways that feel almost magical,” she explains.

She believes the photograph retains its primal power even in this day of endless scrolling. “A single image can pause the scroll, strike directly at the heart,” says Sridhar. Her images often hold up both beauty and urgency. This, she believes, is the future role of visual storytelling. “Wildlife imagery doesn’t just show us animals; it reflects back our own humanity,” she says. According to her, every image is an invitation: To see, empathise, and protect.

Sridhar has watched the Indian landscape change under the weight of climate disruption. Rivers dry up, grasslands grow brittle, sea turtles struggle against rising tides, flamingos gather in shrinking wetlands, and tigers navigate reduced habitats each year. These experiences have changed her gaze.

Today, her subjects are often headliners of climate change. “Every shot becomes a record of a vanishing truth, a fragment of memory we may not see again,” she reminds us. To Sridhar, this is not documentation for the sake of art, but testimony for the sake of history. Each frame is both a question and a warning: What will remain, and what will we lose, if nothing changes?

As one of the few women in a field still dominated by men, Sridhar recognises the unique perspective she brings. “Animals are not just subjects of scientific observation,” she says. “They are sentient beings with relationships, struggles, and emotions.” Her work traverses both advocacy and empathy. At times, her camera has been a weapon, exposing the destruction of Mumbai’s wetlands, documenting the cruelty of the global tortoise trade, or recording the exploitation of fragile ecosystems. At other times, her camera is a bridge of empathy. A tiger grooming her cubs, a leopard in a moment of repose—images that dismantle the predator stereotype and invite empathy. “We only protect what we feel connected to,” she points out. She aims to create that connection, which makes protection personal.

For decades, the wildlife narrative has been dominated by charismatic megafauna—the tiger, the elephant, the lion. For the future, Sridhar imagines a broader canvas. Tomorrow, she believes, must belong equally to the wetlands and grasslands, amphibians and reptiles, insects and interdependent systems that rarely make it into the frame. “If tomorrow’s Indian wildlife photography can become a voice for both the celebrated and the overlooked,” she says, “then we can truly change the way India—and the world—values its wild spaces.”

While she believes that technology will redefine the field with drones, camera traps, mirrorless systems, and AI-assisted tools, but cautions against unchecked use. “With innovation comes responsibility,” she points out. Through her production house, Bambee Studios, Sridhar is already experimenting with new forms of storytelling. She hopes to take Indian stories to global platforms, told through local perspectives rooted in South Asian traditions of narrative and empathy. “Ultimately, Bambee Studios is more than just a production house,” she adds. “It’s a platform for purposeful storytelling—stories that put nature and Earth at the centre, reminding us of what we stand to lose, and why it’s worth fighting for.” Her gaze—one in which science blends with sensitivity— shapes how she imagines the future of wildlife photography. Advocacy and empathy, she believes, must work together if conservation is to endure.

This article first appeared in the August-September 2025 issue of Harper's Bazaar India 

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