Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 is an ambitious book comprised of a series of analytical interventions pertaining to modern India’s visual arts and cultural heritage, and it demonstrates Rebecca Brown’s scholarly sophistication in grappling with wide-ranging conceptual and aesthetic criteria. The central thesis concerns the cultivation—among artists, filmmakers, and architects—of a critical engagement with the legacies of colonization and nationalism during the three decades that followed Independence and Partition. This engagement is framed as being relevant to studies of “the postcolonial condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national identity” (2).

The thesis revolves around the efficacy within artistic and heritage discourses of a “paradox”: that modernism and the search for national identity rely upon divergent tenets. In the case of modernism, these tenets included notions of universalism and progress, while in relation to national identity they emphasized notions of cultural distinctiveness, especially particularistic constructions of time, history, heritage, place, indigeneity, aesthetics, etc. In the context of India, artistic modernization required “the modern” to be re-staged in terms that confronted the Eurocentrism of dominant modes of art criticism, while also acknowledging the possibilities for international exchanges: “one finds continued references to a European, unified, universalized modern. . . . One also finds a need to participate in that universal ideal while simultaneously constructing a vision of India. The modernity figured in this book . . . does not reject outright the foundational definitions of modernism” (10).

Initially casting these divergent tenets in a binary formation, Brown returns to the central paradox to consider how, in fact, the dichotomy has been confronted and creatively reworked in wide-ranging visual contexts as a means of “interrupt[ing] the overarching, unified modern” (10). Recognizing possibilities to synthesize both the artistic reconciliation of divergent tenets (i.e., the subjects of the art history under consideration) and an innovative methodology (i.e., a post-national re-writing of “Indian art”), Brown urges the reader to question how and why the aesthetic and political textures of the period must be reappraised. In striving for this, Brown generates a set of interpretive circuits that pertain to themes of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, modernization, and urbanity. These circuits develop a form of cultural criticism, and help identify how the meanings of artworks and visual forms shift as they intersect across the domains of production, dissemination, reception, legitimization, etc. Given their key role in shaping Brown’s engagement with the period, and given her self-confessed selectivity, these themes also lend themselves to wider scrutiny.

In terms of Indian art history, Brown’s methodology is quite original, as I outline below. It fosters an interdisciplinary milieu, destabilizing the borderlands of art history and cultural heritage studies, and redrawing the limits of each field. Although it shapes mostly convincing arguments, it need not necessarily have been tied so closely to the arena of postcolonial studies per se. Active exponents of postcolonial studies could find the work problematic, as it rarely critiques this field, but would surely be impressed by Brown’s analytical subtlety. Although some of the associations may seem contrived, such as the comparison of Raghav Kaneria’s sculptural assemblages of “appropriated materials” and colonial architectural “citations and appropriations” (66–67), the book largely works on account of Brown’s comprehensive knowledge of the shifting art-historical, spatial, and ideological contours of Indian modernity. The limitations of this term (and all that it encapsulates) in addressing the artistic imagination and social subjectivity, as well as art historiography and cultural critique, are lucidly presented.

The volume responds with vigor to the perceived need within the fields of Indian art and postcolonial art history for a systemic and thematic approach that challenges the conventions of artist- or event-centered research. Brown carefully positions her work after Geeta Kapur, who has made important contributions as historian, critic, and curator throughout the late twentieth century (see, for example, Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Delhi: Manohar, 2000), and she avoids any overlap with the focus of Partha Mitter’s recent text, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–47 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). For teachers of undergraduate and graduate courses on decolonization, contextual modernisms, and cultural heritage studies the ideas and examples that unfold throughout Brown’s interpretive circuits are of significant value. They are communicated in a student-friendly fashion (unlike Kapur’s self-consciously postmodernist idiom), and set out new possibilities for intellectual innovation within an established art-historical field.

The choice of disparate case studies generates comparative analyses that offer numerous possibilities for deconstruction and reconfiguration by engaged readers. Each of the interpretive circuits constitutes a chapter, and each chapter elaborates the dialogic methodology that attends to the ongoing conversations between artistic producers, national modernity, modernism, cultural identity, and cultural difference. The method consists of the application of an analytical template across an imaginary field, constituted by one of the chosen themes: “authenticity,” etc. The template provides the structure for purposeful descriptions and valid evaluations. The beginning of each chapter refocuses the central paradox and questions how this may be rethought across the discursive, historical, and creative terrains of the particular theme at hand. In the chapter on “the icon,” for example, these terrains include spiritual heritage, abstract art, minority religious identities, etc. Between three and five illustrative case studies are then annotated, each setting out new questions and sub-themes for further investigation according to their own terms of production and reception, and also in relation to the neighbouring examples and, of course, the central paradox. In the case of chapter 2, once more, these sub-themes include neo-tantric arts, Ganesh Pyne’s inter-faith imagery, and urban Buddhist-style architecture. As such, a tight enmeshment of ideas, images, and provocations occurs, leaving the reader with the general sense that each topic helps to elaborate the next, thereby legitimating Brown’s eclecticism and generating a notion that the main thesis has indeed moved on.

The interplay of art-historical and heritage concerns best occurs in the chapter on “narrative and time” in which works by Krishen Khanna, K. C. S. Paniker, and Satish Gujral inform a wonderfully fluent and far-reaching discussion, encouraging the reader to rethink conventional approaches to the painterly surface and the postcolonial present. Attention has also to be paid to the overall structure of the book, with “the village” (chapter 1: “Authenticity”) and “The Urban” (chapter 5) framing the general flow of ideas. Throughout, however, Brown could have been more conscious of the pitfalls of treating modernism and modernity, and (as an extension of this) “alternative modernism” and “alternative modernity,” more or less as homologies. This is because modernism, as cultural critique, and modernity, as socio-historical process, have generally produced divergent intellectual/artistic discourses. As such, these entities merit particular scholarly treatment. The literature on “alternative modernities” (as produced by Dilip Gaonkar, for example) is quite distinct from that on “alternative modernisms” (as elaborated by R. Siva Kumar, for example). Brown could have better informed her readers why she chose to underplay these distinctions.

As extension of this point, if it were to become as pertinent to fields of postcolonial sociology and history as it seems destined to be for art history and cultural heritage, Brown’s central thesis (as opposed to her analytical approach) would need to be more multidimensional. As each of these topics/circuits is introduced chapter by chapter, distinct possibilities emerge for the central paradox to have been encountered anew, to be rotated and transformed rather than just adjusted to suit the next area. This is not to question the art-historical integrity of the work, but rather to suggest that if the work is to speak to non-art historians, as the author anticipates, that more should have been made of the sociological and historical ramifications of the modernity/modernism problematic. This could have been achieved by absorbing a wider range of approaches to the “paradox” and by being more critical of them. While undoubtedly they merit recognition by art historians, I would suggest that tracts such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) require fuller contextualisation if they are to facilitate, for authors such as Brown, convincing starting points for analyses.

Beyond this, each chapter would have benefitted from including at least one critical text as one of its case studies (rather than these becoming secondary materials through which to understand the visual art or cultural heritage under discussion). This might have enabled the intertextuality of the cultural fields to become more active in the analysis, with the effect of showing how Brown’s own readings relate both to intellectual currents that were contemporary with the visual art of the period and, of course, to postcolonialist and current thinking. More extensive quotation would have also helped.

The scope of the volume stops at 1980, which is a moment concurrent with the emergence of the postcolonialist theory that informs the initial framing of the paradox. So why is a post-1980 textuality brought to the foreground, at the expense of cultural criticism that emerged in the previous decades? Or, more particularly, what is it that makes Kapur’s writings of the 1990s more relevant to the reinterpretation of cultural practices in the 1970s than her earlier engagements with key topics, such as indigenism, as published in Vrishchik (“In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Post-colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting,” Vrishchik 3, nos. 2–3 (1973): 4–14)?

Brown claims that the book will become a starting point for future investigations. In some ways, given its delightful capacity to trace thematic connections across diverse areas of visual culture, it will hopefully inspire scholars in decades to come. But why should it be a starting point? Should not the cultural criticism that allowed shifts to take place in art-historical discourse in India, which Brown follows up and builds upon, inform the collective departure points? And what of Brown’s own starting point: the debate on the figuration of rural topography as signifying national authenticity?

In the context of the artistic representation of village India, a critical-historical understanding of the concept of desi and the politicization of swadeshi (before and beyond Gandhi) would have enriched the tenure of the debate. For in swadeshi (indigenist) discourse, “the rural” and “the subaltern” emerge less in terms of modernity’s other, and more as constitutive of an anti-imperial milieu that informed how and why the search for national authenticity became a live issue in the early to mid-twentieth century. It may be noted that this issue was addressed at this time by cosmopolitan Indian philosophers and sociologists, such as B. N. Seal and R. K. Mookerji, who transformed anthropological thinking at the interface of colonialism and nationalism. Such shifts accommodated the re-signification of “the rural” in ways that would also impact on the representation of “the folk,” “the primitive” and “the tribal,” etc., in Indian modernism. Such heterotopian flows are generally ignored by art historians, resulting in the overdetermination of a dichotomy between colonialist and nationalist positions, as pertaining to topics of primitivism, authenticity, etc., especially before Independence.

Throughout each chapter, the encounters between colonialist and nationalist imaginaries assume structural importance, as fashioning the terms of subsequent artistic and cultural engagements. But Brown largely withholds an intellectual genealogy linking the first batch of artists selected and their own creative and critical heritage. The analysis of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali could, for example, have referred more directly to B. B. Bandyopadhyay’s earlier novel. The first chapter does, however, set out a clear methodological agenda for the rest of the book. But the historical and conceptual lacunae that I mention are not recovered, thereby somewhat limiting the resonance of the volume for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. Keeping in view Brown’s art-historical skill and insight, and her willingness to bring together disparate media into unified frames of analyses, Art for a Modern India should become a key point of reference for future scholars exploring the interface of art-historical and cultural heritage studies.