Chromophobic Activism

Abstract

This article examines the contested agency of colour in twentieth-century South Asian nationalism and its afterlife in the postcolony. Questioning the entanglements of chromophobia and chromophilia it focuses on colour's volatile status as it veered between poetic and political acceptance by Abanindranath Tagore, Gandhi's seeming abhorrence of any colour but white, Rabindranath Tagore's claim to colour blindness and recourse to inky cosmopolitanism and Nandalal Bose's experiments with muralism in relation to art writing. Tainted by its association with colonial Britain and subaltern exploitation could colour be redeemed? Experimenting with local materials, artists began to devise alternative, sometimes radical chromatics that literally invoked the power of the earth. Post-Independence India's most self-proclaimed colourist – disaffected Marxist Jagdish Swaminathan – sought to provincialize Western ideas of abstraction in his mystical, chromophilic practice. Seen through the lens of subaltern labour and contemporary artistic practice, colour has a distracting, coercive materialism that must be accounted for.