Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857–2007

This volume brings together 19 seminal essays on India's visual culture and its leading manifestations during the period 1857–2007. It traces the shifting role of the artist and art institution through cataclysmic changes in India's history. The early essays cover the age of Empire, which saw the advent of mechanical reproduction and the setting up of British art academies and museums. With the rise of nationalism, the making of Indian art institutions and an Indian art consciousness allowed an indigenous modernity to be carefully determined by artists and idealogues. During the period of the 1960s to the 1980s, Indian art emerged through frequently hard‑fought debates around the role of the State and indigenist values and symbols in art practice. In the later essays of the book, the recent alliance with global art strategies since the 1980s is examined. At the same time, the shift in popular taste and aesthetics influenced by Indian politics and the rise of religious patronage is analysed as a contemporary phenomenon. With contributions by the foremost art writers, critics and curators, this volume seeks to contextualize Indian art within the dynamic shifts of Indian social history.