ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the casteist undercurrents of Modernism in Indian art through the critiques proposed by the works of one of the most prominent Dalit artists of contemporary India: Savi Sawarkar. It proposes a critique of the nationalist historiography by arguing that the history of Modernism in Indian art is defined through the rubric of the elite practitioners' angst in relation to the hegemony of Western dominance. Sawarkar's quest for a new linguistic idiom is an outcome of the recognition that most of the existing linguistic options are inadequate to communicate the expressive needs of an oppressed yet multivocal/multicentered community and culture. One of the semantic components central to Sawarkar's critical artistic positioning is the usage of the language of excess, which problematizes the dominant notions of beauty, harmony, aesthetics and skill in art. Sawarkar's aesthetic and artistic initiatives have to be located as a counterinstitutional mode of cultural production, which rediscovers the possibilities of a newer cultural politics.
