A01=Nigel Macfarlane
Author_Nigel Macfarlane
Category=WTL
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9781780602523
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 21 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Nigel Macfarlane has worked alongside artisan papermakers in India, Nepal and Bhutan for more than forty years. Paper Road tells the story of that journey and of his engagement not just with the place but with handmade paper and with an age-old craft. His account ranges from the contemporary to the distant past, from India s tropical south to the remotest valleys of the Himalayas. It contains characters whose stories reveal the region as it is rarely seen. While the book looks at the influence of such towering figures as Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo on Indian papermaking, at its heart are the many uncelebrated individuals Nigel comes across on his paper journey. We come to feel the passion of the professor in Pune who is determined to prove that papermaking originated in India not China and the irrepressible energy of Shiva Ram in Nepal, who starts a village cooperative to grow the lokta bark needed to make paper. And we meet the brilliant and mercurial Vasudevan with whom Nigel set up a paper factory in South India, a factory which now supplies handmade papers to artists on every continent.
Nigel Macfarlane was born in West Sussex in 1957 where he still lives. He made his first trip to India in 1976 via Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He returned to India in 1980 with his wife to be, artist, Barbara Macfarlane. Together they made contact with papermakers in Sanganer outside Jaipur, shipped some crates back to UK and sold papers to art students from the back of an old Peugeot 405. Slowly the business grew, adding papers from South India, Nepal and Bhutan.
