Social Science Research Council

“The Making of a Postcolonial Avant-garde: Silpi Chakra and the Politics of Modern Art in India”

Most studies on modern Indian art focus on artists’ oeuvres, isolating art from its larger social and cultural context. Seen through this framework, avant-garde art appears to be an esoteric, almost narcissistic, practice. In contrast, I argue that the avant-garde was so integral to the cultural politics of the Indian nation-state that an understanding of India’s post-Independence cultural modernity remains incomplete without an engagement with avant-garde art practices. Using the Silpi Chakra, a Delhi-based artists’ collective (established in 1948), as a lens, my dissertation will study the processes through which the avant-garde intervened in devising a cultural politics for post-Independence India while participating in the state’s policy of non-alignment during the Cold War.

The artists of the Chakra had originally been part of an anti-colonial art group in Lahore. With Partition in 1947, the Hindu artists of this group migrated to Delhi and subsequently formed the Chakra. Almost immediately, these artists actively involved themselves in building cultural institutions for the new nation-state. Their activities will become a discursive site through which I aim to trace the development of institutions for the production, exhibition, and dissemination of art. My study will not only allow for an understanding of the extent to which avant-garde artists participated in nation-making but will also offer a history of the larger postcolonial public sphere within which the art collective operated. Simultaneously, the Chakra’s origin in Lahore will make it possible to explore the shared, but ignored, history of modern art in India and Pakistan. Opening my research to questions regarding nationality, citizenship, and identity, my dissertation hopes to locate a nuanced genealogy for India’s postcolonial avant-garde. The Chakra is therefore an ideal site for my research. Using the formation of the Chakra as a point of departure, I will conclude with the disintegration of the collective in 1970s.