Living Art

In its attempt to reclaim the past, early modern Indian art was informed by a marked paradox. This past, as Daniel Herwitz points out, was at once the product of colonialism's “museumising” imagination that petrified Indian cultural moments for the western gaze and, yet, a past “living on each and every street corner.” ¹ During its history, modern Indian art has offered various ways of “working through” ² this contradiction, including a “quest for indigenism,” ³ a westernization, whether strategically selective, revisionist, or wholesale, and a modifying eclecticism. ⁴ In the process, artistic practices and historiographies have uncovered and drawn on pre-colonial, non-hierarchical interactions between Indian and western painting. ⁵ Metropolitan artistic modernism, seen as based in its provocative reflexivity, on a distancing from realism, has been revealed as “provincial” or a “local rebellion,” incapable of the same degree of provocation outside the West, in cultures where realism was rarely dominant. ⁶ While Ella Shohat and Robert Stam posit non-western modernisms as “alternative” to and challenging the verities of their western counterpart, ⁷ Benita Parry warns that articulations of “alternative modernisms” imply “the existence of an ‘original’ that was formulated in Europe, followed by a series of ‘copies’ or ‘lesser inflections’” and points out colonialism's uneven temporalities manifest in the export of modern technology combined with a fostering of social backwardness that have positioned the art of what she terms “peripheral modernisms” as simultaneously modern and traditional, ahead of and behind the times. ⁸