Chaud Huri 2010

Modernisms in India
Oxford Handbooks Online

Modernisms in India
Supriya Chaudhuri
The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms
Edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker
Print Publication Date: Dec 2010

Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards, Literary Studies - Postcolonial
Literature
Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199545445.013.0053
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the history of modernism in India. It suggests that though the
distinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly
complicated in the case of India, they remain crucial to a historical understanding of the
‘modern’ in all its senses. The article argues that the characteristic feature of Indian
modernism in India is that it is manifestly social and historical rather than a hypostasis of
the new as in the West. It contends that modernisms in India are deeply implicated in the
construction of a secular national identity at home in the world, and in this respect
answer a historical need to fashion a style for the modern as it is locally experienced.
Keywords: modernism, India, modernization, modernity, national identity, hypostasis
THE distinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly

complicated in the case of India, but remain crucial to a historical understanding of the
‘modern’ in all its senses. Modernity, as a social and intellectual project, and
modernization, as its means, are associated with the influence in India of Europe and of
Enlightenment rationality from the eighteenth century onwards. Modernism, as an
aesthetic, is far more limited in period and scope. Nevertheless, just as recent cultural
criticism has proposed the existence of ‘alternative modernities’1 not native to the West,
so too our attention has been drawn to ‘alternative modernisms’, or ‘modernisms at
large’.2 The question of periodicity, as of location, is complicated by the historical fact
that modernism as an aesthetic was simultaneously restricted and elitist, and
international and democratic. In India, moreover, the impact of the style of European
modernism was intensified by the belief that its internationalism suited the experience of
modernity and would further the modernization of public spaces and cultural life. A
politics of modernism, setting this perception against a counter‐argument that saw
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Modernisms in India
modernism as an essentially Western mode opposed both to tradition and to national or

local experience, emerges in the early twentieth century.
Raymond Williams's phrase ‘the politics of modernism’ may remind us of another

(p. 943)
problem that he posed and left to some extent unanswered: ‘When was modernism?’3 This
is a question that has been asked with particular urgency by Indian cultural critics such
as Geeta Kapur, and, interestingly, Kapur's answer appears to involve a sense of the
modern as a state of freedom: that is, as a set of social and historical conditions. Indeed
Kapur argues that ‘The characteristic feature of Indian modernism, as perhaps of many
postcolonial modernisms, is that it is manifestly social and historical’—rather than being
posited, as in the West, as ‘a hypostasis of the new’.4 Whether or not one agrees with
Kapur's description of Indian modernism, Homi Bhabha's notion of the ‘time‐lagged
colonial moment’5 within modernity might serve to furnish the argument that modernism
too was a late phenomenon in India. In fact, however, this is not the case. Both in respect
of the influence of European modernist ideas, and in the development of indigenous
modernisms, India offers striking evidence of the emergence of a new aesthetic in the
first decades of the twentieth century. Partly this is because of the cultural work carried
out by a highly educated bourgeoisie responsive to the latest international developments;
but more importantly, it is rooted in political and social circumstances, in the disputes
over a ‘national’ style, and in the struggle to find an authentic modern identity. As Partha
Mitter urges in his account of the ‘triumph of modernism’ in Indian art, the study of
influence, so integral to the discipline of art history, is not finally useful in understanding
the complex mechanics of this process.6 It is true that, by the end of the nineteenth
century, the growth of a cosmopolitan culture, distributed over great urban centres
located all across the globe (a ‘virtual cosmopolis’, in Mitter's phrase7), is conducive to
the transmission of ideas: but at the same time the pressure of historical circumstances
and political imperatives, as well the creative energy of the local, tends to disrupt and
reconfigure patterns of ‘reception’.
Art
On 7 May 1921 the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore celebrated his sixtieth birthday in
Weimar, and used the opportunity to visit the Bauhaus, where he found the (p. 944)
teaching practices of Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, and Georg Muche akin to his own
radical educational experiments at Vishva Bharati, the university he had founded at
Shantiniketan in Bengal. Two years previously, he had appointed Stella Kramrisch to
teach art history there; now, at Tagore's suggestion, a selection of Bauhaus works was
shipped to Calcutta to be exhibited, in December 1922, at the fourteenth annual
exhibition of the Society of Oriental Art, patronized by the Tagores. Among the exhibits
(which mysteriously never returned to Europe) were two watercolours by Wassily
Kandinsky and nine by Paul Klee, as well as works by Johannes Itten, Georg Muche,
Lyonel Feininger, Gerhardt Marcks, Lothar Schreyer, Sophie Körner, and Margit Tery‐
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Adler, a single painting by the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, and reproductions of

contemporary art from Europe. The exhibition was well received, but, as Mitter shows,
what was perhaps even more important about it was that a number of Cubist paintings by
Rabindranath's nephew Gaganendranath Tagore and folk‐primitivist works by his niece
Sunayani Devi were also shown on this occasion. In earlier decades the example and
influence of the Tagores, particularly of Rabindranath's other nephew Abanindranath, had
been linked to the Orientalism of the Bengal School of art, which drew upon Mughal and
Rajput miniatures and Japanese brush‐and‐ink techniques to create an anti‐colonial, ‘pan‐
Asian’ style of narrative painting welcomed by bourgeois nationalists. By 1922, however,
Rabindranath himself appears to have moved away from the Orientalism of the Bengal
School, and to be seeking a new direction for his art school at Shantiniketan. Even before
the December exhibition, the sociologist Benoy Sarkar, exposed to modernist art in Berlin
and Paris, had initiated a heated dispute in the Orientalist journal Rupam by urging
India's artists to adopt the international avant‐garde's ‘aesthetics of autonomy’ in
accordance with their quest for political autonomy.8 In fact much of the cultural debate is
carried out in journals such as Rupam, Modern Review, Prabasi, and Bharati. Sarkar and
Kramrisch wrote approvingly of Gaganendranath's Cubist fantasies, and Kramrisch's
careful critical evaluation of Sunayani's work is still relevant.9
If we admit the happy coincidence of ‘the modernist moment’ with the year 1922, in India
as in Europe, it must be noted that it is not the influence of the Bauhaus, but the
experiments of Gaganendranath and Sunayani, that initiate a modernist idiom.10
Gaganendranath's Cubism, harshly dismissed as trivial by the colonial British critic W. G.
Archer,11 must be seen as a radical liberation of narrative art from naturalistic
representation, substituting a dynamic, fluid, mysterious play of light and shade and
colour for the relatively static geometry of Analytical Cubism. The titles of his works
(p. 945) (The Poet on the Island of the Birds, The House of Mystery, Aladdin and His
Lamp, The City of Dvaraka, The Seven Brothers Champa) suggest an imagination steeped
in literature and myth, and his experiments with reflected and broken light create a
haunting, fantastic world beyond naturalism, even leading towards Expressionism, as the
avant‐garde critic Max Osborn suggested in reviewing one of his paintings at an
exhibition of modern Indian art in Berlin in 1923.12 But his Cubism had no immediate
following, while his sister Sunayani's adoption of subjects and styles from folk art appears
to have been the first step in the constitution of an Indian primitivism.
Mitter associates the emergence of primitivism in Indian art with a number of social and
political phenomena: ‘the transformation of elite nationalism into a popular movement led
by Mahatma Gandhi’, the move towards ruralism and environmentalism in the social
philosophies of both Gandhi and Tagore, and the admiration of nationalists, including
painters of the Bengal School, for the bold simplicity of folk painting, notably that of the
Kalighat patuas, popular artists associated with the area around the Kali Temple in
Calcutta.13 There is a difference, however, between these responses to indigenous
traditions and the excitement of Picasso, Matisse, or Brancusi over African sculpture,
tribal masks, and other non‐Western art. Twentieth‐century artistic primitivism sought to
interrogate both the academic Naturalism of the past and a materialist urban culture.
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While this might take the form of Cubist admiration for the radical visions of tribal art,
Abstract Expressionists such as Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian also drew upon
Eastern spiritual traditions in going beyond representation (Malevich was deeply moved
by the Indian religious reformer Swami Vivekananda's Chicago address in 1893).
Disentangling the Orientalist strands in these elements of Western modernism is a
difficult task, but they do not exactly coincide with the influences upon Indian artists in
the 1920s and 1930s. As Geeta Kapur shows, the discourse of modernism in Indian art is
marked by a constant dialectic of the national and the modern; the well‐documented
‘turn’ towards folk art, the representation of village life, and the environmental
primitivism of the period are collectively a form of nationalism at odds, in some ways,
with the internationalism of modernist aesthetics. At the same time, there are interesting
congruities with modernisms elsewhere, and, among artists themselves, both an
awareness of the European avant‐garde and a sense of the need to resist, not just its
implicitly imperialist cultural norms, but also the totalizing ideology of bourgeois
nationalism. This might sometimes be achieved by a recourse to formalism, while at other
times the value of local ‘tradition’ might be asserted. Kapur argues, therefore, that
modernism has no firm canonical position in India. It has a paradoxical value

involving a continual double‐take. Sometimes it serves to make indigenist issues
and motifs progressive; (p. 946) sometimes it seems to subvert … tradition. Thus
paradoxically placed, modernism in India does not invite the same kind of
periodization as in the west.'14
This is a valuable reminder, but it is worth recording some features of a temporal history.
Sunayani Devi's use of folk motifs and styles arises partly from her exposure to them as a
woman in the inner quarters of the family house, though she absorbed an eclectic mix of
influences, from Ravi Varma to the Bengal School. At the same time, she reproduces the
aristocratic–folk paradigm of her uncle Rabindranath Tagore's experiments at
Shantiniketan. But her distinctive personal vision influenced the work of Jamini Roy, the
most notable painter in the next decades to use the folk idiom for modernist expression.
Roy's primitivism involved a deliberate formal simplification, accomplished by an
extraordinary mastery of line. Drawing on the Kalighat pat style (a distinctively urban
adaptation of the narrative scroll‐painting of rural Bengal) and on the folk art of the
Bankura region, Roy rooted his art in local artisanal practice, making many copies, selling
his work cheaply, and deliberately rejecting the aura of the individual artist in favour of
collective labour in his workshop. From his first exhibition in 1931 (inaugurated by Stella
Kramrisch) to the height of his reputation in the 1940s, Roy was recognized as a modern
master, idolized by the literary avant‐garde including the modernist poets Bishnu Dey and
Sudhindranath Datta, and admired by many Europeans, who saw his work as combining
elements of Byzantine religious symbolism with Expressionist aesthetics. Mitter speaks of
the ruthless elimination of detail that enables him to achieve ‘a remarkable modernist
brevity’, but notes also that this is not a pure formalism;15 it is an art that criticizes
colonial urban culture through a radical valorization of the local and the communitarian.
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Rabindranath Tagore's art school at Shantiniketan, presided over by Nandalal Bose, also
generated a new aesthetic discourse rooted in the community. Bose had been associated
with Abanindranath Tagore at the Indian Society of Oriental Art, had made copies of the
Ajanta frescoes, and had been deeply influenced by the Japanese scholar and aesthetician
Okakura Kakuzo. But at Shantiniketan he fostered a more eclectic practice, drawing upon
folk styles and rejecting the miniaturization of the Bengal School in favour of bold brush‐
strokes and outdoor murals. Asked by Mahatma Gandhi to provide the wall panels for the
Haripura Congress in 1938, he created a series of vigorous village scenes in contrast to
the more decorative mythological pieces later executed for the Kirti Mandir of the
Gaekwad royal family in Baroda. To his pupils, notably the painter Benodebehari
Mukhopadhyay and the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij, he communicated a strong formal clarity
that became the ground of their modernist experiments, especially in representing the
lives of the local tribal people, the Santals. Benodebehari, who lost his sight in middle age
(he was the subject of a documentary film, The Inner Eye, made by his pupil the director
Satyajit Ray), combined clear modernist influences (notably Cubism, which he (p. 947)
appears to have used to solve spatial problems) with indigenous traditions and Japanese
wash techniques. K. G. Subramanyan, who trained under Nandalal Bose and later taught
at Baroda and at Vishvabharati, developed a witty, expressive, figurative style. Ramkinkar
Baij, probably the most extraordinary genius fostered at Shantiniketan, came from a
humble family with little formal education, but was from the start drawn to avant‐garde
aesthetics, producing heroic outdoor sculptures of Santal subjects in ‘rough’ materials
like cement, rubble, and concrete, recalling the expressive surfaces of Rodin and Epstein.
These sculptures, like many of the murals produced at Shantiniketan, have not lasted
well, but provide a remarkable index of subaltern modernism at work, contrasted to the
naturalist Expressionism of his contemporary Deviprasad Roy Chowdhury, and
influencing the powerfully expressive metalwork of Meera Mukherjee, using the tribal
(Bastar) lost‐wax process.
Rabindranath Tagore himself, however, was a late but radical innovator. Tagore had
received painting lessons in his youth, but his modernist art appears to have originated in
his sixties, and to have emerged from doodles in the manuscripts of his poems,
connecting crossed‐out words and lines to produce startling, masklike images that
gradually dominate the text. On 2 May 1930 his Argentinian friend Victoria Ocampo
organized an exhibition of his works at the avant‐garde Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle in
Paris. Mitter speculates on the influence of Jugendstil graphics, Art Nouveau, tribal
masks, and totemic objects on Tagore's art, but sees it finally as an expression of ‘the
dark landscape of the psyche’.16 Certainly the images he produces have a surreal,
brooding, Expressionist intensity that does not readily yield to explanation, providing the
dark obverse to the poetic idealism with which he is conventionally associated. Between
1928 and his death in 1941 he produced some 2,000 paintings, as if choosing a final form
of self‐expression, though his last poems are also modernist in theme and style. His
interest in the unconscious appears to have developed in the 1920s (he met Freud in
Vienna in 1926), but much earlier, in 1894, he had already referred to a stream of
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consciousness (since Tagore is writing in Bengali, it is not clear whether he has read
William James's Principles of Psychology (1890), where the phrase first appears in
English). Discussing children's rhymes, he associates their images with dreams:
In the normal way, echoes and reflections of the universe revolve in our minds in a
scattered, disjointed manner. They take on various appearances and shift suddenly
from one context to another. As in the atmosphere, roadside dust, flower‐pollen,
countless smells, assorted sounds, fallen leaves, water droplets, the vapours of the
earth—all the ejected, whirling fragments of this turning, agitated universe—float
and roam meaninglessly, so is it in our minds. There too, in the ceaseless stream of
our consciousness, so many colours, scents and sounds; so many vapours of the
imagination, traces of thoughts, broken fragments of language—hundreds of
fallen, forgotten, discarded components of our practical life—float about,
unobserved and purposeless…In one's normal state, sounds and shadows travel
across one's mind's sky like dreams…If they could leave an impress of their
reflections on (p. 948) some canvas of the unconscious mind, we would find many
resemblances to the rhymes we are discussing.17
In his doodles, drawings, and paintings, Tagore appears to reject the ‘authoritarian’
domination of the mind over the matter of thought, allowing expression to the dreamlike,
or nightmarish, ‘shadowy mirages’ otherwise lost to consciousness. Whatever the final
quality of his work, produced compulsively, without much formal training, it is
uncompromisingly modernist in style, involving a total rejection of the aestheticism of the
Bengal School and contemporary academic naturalism.
Away from Bengal, however, another cosmopolitan modernism was brought into being by
the Indo‐Hungarian painter Amrita Sher‐Gil, trained in Paris but choosing a professional
career in India. Sher‐Gil's decision to return to India and to paint images of rural life,
especially village women, appears to have been based on a near‐epiphanic sense of the
‘infinite submission and patience’ of her subjects, in whom she located the true spirit of
India.18 Her primitivism uses the languages of neo‐Impressionism and the Post‐
Impressionism of Gauguin, and owes very little to indigenous traditions, though she
admired Basohli painting. But it creates an Indian modernism far in advance of its time,
whose legacy is only now being understood (though it should be said that her art had
many admirers during her life, including Jawaharlal Nehru). Her beauty, genius, sexual
liaisons, unconventional behaviour, traumatic personal history, and tragic death at the
age of 28 have made her life itself an object of iconic fascination (commemorated, for
example, in film, photomontage, and installation art by her nephew the artist Vivan
Sundaram). Geeta Kapur compares her to the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, in respect of
both the life and of the work, and the conversion of the one into the other.19 The profound
melancholy of her paintings, and their use of colour and line, do not abandon
representation, but direct it towards the expression of an abstract aesthetic emotion.
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Modernism is self‐consciously professed only in the 1940s, by a number of artists' groups:

the Calcutta Group (formed in the shadow of the 1943 famine), the Progressive Painters'
Association of Madras (1944), the Progressive Artists' Group of Bombay (1947), the Delhi
Shilpi Chakra (1949), and the Triveni Kala Sangam (1951). Many of the artists were
Marxists, and had links with the communist Indian People's Theatre Association and with
‘progressive’ writers; several trained in Paris (though Satish Gujral went to Mexico).
Prominent in the Calcutta Group were the sculptor Prodosh Das Gupta and the painters
Paritosh Sen, Nirode Mazumdar, Sunil Madhav Sen, Gopal Ghosh, Gobardhan Ash,
Chittaprasad Bhattacharya, Zainul Abedin, and Somnath Hore. The last three, as
communists, produced a socially (p. 949) committed, progressive art of the people,
especially through images of the famine, and, in the case of Hore, woodcuts, sculptures,
and sketches of the Tebhaga land movement. The Calcutta Group held a joint exhibition
with the Bombay Progressives in 1950, but was gradually eclipsed by the latter, which
included Maqbool Fida Husain (who began as a painter of Bombay film posters), Francis
Newton Souza, K. H. Ara, S. K. Bakre, H. K. Gade, and S. H. Raza, later joined by V. S.
Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna. Influential in their development were three refugees from
Hitler's Germany, the critics Walter Langhammer and Rudy van Leyden, and the collector
Emmanuel Schlesinger. Unfortunately, the group broke up, and many artists (though not
Husain) went abroad. Akbar Padamsee and Jehangir Sabavala of Bombay, Ram Kumar of
the Delhi Shilpi Chakra, and Nirode Mazumdar and Paritosh Sen of the Calcutta Group
trained under the Cubist André Lhote in Paris; Souza went to London, as did Tyeb Mehta.
Husain and Souza are possibly the most celebrated and flamboyant of Indian modernists,
ceaselessly disrupting the tendency of the national to absorb and ‘contain’ the modern.
Husain's exploration of popular and religious icons has drawn the wrath of
fundamentalists, yet his art is deeply tied in with the self‐understanding of the nation.
Souza chose metropolitan exile and aesthetic autonomy, continuing in an Expressionist
style. Sabavala continued in Synthetic Cubism; Raza, Nirode Mazumdar, and K. C. S.
Paniker were drawn to Tantric geometry, and V. S. Gaitonde to minimalist abstraction. But
perhaps the purest minimalism is to be seen in the much later work of Nasreen
Mohamedi, only one of a number of exceptional women artists of the 1970s and 1980s,
including Anjolie Ela Menon, Arpita Singh, Arpana Caur, and Nalini Malani. It is in this
context that Kapur seeks to interrogate the formal regimes of modernism in India,
drawing our attention to the impossibility of neat periodization and to ‘the fraught social
identity’ of the Indian artist in the ‘conceptually open, half‐empty space of modernity’.20
Architecture
In architecture, even more than in art, questions of modernity and modernization are
intimately linked with modernist aesthetics, no doubt because modification of the built
environment can scarcely be treated as a problem of style alone. In the early twentieth
century, the ‘classicism’ of British imperial architecture was contested by a variety of
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other styles: the revivalist Indo‐Saracenic; the primitivist‐folk adopted by leaders like
Tagore and Gandhi; a revivalist school calling itself the Modern Indian Architecture
Movement; the incipient modernism of art deco and its adaptation as Indo‐Deco; and
international modernism. These developments could scarcely have (p. 950) come about
without the growth of the architectural and engineering professions, and the work of
individuals and private firms as well as state public works departments.
The most celebrated expression of imperial power, using a modified classical style, is to
be seen in the City Beautiful plan of New Delhi conceived in 1914 by Sir Edwin Landseer
Lutyens. Lutyens fell out with his co‐architect Sir Herbert Baker, and others shared in the
planning, but Lutyens's Delhi remains one of the major architectural (and imperial)
statements of the twentieth century. It is one point in a trajectory that has, at its other
end, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's post‐Independence choice of Le Corbusier
(Charles‐Édouard Jeanneret‐Gris) to build the modernist city of Chandigarh in the 1950s.
Justifying his choice at a seminar on architecture in Delhi in 1959, Nehru said:
It is the biggest example in India of experimental architecture…You may squirm at

the impact, but it makes you imbibe new ideas…what I like above all this is the
creative approach—not being tied down to what has been done by our forefathers
and the like, but thinking out in new terms; trying to think in terms of light and
air, and ground and water and human beings, not in terms of rules and regulations
laid down by our ancestors. Therefore Chandigarh is of enormous importance,
regardless of whether something succeeds or does not…It is a thing of power
coming out of a powerful mind, not a flat mind or a mind which is a mirror, and
that too not a very clear mirror reflecting somebody else's mind. There is no doubt
that Le Corbusier is a man with a powerful creative type of mind.21
Nevertheless, it would be a gross simplification to see the history of decolonization as a

simple movement from Lutyens to Le Corbusier. Much intervened between the two,
including other forms of modernism. In respect of urban planning and reconstruction,
moreover, City Beautiful ideals, garden city concepts, or ruthless modernist notions of ‘a
place for everything and everything in its place’ were equally out of harmony with the
traditional mixed‐use layout of Indian cities, as Henry Vaughan Lanchester found in
Madras. The most thoughtful responses to this problem in terms of urban design were
those of the British sociologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes, who had met Swami
Vivekananda in 1900 and later grew close to Tagore. Geddes visited India a number of
times between 1914 and 1928, spending nearly ten years in the country, and producing
numerous studies that advocated an empiricist approach to town planning, retaining
mixed‐use areas.
Surendranath Kar, a cousin of Nandalal Bose, designed five houses for Tagore in
Shantiniketan which drew variously upon pan‐Asian (primarily Japanese), traditional
Indian, and primitivist‐folk sources of inspiration. Tagore's philosophical influence is
everywhere evident, and colonial architecture is rejected for a local and nationalist
aesthetics, especially in the mud house called Shyamali. Mahatma Gandhi's ashram at
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Sabarmati near Ahmedabad and the Sevagram at Wardha, built in the 1920s and 1930s,
also employed simple local materials (in the ‘sustainable environments’ spirit) to create
an ascetic, rural atmosphere. Gandhi's belief in ‘the (p. 951) frugality of means to achieve
ends’22 might evoke the functionality of Bauhaus design, which certainly left its mark on
Tagore. Gandhi's influence extends to the modernist architect Charles Correa's design for
the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya (1958–63) near the Sabarmati Ashram: an understated
open‐grid structure with pyramidal roofs showing Le Corbusier's influence, but in a
vernacular idiom.
But the more visible struggle over India's architectural destiny was being fought between
the revivalist and nationalist Modern Indian Architecture Movement, led by Sris Chandra
Chatterjee, and a somewhat more eclectic group of modernists. In 1913 E. B. Havell and
A. K. Coomaraswamy, together with George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Austin, and others, had
appealed unsuccessfully to the Secretary of State for India, the Marquess of Crewe, to
allow Indian craftsmen a share in the design of New Delhi. The Modern Indian
Architecture Movement sought to incorporate traditional Indian motifs in the new
architecture of the time, as, for example, in the nationalist Banaras Hindu University,
founded in 1916. Sris Chandra Chatterjee was particularly hostile to art deco, which
emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as a fashionable new style imported from Europe.
The most dramatic art deco buildings in India are cinema houses, palaces of pleasure for
the new bourgeoisie as well as for a growing population of urban workers: the Roxy,
Metro, and Elite in Calcutta; the Eros, Metro, and Regal in Bombay; the Mayfair in
Lucknow; and several others. A large number of art deco homes and apartment blocks
were built in Bombay in the 1930s for wealthy traders and property developers, and the
New India Assurance Building (1935) is a good example of the strengths of the style.
Lanchester built an Indo‐Deco palace (1927–44) for Maharajah Umaid Singh in Jodhpur,
and Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who had collaborated with Frank
Lloyd Wright in Chicago, produced several Indo‐Deco designs. Griffin, a theosophist who
sympathized with Indian nationalism, felt that international modernism needed to be
modified to suit India, and submitted a number of innovative designs which were
unfortunately not executed in full. He died in Lucknow in 1937.
Modernism in the 1930s is largely imported, with some notable Indian exceptions such as
Atmaram Gajjar and G. B. Mhatre. The ‘International Style’, launched in New York
through an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 (and so named in the
exhibition catalogue by H.‐R. Hitchcock and Philip Johnson) celebrated the global reach
of modernism, which was architecturally expressed through volume, balance, and the
stripping away of ornament. By the 1930s, modernists employing the International Style
such as Eckart Muthesius, Willem Marinus Dudok, Antonin Raymond, and Otto
Koenigsberger were at work in India. Muthesius was engaged in 1930 to build the Manik
Bagh Palace in Indore, an explicitly modernist structure with interiors furnished by E. J.
Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, and Le Corbusier himself. Dudok, who had
absorbed the neoplasticism of De Stijl in the Netherlands, designed the Garden Theatre
and Lighthouse Cinema in Calcutta. (p. 952) Raymond had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright
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for eighteen years, and came to India from Japan to design, together with the
woodcraftsman George Nakashima and François Sumner, a Czech disciple of Le
Corbusier, the pure modernist Golconda building of the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
Otto Koenigsberger, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany who trained under Bruno
Taut, produced modernist buildings in Mysore and Bangalore, including the Dining Hall
of the Indian Institute of Science.
Just before and after Independence (1947), however, modernism was adopted as the style
of modernity in a conscious inflection of nationalism. Architecture, in the spirit of Le
Corbusier's ‘Architecture or Revolution’,23 was absorbed into the project of rebuilding the
Indian identity: notably, of course, by Nehru, who was acquainted with the new
generation of architects and supportive of modernist plans. With assistance from
Matthew Nowicki and Indian engineers, Albert Mayer (whom Nehru knew personally)
prepared a plan for the new city of Chandigarh in 1949–50. Otto Koenigsberger's
contemporary design for another capital, Bhubaneswar, was not fully executed, but
Chandigarh remains a monument to the spirit of modernism. Le Corbusier, his cousin
Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry were among the team appointed to develop
Mayer's plan. By this time Le Corbusier had moved away from his early, Gropius‐inspired
work to a more rugged, ‘honest’ style using exposed concrete (béton brut) and
emphasizing geometric forms such as the cube, the cylinder, and the cone (the
characteristic pilotis are also in evidence). Visually Chandigarh is an impressive
departure from other Indian cities, exciting most Indians with the boldness and
monumentality of its abstract forms and patterns, though displaying also the totalizing
tendencies of international modernism. While the capital complex offered a liberating
sense of space realized in reinforced concrete, Jeanneret, Drew, and Fry contributed
exemplary brick masonry housing. Le Corbusier was invited to execute plans for a
number of houses in Ahmedabad (the Millowners' Association Building, the Museum, and
three residential houses, one of which was not built), providing important lessons to
young Indian architects in innovative solutions to complex problems of design.
Le Corbusier is perhaps the architect who, in terms of both modernist statement and
enduring influence, has left the deepest impact upon twentieth‐century Indian
architecture. Unfortunately, much of this impact was lost in unimaginative mimicry. But
even before Le Corbusier's arrival, Indian architects were using a modernist vocabulary:
G. B. Mhatre employed art deco, and a number of architects trained in Britain, Europe, or
America brought international modernism home. Habib Rahman, who had worked for
Gropius, designed the West Bengal New Secretariat Building (1944–54) in Calcutta under
clear Bauhaus influence, as well as the Gandhi Ghat in Barrackpore (1948). Rahman is
said to have submitted a pure Bauhaus boxlike design for the Rabindra Bhavan (1961) in
New Delhi, but Nehru rejected it as ‘nonsense’ and Rahman's graceful modification, with
some Indian features, is an (p. 953) important new statement.24 Rahman designed other
modernist buildings and memorials in New Delhi, such as the General Post Office and the
Mazar of Maulana Azad, as did his successor in the Central Public Works Department, J.
M. Benjamin, architect of the Delhi High Court. Gropius also influenced the work of A. P.
Kanvinde, who designed the ATIRA building in Ahmedabad (inaugurated by Nehru in
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1954) and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (1959–65), introducing important
features widely copied elsewhere. Several other architects who trained abroad, such as
Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, Bennett Pithavadian, Charles Correa, Hasmukh C. Patel, Ram
Sharma, and Piloo Mody, show elements of Gropius's influence, but often (like
Pithavadian) diverge from it. Others who trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, like Gautam
and Gira Sarabhai (who designed the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad), use a
gentler empiricist vocabulary. The Sarabhais commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design
the Calico Mills Office in Ahmedabad: the design exists but was not executed. They were
instrumental in Louis I. Kahn's coming to Ahmedabad, where he designed the Indian
Institute of Management (1962–74); he also designed the National Assembly building in
Dhaka, now Bangladesh, and made preliminary plans for Gujarat's new capital,
Gandhinagar.25 Other modernist influences, such as that of Oscar Niemeyer, can be seen
in the extraordinary Apsara Cinema building (1968), designed by Yahya Merchant, in
Bombay. Architecturally, northern India was more receptive to modernism than the south.
Tracing the history of modern Indian architecture, Lang, Desai, and Desai argue that ‘If
the first generation of Indian Modernists owed an intellectual and formal debt to the
Bauhaus, the second, highly productive between 1960 and 1980, owes much to Le
Corbusier.’26 Le Corbusier's influence is evident in the Shri Ram Centre (1966–9) in New
Delhi, designed by Shiv Nath Prasad, and in the Institute of Indology (1957–62), designed
by Balkrishna V. Doshi, in Ahmedabad. The influence of Wright and Kahn produced a
more ‘organic’ modernist architecture sensitive to local contexts. Richard Neutra's pupil
Joseph Stein taught at the Bengal Engineering College before setting up a practice in
Delhi, where he designed the India International Centre (1959–62) and the Ford
Foundation building (1969). A modernism adapted to context may be seen in M. M.
Rana's Nehru Memorial Library (1968–9) and Anant Raje's design for the Indian
Statistical Institute in the same city, as well as B. V. Doshi's plan for the Indian Institute of
Management in Bangalore (1963; based on the city of Fatehpur Sikri), and his School of
Architecture (1967–8) in Ahmedabad, and some work by Bernard Kohn. Indeed, Doshi,
after training in Bombay, worked under Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, and
then with Louis Kahn. He was co‐director, with Bernard Kohn, of the School of
Architecture at the Centre for Environmental Planning, Ahmedabad, founded in 1962. He
has since then established an international reputation, like Charles Correa, and (p. 954)
both have evolved distinct styles based on their exploration of structure, materials, and
volume.
Modernist architecture in India is identified with the Nehruvian period, which witnessed
decisive foreign interventions as well as the emergence of a modern Indian idiom.
Ideologically, it has been criticized for its universalist disdain for local conditions (heat,
dust, damp, materials, and maintenance), its ‘ugly’ reinforced concrete fantasies, its
neglect of the street, and its insensitive regulation of private and public spaces. The
‘messy’, mixed‐use character of Indian built environments was never accommodated
within the totalizing vision of modernist design, however democratic it might have been
in intent. Looking back on his work in the late 1980s, Doshi said that while he had learnt
from Le Corbusier to observe and react to climate, tradition, function, structure,
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economy, and landscape, the buildings he had designed now seemed to him unsuited to
their contexts.27 Modernism nevertheless produced some exceptional architectural
statements in India. Architects like Doshi and Correa evolved by responding to
environmental needs, anticipating later experiments (for example, by Laurie Baker) in a
‘sustainable’ vernacular conservation ethic.
Literature
In their recourse to the verbal, literature and cinema may seem to articulate more clearly
the ideological struggles within Indian modernism—most of all, the apparent lack of an
avant‐garde noted with irritation by Geeta Kapur.28 If we accept Bürger's distinction
between high modernism, which dehumanizes and dehistoricizes the aesthetic domain to
overvalue the sign, and the avant‐garde, which questions the institution of art itself, it is
clear that the historical circumstances in which modernism was experienced in India
made it more likely that the contestation would be at the level of material content, or the
possibility of representation, rather than form per se. The emergence of the modern
literatures of India, from the nineteenth century onwards, was itself deeply implicated in
the constitution of the nation by its regions. Each of these literatures performs its own
time‐lagged transactions with modernity, in some cases engaging with the ideology of
European modernism, in others producing its own formal solutions to the problems of
disorder, violence, and mimetic lack. The break with the pre‐modern, already experienced
as a form of trauma by the colonial subject, and requiring the reconstitution of vernacular
literary traditions, is compounded in the twentieth century by a new sense of the gap
between urban and rural, literary and oral cultures, split further by caste and class
divisions, and by (p. 955) political ideologies. Modernism's obsession with the problem of
the subject is one response to such traumas, but not the only one. Most modern Indian
literatures have already experienced a ‘progressive’ phase when socialist realism is seen
as the immediate solution to problems of both style and content in art. The harsh lessons
of such realism may themselves point towards the subject's existentialist isolation and the
inadequacy of representation: as John Frow points out, modernism simply expresses ‘the
internal contradictions of realism’.29 In India, realism never loses its purpose, and
modernism can never be experienced simply as a formalist alternative; it is tied in with
the terror and violence that in Europe is claimed by the avant‐garde, but is here made the
property of the modern itself. Since India has at least twenty substantial literatures in the
twentieth century, this discussion is principally confined to four: Bengali from the east,
Hindi from the north, Marathi from the west, and Malayalam from the south.
Bengali literary modernism was experienced as a reaction to Tagore, though Tagore's

influence (especially that of his late poetry) was inescapable. The moment of departure
was marked by the foundation of a literary journal, Kallol (‘The Surge’), in 1923. Since the
nineteenth century, the arts in Bengal had been dominated by the culture of the literary
journal, acting as a powerful vehicle for ideas transmitted from Europe as well as for
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indigenous critical thought. Kallol's modernist and experimental outlook was later
endorsed by Kali o Kalam (‘Pen and Ink’, 1927), edited by Premendra Mitra and others,
Pragati (‘Progress’, 1928), with Buddhadeva Bose as one of the editors, and more
importantly Sudhindranath Datta's Parichay (‘Identity’, 1931), Sanjay Bhattacharya's
Purbasha (‘The East’, 1932), and Buddhadeva Bose's Kabita (‘Poetry’, 1935).
Nevertheless, the first generation of modernists is still known as the Kallol generation,
and included Samar Sen, Sudhindranath Datta, Buddhadeva Bose, Premendra Mitra,
Bishnu Dey, and Jibanananda Das; all, except the last, communicating a distinctively
urban modernity, and experimenting with the prose poem, vers libre, and new metrical
patterns. The Marxist Samar Sen broke conspicuously with the romantic images of
Tagore's generation, and ultimately abandoned poetry altogether. Datta, Bose, and Dey
were perhaps the most scholarly, directly influenced by European modernism, and
translating extensively from the European languages. Premendra Mitra wrote remarkable
prose fiction as well as poetry. The most original of these poets was, however,
Jibanananda Das, exploring the phantasmagorias of the everyday in metaphors that
transform the familiar into the uncanny, the much‐loved Bengal countryside into a
mysterious and haunted landscape.
Modernist prose writers of the period would include Manik Bandyopadhyay, who wrote
the novels Padmanadir Majhi (‘The Boatmen of the River Padma’, 1936) and Putulnacher
Itikatha (‘The Story of the Puppet Dance’, 1936), as well as exceptional short stories;
Satinath Bhaduri (Jagari, ‘The Vigil’, 1965), Advaita Mallabarman (Titas Ekti Nadir Nam,
‘Titas is the Name of a River’, 1962), and Kamal Kumar Majumdar (p. 956) (Antarjali
Jatra, ‘Final Passage’, 1962, and Nim Annapurna, ‘Bitter Rice’, 1965). In the next
generation, women poets and novelists such as Mahashveta Devi evolved radically
oppositional modernisms rooted in subaltern experience. In theatre, the New Drama
movement initiated by the Indian People's Theatre Association, the culture wing of the
Communist Party of India, produced social‐impact plays in the 1940s (including Bijon
Bhattacharya's Nabanna ‘Harvest’, 1944), and was followed by the epic (though not
actually Brechtian) theatre of Utpal Dutt and the avant‐garde plays (Third Theatre) of
Badal Sircar in the 1960s. Both the content and the period of literary modernism are
made problematic, however, by an incomplete inventory of this kind. While writers of the
Kallol generation make an unmistakable modernist statement in terms of ideological
departures and formal experiment, many of the lessons of modernism are carried over to
avant‐garde poets of the next generation such as Shakti Chattopadhyay, associated with
the journal Krittibas (1953). On the other hand, the social realism of Manik
Bandyopadhyay, Satinath Bhaduri, and Advaita Mallabarman links them to their great
contemporaries Bibhutibhusan and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Perhaps it is only a
certain radical intention, as well as the hypothesis of a beginning, that enables us to mark
a modernist trajectory (or moment) in a literary history that subsumes modernism into a
larger cultural process.
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In Hindi, modernism is inaugurated in 1943 with the publication of Tar Saptak (‘Upper
Octave’), a collection of poems by seven poets edited with an important preface by Ajneya
(S. H. Vatsyayan), setting out a new prayogvadi (‘experimental’) poetics, breaking with an
earlier pragativadi (‘progressive’) literature (as practised, for example, by Premchand).
Ajneya, acquainted with the New Critics and European modernism, himself writing a
bookish and literary Hindi, edited the journal Pratik (‘Image’) from 1947 onwards,
inspiring the poets of Nayi Kavita (‘New Poetry’: a journal by that name began to appear
in 1954) and advocating a formalist concentration on poetic structure, rather than on
social or historical problems. This formalist universalism (further enshrined in Dusra
Saptak, ‘Second Octave’, 1951) was subsequently rejected by Gajanan Madhav
Muktibodh, whose work had appeared in Tar Saptak, but whose intensely self‐conscious,
anguished poetic voice abandons the high modernism of Europe and America for
experimental, radical, sometimes surreal sequences that draw equally upon the Bhakti
tradition of late medieval India as upon other literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Myth is an important resource in the constitution of a modernist critique, both
for Muktibodh and for Dharamvir Bharati in his apocalyptic play based on the
Mahabharata epic Andha Yug (‘Age of Blindness’, 1954), Ajneya's novels, such as Shekhar:
Ek Jivani (‘Shekhar: A Life’, 1941–4) and Nadi Ke Dvip (‘Islands in the Stream’, 1951),
also emphasized the heroic isolation and alienation of the modern individual. But the
chaste Sanskritized Hindi of Ajneya and his followers linked modernism to elite culture:
in fiction, especially, the realist, ‘progressive’ tradition of Premchand and Phanishwar
Renu still carried greater weight. The split between the literary communities of Hindi and
Urdu, effected in the late nineteenth century, led to unresolved tensions: the most
(p. 957) striking modernist fiction was in fact produced in Urdu, by writers like Sa'adat
Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, and Qurratulain Haider.
Marathi poetry was decisively altered by the appearance of B. S. Mardhekar's Kahi Kavita
(‘Some Poems’, 1947), a mordant series of reflections on post‐war disillusionment and
human degradation, using a radically reduced metrical system. Mardhekar was
prosecuted for obscenity and remained a controversial figure until his death in 1956.
Unmistakably influenced by the modernism of Europe and America, his was also a lonely,
self‐critical, auto‐reflexive poetic voice, looking back to the ‘saint’ poetry of an earlier
period. Too singular to start a movement, Mardhekar must nevertheless be placed beside
poets like P. S. Rege, G. V. Karandikar, and Sharatchandra Muktibodh in the textual space
of Marathi modernism. Sharatchandra Muktibodh, a less alienated voice than Mardhekar,
also wrote novels of social commitment in the 1950s, at a time when modernist narrative
was being explored by Gangadhar Gadgil and Arvind Gokhale (and in the next decade by
Bhalchandra Nemade), and Vijay Tendulkar, the most significant modern Marathi
dramatist, had begun producing ‘experimental’ theatre in a modernist idiom, but without
abandoning realism. In the same period, Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre, bilingual poets
who wrote in both Marathi and English, begin to create a remarkable new modernist
œuvre, densely allusive, rooted in the experiences of urban loneliness, the body, and
sexuality. Chitre, who translated the medieval devotional poets Tukaram and Jnanadeva
into English and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé into Marathi, spoke of the profound
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influence these exercises had on his work. The bilingual poetics of Chitre and Kolatkar
(comparable to that of Jayanta Mahapatra in Oriya and English or Kamala Das in English
and Malayalam) should, simply because of their location, be linked to the English poetry
of Nissim Ezekiel, perhaps the most linguistically inventive, wide‐ranging, and flexible
modernist writing in Mumbai from the 1950s.
Marathi literary culture was thrown into radical ferment in the late 1950s by the formal
emergence of Dalit Sahitya, the writing of the oppressed (previously ‘untouchable’)
castes. Social protest became inseparable from an avant‐garde aesthetic seeking to
radicalize the very language of utterance. Dalit writing questioned not just the
institutions of art, but a history of violence and injustice that had denied representation,
identity, and personhood to the dispossessed. In consequence, the rejection of a formal
literary style is only one of the moves that can be adopted by writers attempting to record
previously unacknowledged forms of experience. From the unsparing realism of Baburao
Bagul in the late 1960s to the deliberate recourse to the language and experiences of
street and brothel in Namdeo Dhasal's Golpitha (1973), and through the work of Arjun
Dangle, Arun Kamble, Waman Nimbalkar, Tryambak Sapkale, Hira Bansode, Daya Pawar,
Lakshman Mane, or Sharankumar Limbale, Dalit writing rubs literature against the grain,
roughening its texture and blurring distinctions of voice and genre, autobiography and
fiction, lyric and narrative.
As a literature of difference, Dalit writing in Marathi—however controversial the category

itself has subsequently become—offers an alternative modernism not (p. 958) amenable to
the ideology of the aesthetic. In Malayalam, too, the representation of the underclass
marks the real moment of departure from traditional poetry, especially in the work of the
Ezhava poet Kumaran Asan in the early twentieth century (his epic fragment Duravastha,
‘Misery’, 1923, is particularly significant). But a modernist style emerges several decades
later, with Ayyappa Paniker's long poem Kurukshetram (1960), a complex, free‐verse
treatment of the exhaustion and violence of the age, drawing upon myth in the same
spirit as Eliot's The Waste Land. The spirit of the new poetry was sustained by periodicals
like Paniker's Kerala Kavita (‘Kerala Poetry’) and M. Govindan's Samiksha (‘Survey’);
poets like Govindan himself, N. N. Kakkad, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, K. G. Shankara
Pillai, and K. Satchidanandan employed, between the 1960s and 1980s, an unmistakably
modernist idiom in treating of individual alienation in a rapidly changing culture.
Satchidanandan, a leftist intellectual who translated Latin American, African, and
European poetry, has continued to experiment with form and language. It was also in the
1960s that modernist fiction began to distance itself from the social realism of the great
‘progressive’ writers Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer,
notably in the work of O. V. Vijayan, Zacharia, and Madhavikutty (Kamala Das).
Cinema
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Cinema as a form is modernist almost by definition, yet there is a lag between the high
period of international modernism in all the arts and its accommodation in Indian cinema.
In the auteur films of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen during the 1950s,
1960s, and 1970s, a modernist film language appears assured and self‐evident. In fact it
is confined to a single region of India (Bengal), and it is only in the 1970s and 1980s that
an alternative film movement emerges through the work of such directors as Shyam
Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Kumar Shahani, Govind Nihalani, G. Aravindan, Saeed
Mirza, Girish Kasaravalli, M. S. Sathyu, Mani Kaul, and Jahnu Barua: a belatedness that
inevitably compromises their ‘modernist’ legacy.
The project of modernity might be seen as Ray's principal cinematic subject, from the
time he apprenticed himself to Jean Renoir when he came to India in 1949 to make The
River, through his own first film, Pather Panchali (‘Song of the Road’, 1955), to his last,
Agantuk (‘The Stranger’, 1991). In this he is an heir to Tagore (he had studied art at
Shantiniketan with Benodebehari Mukhopadhyay), absorbing not just the moral and
nationalist imperative of this examination, but also a sense of its delicacy, even peril,
especially in respect of its treatment within a global aesthetic of modernism. Ray's
cinema is taken to be neo‐realist, on the model of Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves
(1947), and the ‘humanism’ of his art has been as widely celebrated as his
cosmopolitanism. Yet from the point when, in 1948, he began to educate the viewing
public about the film medium, he unobtrusively noted his own debts to the (p. 959)
modernist masters: Truffaut's tracking camera, Kurosawa's editing, Godard's
soundtrack.30 Siegfried Kracauer saw Pather Panchali and Aparajito (‘The Unvanquished’,
1956), as classic examples of the modernist use of memory to disrupt chronological
sequence,31 though in fact Ray departs from classical narrative only in the city films of
the 1970s, which steep themselves in the logic of the street. Ray's modernism is most
evident in his use of the honesty of the lens to enact a series of extremely complex
negotiations with the ideology of realism (which, we should recall, has no real history in
Indian cinema). Instead of a collection of objects to be grasped and represented, Ray's
‘realist’ world is a succession of enactments, where camera angle, the duration of the
shot, attitude, voice, gesture, and soundtrack compose and recompose the subjectivity of
the viewer. Insistently, he questioned what film as a medium could do, in respect of both
producing illusion and dissolving it (as in Devi, ‘The Goddess’, 1960).
Ray's contemporaries Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen commenced their careers with the
communist Indian People's Theatre Association, a background that may account to some
extent for their bolder and more gestural cinematic language. Ghatak's Nagarik (‘Citizen’)
was in fact completed before Ray's Pather Panchali in 1953, but released posthumously in
1977. His own experience of the uprooting and exile caused by the partition of India went
into the trilogy of Meghe Dhaka Tara (‘The Cloud‐Capped Star’, 1960), Komal Gandhar (‘E
Flat’, 1961), and Subarnarekha (1962), producing an uneven, sometimes raw, sometimes
melodramatic, but powerfully original cinematic corpus, constantly experimenting with
the composition of frames, the intersection of the mechanical and the human where film
begins. Surprisingly, it was Ghatak, the most unconventional artist of the three, who died
at the age of 50, who left students (from the Film Institute at Pune) to carry on his legacy.
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Mrinal Sen's work in the cinema is arguably more varied, from Neel Akasher Nichey
(‘Under the Blue Sky’, 1958) to Khandahar (‘The Ruins’, 1983) and beyond. His mature
work, however, beginning from the Calcutta films of the 1970s, was both political and
self‐consciously modernist, using fragmented or double narratives and repeatedly
disrupting the illusionist properties of the image and the complacencies of class.
The art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, and its heirs in the alternative cinema movement,
require us to address a central problem of modernism: the place of the popular. Indian
popular cinema, both in Hindi, the medium of the ‘Bombay film’, and in other regional
languages, clearly dominates the cultural space of modernity. In its various forms
(mythological, social, sentimental, melodramatic) it comes to represent the commoditized
mass culture against which art cinema defines itself, and allows for a visible break
between modernist high art and popular entertainment provided by the ‘culture industry’,
to use Adorno's phrase. It is arguable that in India this break is not visible in any other
cultural sphere to the same degree as it is in cinema (with the possible exception of
music); yet it is, we should note, the creation (p. 960) of a highly restricted development
that takes place from the 1950s onwards. In earlier film history it is non‐existent, and
postmodern cinema has already lost the battle against commoditization, though it may
effect its own transactions between high and low, elite and popular, the intellectuals and
the masses. In consequence, some would argue for a critical reassessment of the popular
cinema and mass culture of the 1950s and 1960s as contested territory, not so much an
oppositional space as a site of struggle and subversion, challenging art cinema's claim to
modernist authenticity.
Conclusion
Modernisms in India are deeply implicated in the construction of a secular national
identity at home in the world, and in this respect answer a historical need to fashion a
style for the ‘modern’ as it is locally experienced. But the choice is itself ideologically
determined by notions of the ‘secular’, the ‘modern’, the ‘national’, and the ‘local’. How
precisely are these to be understood? The apparently ‘transnational’ character of
modernism, its ‘break’ with a past experienced only as fragment, ruin, or decay (the
‘facies hippocratica of history’, to use Benjamin's phrase about allegory32), its
preoccupation with existential loneliness and anguish, its abandoning of naturalism and
narrative for an abstract, experimental, non‐sequential aesthetic order, might indeed
appear to fit the experiences of a colonial urban culture. But that ‘fit’ is not simply a
matter of the transmission of a set of aesthetic practices, nor is mimicry the end of the
exercise. Mitter comments acerbically, and with justice, on the discourse of authority,
hierarchy, and power in the consideration of non‐Western modernisms, making them
appear merely derived or imitative.33 Yet even in the case of the educated bourgeoisie,
the modernism of the West contends with a variety of local responses to the intolerable
pressures of tradition, colonial authority, and social oppression, producing completely
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new modernist projects. Modernism's effort to locate the means of release in a new
aesthetic order is historically the most critical element of its enterprise (in a sense,
implicating the avant‐garde in a totalizing vision of the world remade by art). In India,
that aesthetic order must carry, at different locations and at different times, other
burdens as well: the idea of a secular culture, the project of the nation, the reaffirmation
of regional or local identity, the self‐expression of the oppressed, and the sense of a
‘speeded‐up’, intensely concentrated, time.
Notes:
(1) See Dilip Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture, 11 (1999), 1–18.
(2) See Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, in Peter

Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures,
Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005), 6–18, esp. 11–12. The reference is to Arjun Appadurai,
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).
(3) Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’, New Left Review, 1/175 (May–June
1989), 48–52, reconstructed from a lecture Williams delivered at the University of Bristol
in 1987; repr. in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New
Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989).
(4) Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in
India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), 298.
(5) Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 250.
(6) Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant‐Garde, 1922–
1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 7–8. I am indebted to Mitter's account for what
follows.
(7) Ibid. 11.
(8) See Benoy Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, Rupam, 9 (Jan. 1922), 8–24, and
‘Agastya’ [O. C. Gangoly], ‘Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, Rupam, 9 (Jan. 1922),
24–7; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 16.
(9) Stella Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, Der Cicerone, Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler,
Kunstfreude und Sammler, 17/1 (1925), 87–93; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of
Modernism, 43.
(10) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 231 n. 40, notes the influence of Roger Fry, Clive
Bell, and Herbert Read in the constitution of an aestheticist discourse.
(11) W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London: Macmillan, 1959), 43.
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(12) Max Osborn, ‘The Indian Exhibition in Berlin’, Rupam, 15–16 (July–Dec. 1923), 74–8,
esp. p. 77; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 27.
(13) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 29–32.
(14) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 292.
(15) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 122.
(16) Ibid. 71.
(17) From ‘Children's Rhymes’ (first pub. as ‘Women's Rhymes’, in Sadhana (Ashwin–
Kartik 1301; Sept.–Nov. 1894), in Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature
and Language, ed. and trans. S. Chaudhuri et al. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001),
103–4; my emphasis.
(18) See Amrita Sher‐Gil, ‘The Story of My Life’, The Usha, 3/2, special issue (Aug. 1942),
96; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 55. For other material on Sher‐Gil, see
Vivan Sundaram et al., Amrita Sher‐Gil (Bombay: Marg, 1972).
(19) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 3–22, passim.
(20) Ibid. 370–3.
(21) Jawaharlal Nehru, Inaugural Address, in Seminar on Architecture (Delhi: Lalit Kala
Akademi, 1959), 8; cited in Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture and
Independence: The Search for Identity—India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997), app. 3, p. 311.
(22) Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 184.
(23) The dictum was developed in Le Corbusier's contributions, in the 1920s, to the
journal L'Esprit Nouveau, and adopted in his revolutionary Vers une architecture (1923).
(24) See Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 211.
(25) On Gandhinagar, see Ravi S. Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in

Postcolonial India (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
(26) Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 223.
(27) See Doshi's statement in Mildred F. Schmertz (ed.), ‘Balkrishna V. Doshi’, in Ann Lee
Morgan and Colin Naylor (eds), Contemporary Architects (Chicago: St James Press,
1987), 236.
(28) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 288.
(29) John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 117.
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(30) See Satyajit Ray, Our Films, their Films (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976).
(31) Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, ed. M. Bratu
Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 234–5.
(32) Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
New Left Books, 1977), 166.
(33) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 7.
Supriya Chaudhuri
Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University
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Modernisms in India

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Dec 2010

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: modernism, India, modernization, modernity, national identity, hypostasis

THE distinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly

Subscriber: Australian National University; date: 26 April 2018

modernism as an essentially Western mode opposed both to tradition and to national or

Raymond Williams's phrase ‘the politics of modernism’ may remind us of another

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Adler, a single painting by the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, and reproductions of

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modernism has no firm canonical position in India. It has a paradoxical value

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Modernism is self‐consciously professed only in the 1940s, by a number of artists' groups:

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It is the biggest example in India of experimental architecture…You may squirm at

Nevertheless, it would be a gross simplification to see the history of decolonization as a

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Bengali literary modernism was experienced as a reaction to Tagore, though Tagore's

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Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, and Qurratulain Haider.

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As a literature of difference, Dalit writing in Marathi—however controversial the category

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(2) See Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, in Peter

(7) Ibid. 11.

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(13) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 29–32.

(14) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 292.

(15) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 122.

(16) Ibid. 71.

(19) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 3–22, passim.

(20) Ibid. 370–3.

(22) Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 184.

(24) See Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 211.

(25) On Gandhinagar, see Ravi S. Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in

(26) Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 223.

(28) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 288.

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(33) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 7.

Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University

Subscriber: Australian National University; date: 26 April 2018

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