Modern and Contemporary Art of South Asia

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Scholarship on modern and contemporary art has emerged as a significant subfield within the larger field of the art of South Asia, especially since the 1990s. Arguing against earlier historicist readings that presented Europe as the center from which modernism was transmitted to the rest of the world, scholars have critically examined transcontinental artistic encounters and radical aesthetic negotiations in the colony and the post-colony. Moving away from a center-periphery model that inevitably marks modern art in South Asia as merely derivative of its Western counterpart, recent scholarship has presented a number of methodological alternatives appropriate for examining the aesthetic and political imperatives of modern and contemporary art in South Asia on its own terms. Much of this scholarship has paralleled, intersected with, and drawn on the theoretical frames made available by postcolonial and subaltern studies. Thus, although a relatively new arena of inquiry, the methodological sophistication and academic rigor demonstrated by recent scholarship has very rapidly transformed the study of modern and contemporary South Asian art into a subfield with its own vocabulary and lexicon. While significant overlaps exist, the key concerns for the study of modernism, however, differ constitutively from the questions that are central to the study of contemporary art practices. Negotiations between traditional forms and modernist aesthetics, intersections between internationalism and national identity, and questions of authenticity and derivativeness have informed scholarly engagements with the art of the late 19th century and the 20th century. In contrast, globalization and its attendant cultural transformations, accelerated migration and the increased global mobility of both artworks and artists, the rise of new media and the reconfiguration of older aesthetic imperatives, and, in recent years, an alteration in the role of the artist and the audience have emerged as organizing themes for studies on contemporary art. Despite this divergence, the study of modern and contemporary South Asian art, nevertheless, shares a set of theoretical and methodological predilections that give this subfield conceptual coherence. Many of the entries in this article demonstrate that these predilections result from a broader interest in questions of anti-imperialism, marginality, difference, and otherness as articulated through visual representation. This perhaps is inevitable given that the genealogy of this new subfield can be traced to the anticolonial tenor of early-20th-century scholarship on modern South Asian art, citations for which have also been included in this bibliography.