A Dozen Ways of Viewing India

Ranjit Hoskote provides an account of the way art in India has, over the decades, reflected and questioned the state of the nation.

- Ranjit Hoskote

Gulammohammed Sheikh. Speechless City. Oil on canvas. 107.2 cms x 107 cms. 1975-77. Collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Image courtesy of the artist.

THIS EXCERPT IS TAKEN FROM THE HOME/NATION ISSUE OF ART INDIA VOLUME V, ISSUE I, 2000.

IV.

Nearly two decades separate Sher-Gil's Bride's Toilet from M.F. Husain's Zameen and Ram Kumar's Sad Town. In those crucial years, independence had been achieved in bitter exchange for partition; the ethnic riots that attended these events, and the two-way diaspora of refugees between India and Pakistan, were to scar the subsequent history of the subcontinent. The passage to freedom had released both constructive and destructive energies on a mass scale, and the nascent Republic was held together mainly by the Nehruvian vision of a liberal, humane and ecumenical society, a vision confidently positivist in its regard for the scientific management of progress, yet sensitive to the conservation of India's traditional systems of creativity and skill. Indian artists saw themselves, in this phase, both as participants in the nation-building enterprise and as detached observers of its costs: their mood fluctuated between idealism and doubt.