The London Jungle Book by award-winning Indian artist Bhajju Shyam is an absolute masterpiece – an Alice in Wonderland for the modern world and an invitation to look at the mundane details of our daily lives with new eyes of wonder.

In 1988, at the age of sixteen, young Bhajju left his small village in the forests of Central India and went to the city of Bhopal looking for work. He got a job as a night watchman, until his uncle — who happened to be the prominent Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam — offered him an apprenticeship. Initially, the work was rather menial — filling out patterns in his uncle’s large canvases — but the boy’s talent quickly became apparent. With his uncle’s encouragement to strike out on his own, Shyam spent the next ten years honing his craft and slowly began to gain recognition. His work was eventually included in a significant 1998 exhibition of indigenous art in Paris.

A few years later, he received an invitation from the acclaimed London-based Indian designer Rajeev Sethi, who had come to know and love Shyam’s work, to travel to the European metropolis and paint murals on the walls of an upscale Indian restaurant... Shyam took the opportunity. As he observes in the book, with his signature penchant for the intersection of the humble and the profound, “An artist goes where there is work." The two months he spent in London became his real-life version of Alice in Wonderland as he found himself in a world that made little sense compared to his familiar reality, yet enchanted him with its wonders and invited him to mediate ... between the ideal and the real.

Peek inside this treasure here.