International Departures: Art in India after Independence
Devika Singh, Reaktion Books, £30

INFLUENCED by Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking concept of the nation as an “imagined community,” the art historian Partha Mitter conceived of a “virtual cosmopolis” to explain the relationship between Indian art and Western modernism.

This idea offered a tool for cross-cultural analysis of in terms of transnational transactions which did not depend on crude anti-colonial narratives based upon an asymmetrical relationship between the so-called centre and periphery. 

Mitter envisaged an “imagined global community” of artistic exchanges creating the “hybrid multipolar universe of modernity” that explained both the reception of Western ideas in colonised nations, but also a similar flow from East to West.

This influential notion is at the heart of Devika Singh’s eloquent challenge to perspectives on modernism that are still distorted by Western scholarship and markets. 

Her book examines international connections that shaped Indian art between independence in 1947 and the 1980s, arguing that the latter cannot be analysed as a separate, grand national narrative, but must be seen as entangled with transnational trends. In so doing it seeks to unpick the complex mutual relationships between traditions on the receiving end of colonialism and within the hegemonic centre itself.

This an important ambition because the history of modernism is still shaped by debates in Europe and North America, with the result that Indian art continues to be marginalised in scholarship — a persistent legacy of colonialism.

At the same time, mainstream histories of Indian art tend to sideline the work of foreigners influential in or influenced by India, especially under the explicit nation-building and modernising agenda of the early post-independence era.

While the effort to “decentre” modernism in this way is not new and themes of dialogue and exchange have come together across a range of subjects in a post-colonial paradigm shift, Singh offers novel material for analysis. Her study does not seek to juxtapose work from outside India with that from within in an effort to demonstrate equivalence, but to contribute to a more tectonic shift in the field by revising the terms of both modernism itself and Indian art history.

Internationalism and anti-Western sentiment were not necessarily in contradiction, the author argues, but complementary. Singh writes: “Even the most committed anti-colonial nationalists, from MN Roy to Rabindranath Tagore, often articulated their thoughts and struggle within international networks and sought inspiration and support from other like-minded intellectuals and politicians.”

The author examines how independence emancipated some Indian thinkers from the burden of nationalist introspection, fostering a new understanding of internationalism that enabled greater foreign interaction.

Leading 20th century figures in Western art and architecture were welcomed on the invitation of Indian patrons, and this left an enduring stamp on their work. The US artist Isamu Noguchi was impressed by the classical and early modern art he encountered. His friend Buckminster Fuller, a visionary architect, was drawn magnetically to Indian utopian and scientific ideas. The Italian film director Roberto Rossellini was intrigued by the country’s divergent realities. Le Corbusier’s iconic architectural creations in Chandigarh made an ambitious statement about India’s future.

Yet in all these cases, Singh shows, the interactions of Western artists with their Indian hosts were dynamic, mutually affirming, and often collaborative.

The same was true for Indian artists abroad whose sojourns in London, Paris and New York were not the “colonial pilgrimage” as some scholars have characterised them, but exercises in empowerment as the voices of the transnational left and Third Worldism grew louder.

The liberating experiences of these cities and exposure to political mobilisation for artists such as Francis Newton Souza, Vivan Sundaram and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh posed questions of identity and enabled them to repurpose perspectives in subversive ways.

Yet despite their profound impact, all these exchanges did not ultimately change the centralised, hegemonic bias of the art world. Singh notes: “The primary sites of consumption and legitimisation, as opposed to creation, remained disproportionately located in Europe and North America.”

While since the 1990s Indian contemporary artists have been increasingly included in the global exhibition circuit, the attention bestowed on their work has moved the focus away from Indian modernism, a legacy that scholars such as Singh are determined to revisit.

Doing so poses an explosive question for those determined to rewrite the narrative of 20th century modernism, and she asks what happens to the canonical artists we have put on a pedestal in Western narratives within a transnational art history that has shed its Euro-American framework?