ABSTRACT
This essay is an attempt to trace 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 (both Left and Right Wing) by arguing that the history of Modernism (and the experience of modernity) in Indian art is primarily defined through the rubric of the elite practitioners’ angst in relation to the hegemony of Western dominance. Due to this overarching canonical framework, the struggle of the subalterns in India to register their presence in mainstream cultural practices faces multiple hazards. Even after attaining a political identity such as Dalit and their recent assertion and distinguishable presence in the realm of political power, their struggles to participate in cultural practices have not been addressed adequately. Indeed, their cultures have, more often than not, been accused of ‘contamination’, and are regulated by the upper caste intelligentsia. This is most evident when many of the attempts made by the practitioners of subaltern art to engage with the larger cultural field are accused of pop cultural betrayal through the regulation/ attribution of their practices at the level of authentic folk/tribal culture. In this historical context, I would argue that the subalterns in India have to face a dual challenge: to counteract the hegemonic and overarching discourse of upper caste national bourgeois intelligentsia on the one hand and global imperialism on the other (not to mention that, very often, their identities are indistinguishable).
