ABSTRACT
I here address a single text by Ramchandra Gandhi: Svarāj: A Journey with Tyeb Mehta’s Shantiniketan Triptych (2002). is remarkable book is devoted entirely to a careful, creative and sustained analysis of a single work of art by the Mumbai artist Tyeb Mehta (19252009). Here I will not consider the correctness or even the plausibility of Gandhi’s interpretation of Mehta’s Shantiniketan Triptych (1985); that is the provinance of the art critic, or art historian. As a philosopher and hence as Gandhi’s disciplinary comrade, I am much more interested in what Gandhi’s hermeneutical exegesis of this single work of art might reveal more broadly about his attitudes toward art and aesthetic theory, his metaphysical commitments, and, significantly, the role that great art can play in a culture. is is of particular interest to Gandhi with respect to the culture of India, as she struggles, post-Independence, to find a way to navigate the seemingly intractable dichotomy of religious tradition on the one hand and secular modernity on the other.
