Art For A Modern India, 1947-1980

by Rebecca M. Brown
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2009
224 pp., illus. 17 b/w., 2 col. Trade, $79.95; paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8223-4355-X; ISBN: 0-8223-4375-4.

Reviewed by Aparna Sharma

a.sharma@arts.ucla.edu

On reading Art For A Modern India, 1947-1980, one is most struck by the ambition underpinning this project. Rebecca M Brown's text unveils an array of artistic output starting from India's independence in 1947 until the 1980s prior to India's economic liberalisation. Brown addresses the central paradox embodied in India's postcolonial condition -- the transaction between modernity and the quest for Indianness. She does not approach either category as neatly constituted, instead she cuts into recent moves within postcolonial studies that point to the 'centrality of colonialism to the production of modernity.' She states in the introduction to the book that colonialism served not simply as a 'tangential motivating factor but as a constitutive, core element' within modernity (p.3). This is a crucial move whose implications span disciplines of both Art History and Anthropology wherein arts and cultural practices outside the Euro-American canon have invariably surfaced as 'alternatives' evoked within the modernist project to critique the dominant and hegemonic paradigm. More specifically in the context of India, this flags up the tensions within the terms of reference for the arts heightening our sensitivity towards the operations of ideology within aesthetics.

Brown's study of arts in India qualifies the disparity between modernity and modernism that maybe clear with a Euro-American context but assumes varied significance in the postcolonial context principally as modernisation comes to be equated with westernisation and neo-colonial dependence. Through the breadth of materials examined and their juxtaposition in the carefully designated chapters of the edition, Brown inaugurates a much required and rigorous method for art history in India. This method privileges discourse over other terms of debating arts such as biography or technique -- a move that only a few historians from the subcontinent such as Geeta Kapur have been previously able to successfully make. Brown brings varied media such as Hindi cinema, parallel cinema, architecture, painting, industry and photography onto a common plane from where she investigates and debates their strategies and discursive implications. This fosters cross-disciplinary discussion and overcomes the restrictions of focussing on a single medium. While discussing the works Brown's approach is descriptive and comparative. She points out that the arts discourse in India was affected by the euphoric nation-building project that was itself charged with the quest for asserting a distinct Indian identity on which basis claims were made to India's past, prior to colonialism.

Brown highlights how nationalist assertiveness was problematically regurgitating the varied tropes of the colonial discourse including the orientalist posture. This problematic has two implications: one, it highlights the contingency underpinning the mobilisation of India's history and aesthetics prior to colonialism; and two, it sets up the specific terms of critique for a modernist project in India. The first three chapters of the text focus on issues of authenticity, iconicity and narrativity. Brown repeatedly points out how any claim to or valorisation of a puritanical past is problematic being ahistorical and essentialised, and therefore counterproductive to a critical, modernist sensibility. She analyses specific artworks and while she points out discursive and strategic disparities between a spread of artists ranging from Charles Correa, Satyajit Ray, MF Hussain, Le Corbusier and Krishen Khanna among others, what is wanting in this section of the book is a frontal and more direct discussion of the class backgrounds and social histories of the artists. The discussion of the artworks is detailed and evocative, and it is for this reason that one feels a gap between the artist's body and the work. While Brown consciously steered away from plotting biographies, perhaps the ethnographic life history method that serves to contextualise the individual socio-historically could have been used to evoke the artist-as-person before us. In the endnotes for the chapters, Brown does gesture towards the artists' backgrounds and supporting literature, but a rounded and more critical discussion would clearly draw upon the disparity between the liberal cultural elite and the radical practitioners.

The last two sections of the book, 'Science, Technology, Industry' and 'The Urban' are particularly thoroughgoing and interesting. Art, Science and industry are placed in conversation through comparisons such as between city planning and architecture (for example Le Corbusier's planning for the Chandigarh city), photography and industry. While previously in the text Brown treads into the disparity between folk and high art and the mobilisation of the former within the nationalist discourse, her discussion for example of the Kanvinde Dudhsagar Dairy Complex and its comparison with Corbusier's design of Chandigarh provides a telling critique of modernist primitivism as associated with issues of 'authenticity', 'tradition' and the 'past' within the context of the nation. With respect to these two projects she concludes; 'The dairy complex acknowledges the material needs of local farmers rather than putting them on a pedestal as an example of ostensibly primitive purity. This crucial difference between Corbusian modernism and that exhibited at the Dudhsagar complex allows the dairy factory to represent the mid-century movement of autonomous action in its modernity, serving as a hub for cooperative activity, economic growth and the articulation of industrial progress.' (127) In further examination of photography, painting and cinema addressing the urban context, Brown highlights the human element and its relationship with the urban context. The human is evoked here not in the sense of rationalist enlightenment, but more as a folkloristic category such as say in the discipline of America Folkloristics. Her concluding comments about Nasreen Mohamedi's work provide a succinct insight not only into the position of the human individual in the context of urbanity but the wider condition of postcoloniality -- the theme of text. She says; '... Mohamedi's images show us precisely the difficulty of producing a fully evident, embodied modern Indian subject. We get hints of it, we see evidence of its potential, but it can never be complete or whole. Mohamedi's abstraction, then, provides us a glimpse into the postcolonial condition by articulating how the postcolonial self exists only in glances, shadows, and traces' (p. 122).

Bringing together a range of disparate but linked examples, Brown's text makes for stimulating reading -- an essential text for any student of the arts, postcolonialism, and the interaction of science and arts in the postcolonial context.