Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980
Modernism has traditionally relied on peripheral, colonial spaces to position the West at the vanguard of progress, aesthetic and otherwise. How, then, can India—which was more often seen as a source of primitivist imagery to use in modernist art than as a source of modernist art itself—be modern and produce modernist culture? It is this paradox that Rebecca Brown investigates in ART FOR A MODERN INDIA. By examining sculpture, architecture, narrative, painting, film, and movies produced between 1947 and 1980, she studies how Indian artists negotiated being national, postcolonial, traditional, and progressive in the post-independence era. Brown argues against a conception of modernity that would make “modern India” a misnomer, instead building her argument from the insight that modernity is not as monolithic and uniform as it has often been understood. This starting point allows her to examine India’s artistic productions for the ways in which they “reveal modernity’s cracks” even while they are themselves modernist.
Brown focuses each thematic chapter on a few cultural productions to illustrate how art and artists engage with the central terms of this paradox. In a chapter on “Authenticity,” for instance, she considers how the visual trope of the guru under the tree changes in works of art produced before and after independence. The next chapter, “The Icon,” explores a related idea of how post-independence artists reworked traditional iconography to reflect on India’s new national identity. The technological aspect of modernism, including advances in photography and architecture as well as broader interest in the geometries and sciences of art, serves as the focus of Brown’s chapter on how modernization in India affected the making of modern Indian art.
