Modern Indian Art and the idea of
Indigenous Contemporary

Tanveer Ajsi

Historians of art inform us that until the nineteenth century, the cultural hegemony of the West had not found its feet within the artistic traditions of India. The aesthetic sensibility of the West was, until then, received with a scant interest by the Mughal court painters of the sixteenth century. The Western academic style of painting was adopted as a contributing factor to the Mughal style of painting which only borrowed certain aspects of it.

Unlike the West, where the history of modernism is primarily seen in conjunction with the avant-garde, the non-Western modernisms – which were imposed on the colonized world to implement a Eurocentric cultural criteria to value the ‘Other’ cultures – require different frameworks and perspectives which do not essentially see them as linear, monolithic, and a completely western phenomena. It is not easy to plot a straight line from the nineteenth century to what came to be known as Indian Modern art and its projection in the cultural map of the world. Historians of art and culture have yet to equip us with the conceptual frameworks within which one can approach the domain of modern Indian art to explore and reconsider the circumstances and developments that encouraged and provoked Indian artists to look back at their own traditional antecedents and come up with alternative ways of responding to a selective idea of modernization which was embedded deep within the bourgeois ideology of the colonizer.

The evolution of modernism in India immediately tinged itself with nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which defined the tradition as resistive approach for decolonization to set the claim for the contemporary. Needless to point out, the paradox here is that the rolemodel for this revivalist gesture was the European idea of Renaissance. But, what segregates the post- Renaissance Western realist tradition from Indian artists, who were descendants of several artistic traditions, is the assimilation of Western modernism and the traditional artistic dynamics, which ultimately resulted in a double edged manner- the traditional Indian artists set to claim an individualist modern identity for themselves and reconsidered the ways traditions were looked upon. However, modernism posed another challenge, that of the crucial divide between tradition and modernity. We are yet to liberate ourselves from this double edict of the colonial hangover.