20th century Indian art by Parth Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, Rakhee Balaram

This edited excerpt from the introduction to the definitive book on modern and contemporary Indian art explains its focus while looking at the geopolitics of modernism in the 20th century

It would be audacious, to say the least, to present 20th-century Indian art as a coherent and self-contained subject. Would it even be possible, given that the subcontinent represents so many different elements, while the definition of Indian art itself suffers from the competing claims of a myriad of its stakeholders? Geopolitics intervened in the middle of the century, bifurcating the old subcontinent into two new states in 1947: the new Indian Republic and the Islamic Republic of West and East Pakistan (later to be renamed Bangladesh). Art and artists followed the course of political Partition, as two new modernist traditions rose like the phoenix from the ashes of communal genocide. The end of the century heralded further momentous changes, with the free market forcing its way into the previously hermetic world of art and artists, offering vast opportunities as well as much scope for the adventurous. Underlying all this is the incipient globalization of India that had commenced in the early part of the century with colonial expansion but exploded with unprecedented intensity with the rise of information technology at the century’s close.

Very Hungry God, 2006; Subodh Gupta (20th Century Indian Art)

20th Century Indian Art tells the story of Indian artists’ responses to artistic modernity as part of a global phenomenon. By artistic modernity in India, we mean the introduction of western academic art and related institutions during the colonial era. The early decades of the 1920s introduced a more specific aspect of artistic modernity: modernism, followed by its successors, late- and post-modernism. Worldwide, modernism was a revolutionary movement or expression that challenged traditional forms. Originating in the West, it gradually spread to the rest of the world. Admittedly, modernism had its origins in the West, but what makes the story compelling are the particular responses of Indian artists to this radical global language, and the historical nature of their particular experiences…

The 20th century could be called the Euro-American century. The Exposition Universelle held in Paris in the year 1900 seemed to confirm, if confirmation were needed, the triumph of western civilization. The century that followed marked the passage of western industrial-colonial capitalism from its meridian, through two intervening World Wars, to its decline, as colonised nations increasingly challenged Euro-American supremacy. Indeed, the so-called triumph of western civilization ended within a year of the century’s end. The events of 9/11 shattered the myth of US invincibility, ending the rarely challenged primacy of the West.

European colonial expansion has been associated with technological, transport and communication revolutions, as well as mass population movements. Within this broad canvas of global history, India’s transformation was effected primarily through interactions with the British Raj. Founded in 1757, the modest English colony was transformed into a great empire by the mid-19th century; unprecedented material prosperity offered by the Industrial Revolution enabled Britain to spread its sphere of influence over a large part of the globe. And yet such European confidence was short-lived. It received a hard knock in 1905 with Japan’s defeat of Russia, which compromised western invincibility, offering inspiration to Indians and other colonised peoples. The language of nationhood, a legacy of the European Enlightenment, was refashioned by the Indian intelligentsia in their struggle against the Empire. The period up to 1947, the year of India’s independence, may be aptly described as the dialectic between colonialism and nationalism, a dialectic that gave rise to debates on the nature of art and Indian identity, which continue today…

The narrative presented in this volume traces the significant features of the artistic meeting of West and Non-West as much as forging new constellations and realignments with other parts of the globe…

20th Century Indian Art explores these new developments right through to the end of the century and beyond. If the periodisation of the modern and the contemporary in art is fraught in the West, so too is this the case in India. A range of modern expressions can be observed from the late 19th century, with Ravi Varma, to 1900, where this volume begins: the first decade of the century saw the emergence of the Bengal School of Painting, the first nationalist art movement in India, followed in 1919 by Rabindranath Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, and in 1922 by the exhibition of the Bauhaus artists in Calcutta; the 1920s to 1930s were dominated by Amrita Sher-Gil, Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy, leading to the rise of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947. If the modern is not easily periodised, the contemporary is even harder to pinpoint. While critiques of modernism can be traced to the early 1970s, it is really in the post-Emergency period, through the 1980s and 1990s, that we see a conscious rupture with the modernist paradigm – a rupture that continues into the 2000s. This phase cannot be neatly encapsulated within a precise time frame, and its ramifications have not yet finished unfolding. This volume takes account of that.

This introduction gives us a chance to ask some general questions about the subject of 20th-century Indian art, and to set it against a wider global framework… In the rapidly changing world of the 20th century, it is not realistic to assume that Indian art remained the same. Indian modernism is the local expression of a global phenomenon; how do we read this complex art movement from the periphery, which partakes of global modernity and yet creates its own unique cultural expression? This is true not only for India but also for many South Asian nations, including Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. What further links these South Asian modernisms with Indian modernism is not just the shared colonial experience through which modernization made an entry, but the manner in which these nations’ modernisms have received scant attention in 20th-century art historiography on the grounds that they were derivative of Euro-American models and therefore to be considered inauthentic.

Historically speaking, modernist art has developed worldwide by ‘translating’ the grammar of modernism, which was first formulated in Europe, to reflect local needs and priorities. Yet this plural interpretation of modernism has been complicated by the history of colonialism which positions cultural borrowing as a sign of inferiority. To turn to the practice of art history itself, the discipline’s bedrock has been the notion of ‘influence’, a reflection of a linear or teleological interpretation of artistic development, inspired by Giorgio Vasari. His master narrative for Renaissance art, based on the conquest of visual representation, defined Florence, Rome and Venice as centres of innovation, categorizing other regions as sites of delayed growth and imitation.

Thus the terms centre and periphery were not a matter of geography, but of art history. Vasari’s formulation received strong endorsement during the colonial era, when the centre–periphery relationship became one of power and authority, of inclusions and exclusions. The diffusion of modernism worldwide was viewed as the influence of the European centres of innovation on the peripheries, the sites of delayed growth.

The study of other modernisms thus became beset with the problem of different and even contradictory time frames or clashing temporalities.

The aim of constructing a comparative or global history of modernism is made especially difficult by the non-synchronous nature of temporal developments. To put it simply, the shortcoming of such linear art history is that it does not allow for multiple developments, or in other words, multiple temporalities. Recently, awareness of the enormous diversity of global art forms and practices and the narrow focus of canonical art histories has given rise to much anxiety among art historians. And yet in actual fact, these heterogeneous developments have not made any significant inroads into the ‘closed’ discourse of modernism. It is against this background that 20th Century Indian Art aims to offer competing ways of studying artistic traditions that will not seem entirely beholden to the European discourse of modernism. In establishing these alternate approaches to the study of Indian art history, three key considerations must be taken into account. First, even though the concept of ‘influence’ has been a handy tool for art historians, it does not tell us much. Michael Baxandall describes artistic influence as appearing to reverse the active/passive relationship, ‘which the historical actor experiences, and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account.’ We should bear in mind the fact that when an artist makes a selection from a range of sources, that process involves making conscious choices. Secondly, art history tends to present interactions between the West and Non-West as passive. Instead of tracing the particular modernist source of an Indian artist, however, we may like to establish what particular context prompted the artist’s conscious choices. Thirdly, less obvious but no less significant, the process of cultural transmissions between the West and the rest of the world has always been reciprocal, it is simply that the contributions of regions beyond the West have hitherto been ignored.

How can we study cultural exchanges during the period of European expansion when the power imbalance and asymmetrical relationship between centre and periphery, between the colonizer and the colonized, was a fact of history? A notion that enjoys currency in recent debates on globalization is cosmopolitanism…

Accepting the limitations of cosmopolitan values in the abstract, we may consider another expression of cosmopolitanism that is not directly reliant on power relations. The idea of ‘virtual cosmopolitanism’, a mode of communication which relies on an exchange of information that depends not on physical mobility but rather on the diffusion of print capitalism across the world, has been proposed elsewhere in this volume. This process of virtual communication culminates in the 1990s in a veritable explosion of information through the World Wide Web (www.), with far-reaching consequences for art. In short, we may regard the 20th century as the virtual century for global communication.

The long 20th century may be divided into two broad periods in western art history: (i) from the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 to the end of World War II in 1945; and (ii) from c. 1945 until the end of the century. In India, however, the century may arguably be divided into three. The year of Indian independence in 1947 represents the halfway mark between colonial and postcolonial periods, but this narrative is disrupted in the 1990s by the onset of economic liberalization and globalization, which led to a radical reconsideration of the East/West binary logic. Accordingly, the volume is divided into three central sections, following the three broad periods of 20th-century Indian art: Part I: c. 1900–1947... Part II: c. 1947–c. 1990s... Part III: c. 1990s–c. 2000s…

The art of the 20th and 21st centuries unfolds across multiple registers. What makes this moment complex is the coincidence of the arrival of the technological with the surfacing of social and political crises in the public domain: the very moment of the changes ushered in by globalization is also the time of violent conflicts between different communities. This gave rise to a form of cultural politics that added new complexities to the art practice of this period and resulted in the NGO-ization of art while market fervour underscored the proliferation of auction houses, art fairs, private art galleries and museums. This period also coincided with the state art institutions receding in importance, allowing for a new geography of art to emerge.

The social crisis, which took the form of communal conflicts and caste/gender discrimination that exposed the fault lines of the ‘national modern’, also became a productive site for experiments, as, for example, in new media. Technology allowed artists to respond to these social failures and reawaken an imaginary that moved beyond the confines of a nation. In a sense, a meaningful response to the crisis in the public sphere could only be made via new languages and genres that could accommodate ruptures and contradictions. During this period, installation, for example, as much as performance art, proliferated on experimental platforms. Moreover, technologically driven collectives were formed in metropolitan cities, working with and responding to documentary videos, surveillance camera footage and the global circulation of commodities, capital and migration of peoples.

The rural and urban divide is among the many contradictions that have remained part of India’s uneven modernity. Artists took a conscious decision to collaborate with subaltern communities both in rural areas and urban slums. This resulted in innovative forms of art that often privileged artisanal and craft based practices and questioned the nature of the collaboration between artists and artisans through class and caste asymmetries.

This has been explored in new considerations of Dalit art, a category that has gained visibility in recent times. Meanwhile, the issue of folk and tribal arts, deeply rooted in the nationalist imaginary, has broken free from these bounds to be recognized as an autonomous form of contemporary practice…

Admittedly, one cannot do full justice to such a large subject... we decided to make the story multi-vocal, with all the dialectics of conflicting, contesting and contrasting styles and approaches represented by a wide range of authors that we hope will truly reflect the multiple and diverging narratives that are the story of 20th-century Indian art…