Following India’s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an “Indianness” representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India’s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism’s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West’s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernism—in painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, film, and photography—in the years between independence and 1980, by which time the Indian art scene had changed significantly and postcolonial discourse had begun to complicate mid-century ideas of nationalism. Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design, Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of “authentic India” in his acclaimed Apu Trilogy, how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India’s past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of India’s modern visual culture.

India is changing at a rapid pace as it continues to move from its colonial past to its globalised future. This Companion offers a framework for understanding that change, and how modern cultural forms have emerged out of very different histories and traditions. The book provides accounts of literature, theatre, film, modern and popular art, music, television and food; it also explores in detail social divisions, customs, communications and daily life. In a series of engaging, erudite and occasionally moving essays the contributors, drawn from a variety of disciplines, examine not merely what constitutes modern Indian culture, but just how wide-ranging are the cultures that persist in the regions of India. This volume will help the reader understand the continuities and fissures within Indian culture and some of the conflicts arising from them. Throughout, what comes to the fore is the extraordinary richness and diversity of modern Indian culture.

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture presents a collection of 26 original essays from top scholars in the field that explore and critically examine various aspects of Asian art and architectural history. Brings together top international scholars of Asian art and architecture Represents the current state of the field while highlighting the wide range of scholarly approaches to Asian Art Features work on Korea and Southeast Asia, two regions often overlooked in a field that is often defined as India-China-Japan Explores the influences on Asian art of global and colonial interactions and of the diasporic communities in the US and UK Showcases a wide range of topics including imperial commissions, ancient tombs, gardens, monastic spaces, performances, and pilgrimages.

To commemorate the centenary of artist Sukumar Bose (1912–1986), this book attempts to take an incisive look at the artist, his works and the context of his art production in South and Southeast Asia. Bose’s art varied from the traditional to the decorative and ornamental, with a hint of the Oriental flavour. His work demonstrated traces of the Bengal School styles of Abanindranath Tagore and AR Chugtai. Be it figurative, landscape or abstract, Bose’s art synthesized the decorative elements of Indo-Persian miniatures with Chinese and Japanese techniques. In this context, his vision and passion were inspired by traditional art forms, including Ajanta, Rajput and Mughal miniatures. His incisive observations of life, people and cultures, during colonial and postcolonial India and his later sojourn into Southeast Asia, emerge as both a contested yet seamless narrative of history and hope in his art. This book is the first of its kind to document and give a critical overview of Sukumar Bose.

This volume brings together a range of essays that offer a new perspective on the dynamic history of the museum as a cultural institution in South Asia. It traces the museum from its origin as a tool of colonialism and adoption as a vehicle of sovereignty in the nationalist period, till its role in the present, as it reflects the fissured identities of the post-colonial period.

This volume challenges existing notions of what is “Indian,” “Southeast Asian,” and/or “South Asian” art to help educators present a more contextualized understanding of art in a globalized world. In doing so, it (re)examines how South or Southeast Asian art is being made, exhibited, circulated and experienced in new ways in the United States or in regions under its cultural hegemony. The essays presented in this book examine both historical and contemporary transformations or lived experiences of monuments and regional styles (sites) from South or Southeast Asian art in art making, subsequent usage, and exhibition-making under the rubric of “Indian,” “South Asian,” “or “Southeast Asian” Art.

From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter’s wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet’s wooden hooves—these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America’s image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists. Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.