Art for a modern India, 1947-1980

About this book

"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 mdoernist 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.