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Modernisms in

Modernisms in India Supriya Chaudhuri The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms Edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker

Print Publication Date: Dec 2010 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards, Literary Studies - Postcolonial Literature Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199545445.013.0053

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the history of in India. It suggests that though the dis­ tinctions between , modernization, and modernism are particularly complicated in the case of India, they remain crucial to a historical understanding of the ‘modern’ in all its senses. The article argues that the characteristic feature of Indian modernism in In­ dia is that it is manifestly social and historical rather than a hypostasis of the new as in the West. It contends that modernisms in India are deeply implicated in the construction of a secular national identity at home in the world, and in this respect answer a historical need to fashion a style for the modern as it is locally experienced.

Keywords: modernism, India, modernization, modernity, national identity, hypostasis

THE distinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly com­ plicated in the case of India, but remain crucial to a historical understanding of the ‘mod­ ern’ in all its senses. Modernity, as a social and intellectual project, and modernization, as its means, are associated with the influence in India of Europe and of Enlightenment ra­ tionality from the eighteenth century onwards. Modernism, as an aesthetic, is far more limited in period and scope. Nevertheless, just as recent cultural criticism has proposed the existence of ‘alternative modernities’1 not native to the West, so too our attention has been drawn to ‘alternative modernisms’, or ‘modernisms at large’.2 The question of peri­ odicity, as of location, is complicated by the historical fact that modernism as an aesthetic was simultaneously restricted and elitist, and international and democratic. In India, moreover, the impact of the style of European modernism was intensified by the belief that its internationalism suited the experience of modernity and would further the mod­ ernization of public spaces and cultural life. A politics of modernism, setting this percep­ tion against a counter‐argument that saw modernism as an essentially Western mode op­ posed both to tradition and to national or local experience, emerges in the early twentieth century.

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(p. 943) Raymond Williams's phrase ‘the politics of modernism’ may remind us of another problem that he posed and left to some extent unanswered: ‘When was modernism?’3 This is a question that has been asked with particular urgency by Indian cultural critics such as , and, interestingly, Kapur's answer appears to involve a sense of the mod­ ern as a state of freedom: that is, as a set of social and historical conditions. Indeed Ka­ pur argues that ‘The characteristic feature of Indian modernism, as perhaps of many postcolonial modernisms, is that it is manifestly social and historical’—rather than being posited, as in the West, as ‘a hypostasis of the new’.4 Whether or not one agrees with Kapur's description of Indian modernism, Homi Bhabha's notion of the ‘time‐lagged colo­ nial moment’5 within modernity might serve to furnish the argument that modernism too was a late phenomenon in India. In fact, however, this is not the case. Both in respect of the influence of European modernist ideas, and in the development of indigenous mod­ ernisms, India offers striking evidence of the emergence of a new aesthetic in the first decades of the twentieth century. Partly this is because of the cultural work carried out by a highly educated bourgeoisie responsive to the latest international developments; but more importantly, it is rooted in political and social circumstances, in the disputes over a ‘national’ style, and in the struggle to find an authentic modern identity. As Partha Mitter urges in his account of the ‘triumph of modernism’ in , the study of influence, so integral to the discipline of art history, is not finally useful in understanding the complex mechanics of this process.6 It is true that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of a cosmopolitan culture, distributed over great urban centres located all across the globe (a ‘virtual cosmopolis’, in Mitter's phrase7), is conducive to the transmission of ideas: but at the same time the pressure of historical circumstances and political impera­ tives, as well the creative energy of the local, tends to disrupt and reconfigure patterns of ‘reception’.

Art

On 7 May 1921 the Indian poet celebrated his sixtieth birthday in Weimar, and used the opportunity to visit the , where he found the (p. 944) teach­ ing practices of , Johannes Itten, and Georg Muche akin to his own radical educational experiments at Vishva Bharati, the university he had founded at Shantinike­ tan in . Two years previously, he had appointed Stella Kramrisch to teach art histo­ ry there; now, at Tagore's suggestion, a selection of Bauhaus works was shipped to Cal­ cutta to be exhibited, in December 1922, at the fourteenth annual exhibition of the Soci­ ety of Oriental Art, patronized by the Tagores. Among the exhibits (which mysteriously never returned to Europe) were two watercolours by and nine by , as well as works by Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhardt Mar­ cks, Lothar Schreyer, Sophie Körner, and Margit Tery‐Adler, a single painting by the Vorti­ cist , and reproductions of contemporary art from Europe. The exhibition was well received, but, as Mitter shows, what was perhaps even more important about it was that a number of Cubist paintings by Rabindranath's nephew Gaganendranath Tagore and folk‐primitivist works by his niece Sunayani Devi were also shown on this oc­ casion. In earlier decades the example and influence of the Tagores, particularly of

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Rabindranath's other nephew Abanindranath, had been linked to the Orientalism of the , which drew upon Mughal and Rajput miniatures and Japanese brush‐and‐ink techniques to create an anti‐colonial, ‘pan‐Asian’ style of narrative painting welcomed by bourgeois nationalists. By 1922, however, Rabindranath himself appears to have moved away from the Orientalism of the Bengal School, and to be seeking a new di­ rection for his art school at . Even before the December exhibition, the soci­ ologist Benoy Sarkar, exposed to modernist art in and Paris, had initiated a heated dispute in the Orientalist journal Rupam by urging India's artists to adopt the internation­ al avant‐garde's ‘aesthetics of autonomy’ in accordance with their quest for political au­ tonomy.8 In fact much of the cultural debate is carried out in journals such as Rupam, Modern Review, Prabasi, and Bharati. Sarkar and Kramrisch wrote approvingly of Gaganendranath's Cubist fantasies, and Kramrisch's careful critical evaluation of Sunayani's work is still relevant.9

If we admit the happy coincidence of ‘the modernist moment’ with the year 1922, in India as in Europe, it must be noted that it is not the influence of the Bauhaus, but the experi­ ments of Gaganendranath and Sunayani, that initiate a modernist idiom.10 Gaganendranath's , harshly dismissed as trivial by the colonial British critic W. G. Archer,11 must be seen as a radical liberation of narrative art from naturalistic represen­ tation, substituting a dynamic, fluid, mysterious play of light and shade and colour for the relatively static geometry of Analytical Cubism. The titles of his works (p. 945) (The Poet on the Island of the Birds, The House of Mystery, Aladdin and His Lamp, The City of Dvaraka, The Seven Brothers Champa) suggest an imagination steeped in literature and myth, and his experiments with reflected and broken light create a haunting, fantastic world beyond naturalism, even leading towards , as the avant‐garde critic Max Osborn suggested in reviewing one of his paintings at an exhibition of modern Indi­ an art in Berlin in 1923.12 But his Cubism had no immediate following, while his sister Sunayani's adoption of subjects and styles from folk art appears to have been the first step in the constitution of an Indian primitivism.

Mitter associates the emergence of primitivism in Indian art with a number of social and political phenomena: ‘the transformation of elite nationalism into a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi’, the move towards ruralism and environmentalism in the social philosophies of both Gandhi and Tagore, and the admiration of nationalists, including painters of the Bengal School, for the bold simplicity of folk painting, notably that of the , popular artists associated with the area around the Kali Temple in Cal­ cutta.13 There is a difference, however, between these responses to indigenous traditions and the excitement of Picasso, Matisse, or Brancusi over African sculpture, tribal masks, and other non‐Western art. Twentieth‐century artistic primitivism sought to interrogate both the academic Naturalism of the past and a materialist urban culture. While this might take the form of Cubist admiration for the radical visions of tribal art, Abstract Ex­ pressionists such as Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian also drew upon Eastern spiritual traditions in going beyond representation (Malevich was deeply moved by the Indian reli­ gious reformer 's Chicago address in 1893). Disentangling the Orien­ talist strands in these elements of Western modernism is a difficult task, but they do not

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India exactly coincide with the influences upon Indian artists in the 1920s and 1930s. As Geeta Kapur shows, the discourse of modernism in Indian art is marked by a constant dialectic of the national and the modern; the well‐documented ‘turn’ towards folk art, the repre­ sentation of village life, and the environmental primitivism of the period are collectively a form of nationalism at odds, in some ways, with the internationalism of modernist aes­ thetics. At the same time, there are interesting congruities with modernisms elsewhere, and, among artists themselves, both an awareness of the European avant‐garde and a sense of the need to resist, not just its implicitly imperialist cultural norms, but also the totalizing ideology of bourgeois nationalism. This might sometimes be achieved by a re­ course to formalism, while at other times the value of local ‘tradition’ might be asserted. Kapur argues, therefore, that

modernism has no firm canonical position in India. It has a paradoxical value in­ volving a continual double‐take. Sometimes it serves to make indigenist issues and motifs progressive; (p. 946) sometimes it seems to subvert … tradition. Thus para­ doxically placed, modernism in India does not invite the same kind of periodiza­ tion as in the west.'14

This is a valuable reminder, but it is worth recording some features of a temporal history. Sunayani Devi's use of folk motifs and styles arises partly from her exposure to them as a woman in the inner quarters of the family house, though she absorbed an eclectic mix of influences, from Varma to the Bengal School. At the same time, she reproduces the aristocratic–folk paradigm of her uncle Rabindranath Tagore's experiments at Shantinike­ tan. But her distinctive personal vision influenced the work of , the most no­ table painter in the next decades to use the folk idiom for modernist expression. Roy's primitivism involved a deliberate formal simplification, accomplished by an extraordinary mastery of line. Drawing on the Kalighat pat style (a distinctively urban adaptation of the narrative scroll‐painting of rural Bengal) and on the folk art of the region, Roy rooted his art in local artisanal practice, making many copies, selling his work cheaply, and deliberately rejecting the aura of the individual artist in favour of collective labour in his workshop. From his first exhibition in 1931 (inaugurated by Stella Kramrisch) to the height of his reputation in the 1940s, Roy was recognized as a modern master, idolized by the literary avant‐garde including the modernist poets and Sudhindranath Datta, and admired by many Europeans, who saw his work as combining elements of Byzantine religious with Expressionist aesthetics. Mitter speaks of the ruth­ less elimination of detail that enables him to achieve ‘a remarkable modernist brevity’, but notes also that this is not a pure formalism;15 it is an art that criticizes colonial urban culture through a radical valorization of the local and the communitarian.

Rabindranath Tagore's art school at Shantiniketan, presided over by , also generated a new aesthetic discourse rooted in the community. Bose had been associated with at the Indian Society of Oriental Art, had made copies of the Ajanta frescoes, and had been deeply influenced by the Japanese scholar and aesthetician Okakura Kakuzo. But at Shantiniketan he fostered a more eclectic practice, drawing upon folk styles and rejecting the miniaturization of the Bengal School in favour of bold brush‐

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India strokes and outdoor murals. Asked by Mahatma Gandhi to provide the wall panels for the Haripura Congress in 1938, he created a series of vigorous village scenes in contrast to the more decorative mythological pieces later executed for the Kirti Mandir of the Gaek­ wad royal family in Baroda. To his pupils, notably the painter Benodebehari Mukhopad­ hyay and the sculptor , he communicated a strong formal clarity that be­ came the ground of their modernist experiments, especially in representing the lives of the local tribal people, the Santals. Benodebehari, who lost his sight in middle age (he was the subject of a documentary film, The Inner Eye, made by his pupil the director ), combined clear modernist influences (notably Cubism, which he (p. 947) ap­ pears to have used to solve spatial problems) with indigenous traditions and Japanese wash techniques. K. G. Subramanyan, who trained under Nandalal Bose and later taught at Baroda and at Vishvabharati, developed a witty, expressive, figurative style. Ramkinkar Baij, probably the most extraordinary genius fostered at Shantiniketan, came from a hum­ ble family with little formal education, but was from the start drawn to avant‐garde aes­ thetics, producing heroic outdoor sculptures of Santal subjects in ‘rough’ materials like cement, rubble, and concrete, recalling the expressive surfaces of Rodin and Epstein. These sculptures, like many of the murals produced at Shantiniketan, have not lasted well, but provide a remarkable index of subaltern modernism at work, contrasted to the naturalist Expressionism of his contemporary Deviprasad Roy Chowdhury, and influenc­ ing the powerfully expressive metalwork of , using the tribal (Bastar) lost‐wax process.

Rabindranath Tagore himself, however, was a late but radical innovator. Tagore had re­ ceived painting lessons in his youth, but his modernist art appears to have originated in his sixties, and to have emerged from doodles in the manuscripts of his poems, connect­ ing crossed‐out words and lines to produce startling, masklike images that gradually dominate the text. On 2 May 1930 his Argentinian friend Victoria Ocampo organized an exhibition of his works at the avant‐garde Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle in Paris. Mitter spec­ ulates on the influence of Jugendstil graphics, , tribal masks, and totemic ob­ jects on Tagore's art, but sees it finally as an expression of ‘the dark landscape of the psy­ che’.16 Certainly the images he produces have a surreal, brooding, Expressionist intensity that does not readily yield to explanation, providing the dark obverse to the poetic ideal­ ism with which he is conventionally associated. Between 1928 and his death in 1941 he produced some 2,000 paintings, as if choosing a final form of self‐expression, though his last poems are also modernist in theme and style. His interest in the unconscious appears to have developed in the 1920s (he met Freud in in 1926), but much earlier, in 1894, he had already referred to a stream of consciousness (since Tagore is writing in Bengali, it is not clear whether he has read William James's Principles of Psychology (1890), where the phrase first appears in English). Discussing children's rhymes, he asso­ ciates their images with dreams:

In the normal way, echoes and reflections of the universe revolve in our minds in a scattered, disjointed manner. They take on various appearances and shift suddenly from one context to another. As in the atmosphere, roadside dust, flower‐pollen, countless smells, assorted sounds, fallen leaves, water droplets, the vapours of the

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earth—all the ejected, whirling fragments of this turning, agitated universe—float and roam meaninglessly, so is it in our minds. There too, in the ceaseless stream of our consciousness, so many colours, scents and sounds; so many vapours of the imagination, traces of thoughts, broken fragments of language—hundreds of fall­ en, forgotten, discarded components of our practical life—float about, unobserved and purposeless…In one's normal state, sounds and shadows travel across one's mind's sky like dreams…If they could leave an impress of their reflections on (p. 948) some canvas of the unconscious mind, we would find many resemblances to the rhymes we are discussing.17

In his doodles, drawings, and paintings, Tagore appears to reject the ‘authoritarian’ domi­ nation of the mind over the matter of thought, allowing expression to the dreamlike, or nightmarish, ‘shadowy mirages’ otherwise lost to consciousness. Whatever the final quali­ ty of his work, produced compulsively, without much formal training, it is uncompromis­ ingly modernist in style, involving a total rejection of the aestheticism of the Bengal School and contemporary academic naturalism.

Away from Bengal, however, another cosmopolitan modernism was brought into being by the Indo‐Hungarian painter Amrita Sher‐Gil, trained in Paris but choosing a professional career in India. Sher‐Gil's decision to return to India and to paint images of rural life, es­ pecially village women, appears to have been based on a near‐epiphanic sense of the ‘infi­ nite submission and patience’ of her subjects, in whom she located the true spirit of India.18 Her primitivism uses the languages of neo‐ and the Post‐Impres­ sionism of Gauguin, and owes very little to indigenous traditions, though she admired Ba­ sohli painting. But it creates an Indian modernism far in advance of its time, whose lega­ cy is only now being understood (though it should be said that her art had many admirers during her life, including Jawaharlal Nehru). Her beauty, genius, sexual liaisons, uncon­ ventional behaviour, traumatic personal history, and tragic death at the age of 28 have made her life itself an object of iconic fascination (commemorated, for example, in film, photomontage, and installation art by her nephew the artist Vivan Sundaram). Geeta Ka­ pur compares her to the Mexican artist , in respect of both the life and of the work, and the conversion of the one into the other.19 The profound melancholy of her paintings, and their use of colour and line, do not abandon representation, but direct it to­ wards the expression of an abstract aesthetic emotion.

Modernism is self‐consciously professed only in the 1940s, by a number of artists' groups: the Calcutta Group (formed in the shadow of the 1943 famine), the Progressive Painters' Association of Madras (1944), the Progressive Artists' Group of Bombay (1947), the Shilpi Chakra (1949), and the Triveni Kala Sangam (1951). Many of the artists were Marxists, and had links with the communist 's Theatre Association and with ‘progressive’ writers; several trained in Paris (though went to Mexico). Prominent in the Calcutta Group were the sculptor Prodosh Das Gupta and the painters , Nirode Mazumdar, Sunil Madhav Sen, Gopal Ghosh, Gobardhan Ash, Chit­ taprasad Bhattacharya, Zainul Abedin, and Somnath Hore. The last three, as communists, produced a socially (p. 949) committed, progressive art of the people, especially through

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India images of the famine, and, in the case of Hore, woodcuts, sculptures, and sketches of the Tebhaga land movement. The Calcutta Group held a joint exhibition with the Bombay Pro­ gressives in 1950, but was gradually eclipsed by the latter, which included Maqbool Fida Husain (who began as a painter of Bombay film posters), Francis Newton Souza, K. H. Ara, S. K. Bakre, H. K. Gade, and S. H. Raza, later joined by V. S. Gaitonde and . Influential in their development were three refugees from Hitler's Germany, the critics Walter Langhammer and Rudy van Leyden, and the collector Emmanuel Sch­ lesinger. Unfortunately, the group broke up, and many artists (though not Husain) went abroad. and of Bombay, Ram Kumar of the Delhi Shilpi Chakra, and Nirode Mazumdar and Paritosh Sen of the Calcutta Group trained un­ der the Cubist André Lhote in Paris; Souza went to , as did .

Husain and Souza are possibly the most celebrated and flamboyant of Indian modernists, ceaselessly disrupting the tendency of the national to absorb and ‘contain’ the modern. Husain's exploration of popular and religious icons has drawn the wrath of fundamental­ ists, yet his art is deeply tied in with the self‐understanding of the nation. Souza chose metropolitan exile and aesthetic autonomy, continuing in an Expressionist style. Sabavala continued in Synthetic Cubism; Raza, Nirode Mazumdar, and K. C. S. Paniker were drawn to Tantric geometry, and V. S. Gaitonde to minimalist abstraction. But perhaps the purest is to be seen in the much later work of , only one of a number of exceptional women artists of the 1970s and 1980s, including , Arpita Singh, Arpana Caur, and Nalini Malani. It is in this context that Kapur seeks to interrogate the formal regimes of modernism in India, drawing our attention to the impossibility of neat periodization and to ‘the fraught social identity’ of the Indian artist in the ‘conceptually open, half‐empty space of modernity’.20

Architecture

In architecture, even more than in art, questions of modernity and modernization are inti­ mately linked with modernist aesthetics, no doubt because modification of the built envi­ ronment can scarcely be treated as a problem of style alone. In the early twentieth centu­ ry, the ‘classicism’ of British imperial architecture was contested by a variety of other styles: the revivalist Indo‐Saracenic; the primitivist‐folk adopted by leaders like Tagore and Gandhi; a revivalist school calling itself the Modern Indian Architecture Movement; the incipient modernism of and its adaptation as Indo‐Deco; and international modernism. These developments could scarcely have (p. 950) come about without the growth of the architectural and engineering professions, and the work of individuals and private firms as well as state public works departments.

The most celebrated expression of imperial power, using a modified classical style, is to be seen in the City Beautiful plan of conceived in 1914 by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens. Lutyens fell out with his co‐architect Sir Herbert Baker, and others shared in the planning, but Lutyens's Delhi remains one of the major architectural (and imperial) state­ ments of the twentieth century. It is one point in a trajectory that has, at its other end,

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Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's post‐Independence choice of (Charles‐ Édouard Jeanneret‐Gris) to build the modernist city of Chandigarh in the 1950s. Justifying his choice at a seminar on architecture in Delhi in 1959, Nehru said:

It is the biggest example in India of experimental architecture…You may squirm at the impact, but it makes you imbibe new ideas…what I like above all this is the creative approach—not being tied down to what has been done by our forefathers and the like, but thinking out in new terms; trying to think in terms of light and air, and ground and water and human beings, not in terms of rules and regulations laid down by our ancestors. Therefore Chandigarh is of enormous importance, re­ gardless of whether something succeeds or does not…It is a thing of power com­ ing out of a powerful mind, not a flat mind or a mind which is a mirror, and that too not a very clear mirror reflecting somebody else's mind. There is no doubt that Le Corbusier is a man with a powerful creative type of mind.21

Nevertheless, it would be a gross simplification to see the history of decolonization as a simple movement from Lutyens to Le Corbusier. Much intervened between the two, in­ cluding other forms of modernism. In respect of urban planning and reconstruction, moreover, City Beautiful ideals, garden city concepts, or ruthless modernist notions of ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ were equally out of harmony with the tra­ ditional mixed‐use layout of Indian cities, as Henry Vaughan Lanchester found in Madras. The most thoughtful responses to this problem in terms of urban design were those of the British sociologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes, who had met Swami Vivekananda in 1900 and later grew close to Tagore. Geddes visited India a number of times between 1914 and 1928, spending nearly ten years in the country, and producing numerous stud­ ies that advocated an empiricist approach to town planning, retaining mixed‐use areas.

Surendranath Kar, a cousin of Nandalal Bose, designed five houses for Tagore in Shanti­ niketan which drew variously upon pan‐Asian (primarily Japanese), traditional Indian, and primitivist‐folk sources of inspiration. Tagore's philosophical influence is everywhere evi­ dent, and colonial architecture is rejected for a local and nationalist aesthetics, especially in the mud house called Shyamali. Mahatma Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati near Ahmed­ abad and the Sevagram at Wardha, built in the 1920s and 1930s, also employed simple lo­ cal materials (in the ‘sustainable environments’ spirit) to create an ascetic, rural atmos­ phere. Gandhi's belief in ‘the (p. 951) frugality of means to achieve ends’22 might evoke the functionality of Bauhaus design, which certainly left its mark on Tagore. Gandhi's in­ fluence extends to the modernist architect 's design for the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya (1958–63) near the Sabarmati Ashram: an understated open‐grid structure with pyramidal roofs showing Le Corbusier's influence, but in a vernacular id­ iom.

But the more visible struggle over India's architectural destiny was being fought between the revivalist and nationalist Modern Indian Architecture Movement, led by Sris Chandra Chatterjee, and a somewhat more eclectic group of modernists. In 1913 E. B. Havell and A. K. Coomaraswamy, together with , Alfred Austin, and others, had

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India appealed unsuccessfully to the Secretary of State for India, the Marquess of Crewe, to al­ low Indian craftsmen a share in the design of New Delhi. The Modern Indian Architecture Movement sought to incorporate traditional Indian motifs in the new architecture of the time, as, for example, in the nationalist Banaras Hindu University, founded in 1916. Sris Chandra Chatterjee was particularly hostile to art deco, which emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as a fashionable new style imported from Europe.

The most dramatic art deco buildings in India are cinema houses, palaces of pleasure for the new bourgeoisie as well as for a growing population of urban workers: the Roxy, Metro, and Elite in Calcutta; the Eros, Metro, and Regal in Bombay; the Mayfair in Luc­ know; and several others. A large number of art deco homes and apartment blocks were built in Bombay in the 1930s for wealthy traders and property developers, and the New India Assurance Building (1935) is a good example of the strengths of the style. Lanches­ ter built an Indo‐Deco palace (1927–44) for Maharajah Umaid Singh in Jodhpur, and Wal­ ter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who had collaborated with in Chicago, produced several Indo‐Deco designs. Griffin, a theosophist who sym­ pathized with , felt that international modernism needed to be modi­ fied to suit India, and submitted a number of innovative designs which were unfortunate­ ly not executed in full. He died in Lucknow in 1937.

Modernism in the 1930s is largely imported, with some notable Indian exceptions such as Atmaram Gajjar and G. B. Mhatre. The ‘International Style’, launched in New York through an exhibition at the Museum of in 1932 (and so named in the exhibi­ tion catalogue by H.‐R. Hitchcock and ) celebrated the global reach of mod­ ernism, which was architecturally expressed through volume, balance, and the stripping away of ornament. By the 1930s, modernists employing the International Style such as Eckart Muthesius, Willem Marinus Dudok, , and Otto Koenigsberger were at work in India. Muthesius was engaged in 1930 to build the Manik Bagh Palace in Indore, an explicitly modernist structure with interiors furnished by E. J. Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, and Le Corbusier himself. Dudok, who had absorbed the neoplasticism of in the Netherlands, designed the Garden Theatre and Light­ house Cinema in Calcutta. (p. 952) Raymond had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright for eigh­ teen years, and came to India from Japan to design, together with the woodcraftsman George Nakashima and François Sumner, a Czech disciple of Le Corbusier, the pure mod­ ernist Golconda building of the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Otto Koenigsberger, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany who trained under Bruno Taut, produced mod­ ernist buildings in Mysore and , including the Dining Hall of the Indian Insti­ tute of Science.

Just before and after Independence (1947), however, modernism was adopted as the style of modernity in a conscious inflection of nationalism. Architecture, in the spirit of Le Corbusier's ‘Architecture or Revolution’,23 was absorbed into the project of rebuilding the Indian identity: notably, of course, by Nehru, who was acquainted with the new genera­ tion of architects and supportive of modernist plans. With assistance from Matthew Now­ icki and Indian engineers, Albert Mayer (whom Nehru knew personally) prepared a plan

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India for the new city of Chandigarh in 1949–50. Otto Koenigsberger's contemporary design for another capital, Bhubaneswar, was not fully executed, but Chandigarh remains a monu­ ment to the spirit of modernism. Le Corbusier, his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry were among the team appointed to develop Mayer's plan. By this time Le Corbusier had moved away from his early, Gropius‐inspired work to a more rugged, ‘honest’ style using exposed concrete (béton brut) and emphasizing geometric forms such as the cube, the cylinder, and the cone (the characteristic pilotis are also in evidence). Vi­ sually Chandigarh is an impressive departure from other Indian cities, exciting most Indi­ ans with the boldness and monumentality of its abstract forms and patterns, though dis­ playing also the totalizing tendencies of international modernism. While the capital com­ plex offered a liberating sense of space realized in reinforced concrete, Jeanneret, Drew, and Fry contributed exemplary brick masonry housing. Le Corbusier was invited to exe­ cute plans for a number of houses in Ahmedabad (the Millowners' Association Building, the Museum, and three residential houses, one of which was not built), providing impor­ tant lessons to young Indian architects in innovative solutions to complex problems of de­ sign.

Le Corbusier is perhaps the architect who, in terms of both modernist statement and en­ during influence, has left the deepest impact upon twentieth‐century Indian architecture. Unfortunately, much of this impact was lost in unimaginative mimicry. But even before Le Corbusier's arrival, Indian architects were using a modernist vocabulary: G. B. Mhatre employed art deco, and a number of architects trained in Britain, Europe, or America brought international modernism home. , who had worked for Gropius, de­ signed the New Secretariat Building (1944–54) in Calcutta under clear Bauhaus influence, as well as the Gandhi Ghat in Barrackpore (1948). Rahman is said to have submitted a pure Bauhaus boxlike design for the Rabindra Bhavan (1961) in New Delhi, but Nehru rejected it as ‘nonsense’ and Rahman's graceful modification, with some Indian features, is an (p. 953) important new statement.24 Rahman designed other mod­ ernist buildings and memorials in New Delhi, such as the General Post Office and the Mazar of Maulana Azad, as did his successor in the Central Public Works Department, J. M. Benjamin, architect of the Delhi High Court. Gropius also influenced the work of A. P. Kanvinde, who designed the ATIRA building in Ahmedabad (inaugurated by Nehru in 1954) and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (1959–65), introducing important features widely copied elsewhere. Several other architects who trained abroad, such as Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, Bennett Pithavadian, Charles Correa, Hasmukh C. Patel, Ram Shar­ ma, and Piloo Mody, show elements of Gropius's influence, but often (like Pithavadian) di­ verge from it. Others who trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, like Gautam and Gira Sarab­ hai (who designed the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad), use a gentler empiri­ cist vocabulary. The Sarabhais commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the Calico Mills Office in Ahmedabad: the design exists but was not executed. They were instrumen­ tal in Louis I. Kahn's coming to Ahmedabad, where he designed the Indian Institute of Management (1962–74); he also designed the National Assembly building in , now , and made preliminary plans for Gujarat's new capital, Gandhinagar.25 Other modernist influences, such as that of , can be seen in the extraordinary

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Apsara Cinema building (1968), designed by Yahya Merchant, in Bombay. Architecturally, northern India was more receptive to modernism than the south.

Tracing the history of modern Indian architecture, Lang, Desai, and Desai argue that ‘If the first generation of Indian Modernists owed an intellectual and formal debt to the Bauhaus, the second, highly productive between 1960 and 1980, owes much to Le Cor­ busier.’26 Le Corbusier's influence is evident in the Shri Ram Centre (1966–9) in New Del­ hi, designed by Shiv Nath Prasad, and in the Institute of Indology (1957–62), designed by Balkrishna V. Doshi, in Ahmedabad. The influence of Wright and Kahn produced a more ‘organic’ modernist architecture sensitive to local contexts. 's pupil Joseph Stein taught at the Bengal Engineering College before setting up a practice in Delhi, where he designed the India International Centre (1959–62) and the Ford Foundation building (1969). A modernism adapted to context may be seen in M. M. Rana's Nehru Memorial Library (1968–9) and Anant Raje's design for the Indian Statistical Institute in the same city, as well as B. V. Doshi's plan for the Indian Institute of Management in Ban­ galore (1963; based on the city of Fatehpur Sikri), and his School of Architecture (1967– 8) in Ahmedabad, and some work by Bernard Kohn. Indeed, Doshi, after training in Bom­ bay, worked under Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, and then with Louis Kahn. He was co‐director, with Bernard Kohn, of the School of Architecture at the Centre for Environmental Planning, Ahmedabad, founded in 1962. He has since then established an international reputation, like Charles Correa, and (p. 954) both have evolved distinct styles based on their exploration of structure, materials, and volume.

Modernist architecture in India is identified with the Nehruvian period, which witnessed decisive foreign interventions as well as the emergence of a modern Indian idiom. Ideo­ logically, it has been criticized for its universalist disdain for local conditions (heat, dust, damp, materials, and maintenance), its ‘ugly’ reinforced concrete fantasies, its neglect of the street, and its insensitive regulation of private and public spaces. The ‘messy’, mixed‐ use character of Indian built environments was never accommodated within the totalizing vision of modernist design, however democratic it might have been in intent. Looking back on his work in the late 1980s, Doshi said that while he had learnt from Le Corbusier to observe and react to climate, tradition, function, structure, economy, and landscape, the buildings he had designed now seemed to him unsuited to their contexts.27 Modernism nevertheless produced some exceptional architectural statements in India. Architects like Doshi and Correa evolved by responding to environmental needs, antici­ pating later experiments (for example, by ) in a ‘sustainable’ vernacular con­ servation ethic.

Literature

In their recourse to the verbal, literature and cinema may seem to articulate more clearly the ideological struggles within Indian modernism—most of all, the apparent lack of an avant‐garde noted with irritation by Geeta Kapur.28 If we accept Bürger's distinction be­ tween , which dehumanizes and dehistoricizes the aesthetic domain to

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India overvalue the sign, and the avant‐garde, which questions the institution of art itself, it is clear that the historical circumstances in which modernism was experienced in India made it more likely that the contestation would be at the level of material content, or the possibility of representation, rather than form per se. The emergence of the modern liter­ atures of India, from the nineteenth century onwards, was itself deeply implicated in the constitution of the nation by its regions. Each of these literatures performs its own time‐ lagged transactions with modernity, in some cases engaging with the ideology of Euro­ pean modernism, in others producing its own formal solutions to the problems of disor­ der, violence, and mimetic lack. The break with the pre‐modern, already experienced as a form of trauma by the colonial subject, and requiring the reconstitution of vernacular lit­ erary traditions, is compounded in the twentieth century by a new sense of the gap be­ tween urban and rural, literary and oral cultures, split further by caste and class divi­ sions, and by (p. 955) political ideologies. Modernism's obsession with the problem of the subject is one response to such traumas, but not the only one. Most modern Indian litera­ tures have already experienced a ‘progressive’ phase when socialist realism is seen as the immediate solution to problems of both style and content in art. The harsh lessons of such realism may themselves point towards the subject's existentialist isolation and the inade­ quacy of representation: as John Frow points out, modernism simply expresses ‘the inter­ nal contradictions of realism’.29 In India, realism never loses its purpose, and modernism can never be experienced simply as a formalist alternative; it is tied in with the terror and violence that in Europe is claimed by the avant‐garde, but is here made the property of the modern itself. Since India has at least twenty substantial literatures in the twentieth century, this discussion is principally confined to four: Bengali from the east, from the north, Marathi from the west, and from the south.

Bengali was experienced as a reaction to Tagore, though Tagore's in­ fluence (especially that of his late poetry) was inescapable. The moment of departure was marked by the foundation of a literary journal, Kallol (‘The Surge’), in 1923. Since the nineteenth century, the arts in Bengal had been dominated by the culture of the literary journal, acting as a powerful vehicle for ideas transmitted from Europe as well as for in­ digenous critical thought. Kallol's modernist and experimental outlook was later endorsed by Kali o Kalam (‘Pen and Ink’, 1927), edited by and others, Pragati (‘Progress’, 1928), with as one of the editors, and more importantly Sudhindranath Datta's Parichay (‘Identity’, 1931), Sanjay Bhattacharya's Purbasha (‘The East’, 1932), and Buddhadeva Bose's Kabita (‘Poetry’, 1935). Nevertheless, the first gen­ eration of modernists is still known as the Kallol generation, and included , Sudhindranath Datta, Buddhadeva Bose, Premendra Mitra, Bishnu Dey, and ; all, except the last, communicating a distinctively urban modernity, and experiment­ ing with the prose poem, vers libre, and new metrical patterns. The Marxist Samar Sen broke conspicuously with the romantic images of Tagore's generation, and ultimately abandoned poetry altogether. Datta, Bose, and Dey were perhaps the most scholarly, di­ rectly influenced by European modernism, and translating extensively from the European languages. Premendra Mitra wrote remarkable prose fiction as well as poetry. The most original of these poets was, however, Jibanananda Das, exploring the phantasmagorias of

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India the everyday in metaphors that transform the familiar into the uncanny, the much‐loved Bengal countryside into a mysterious and haunted landscape.

Modernist prose writers of the period would include Manik Bandyopadhyay, who wrote the novels Padmanadir Majhi (‘The Boatmen of the River Padma’, 1936) and Putulnacher Itikatha (‘The Story of the Puppet ’, 1936), as well as exceptional short stories; Sati­ nath Bhaduri (Jagari, ‘The Vigil’, 1965), Advaita Mallabarman (Titas Ekti Nadir Nam, ‘Titas is the Name of a River’, 1962), and Kumar Majumdar (p. 956) (Antarjali , ‘Final Passage’, 1962, and Nim Annapurna, ‘Bitter Rice’, 1965). In the next generation, women poets and novelists such as Mahashveta Devi evolved radically oppositional mod­ ernisms rooted in subaltern experience. In theatre, the New Drama movement initiated by the Indian People's Theatre Association, the culture wing of the Communist Party of In­ dia, produced social‐impact plays in the 1940s (including 's ‘Harvest’, 1944), and was followed by the epic (though not actually Brechtian) theatre of and the avant‐garde plays (Third Theatre) of Badal Sircar in the 1960s. Both the content and the period of literary modernism are made problematic, however, by an incomplete inventory of this kind. While writers of the Kallol generation make an unmis­ takable modernist statement in terms of ideological departures and formal experiment, many of the lessons of modernism are carried over to avant‐garde poets of the next gen­ eration such as Shakti Chattopadhyay, associated with the journal Krittibas (1953). On the other hand, the of Manik Bandyopadhyay, , and Advaita Mallabarman links them to their great contemporaries Bibhutibhusan and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Perhaps it is only a certain radical intention, as well as the hypothesis of a beginning, that enables us to mark a modernist trajectory (or moment) in a literary his­ tory that subsumes modernism into a larger cultural process.

In Hindi, modernism is inaugurated in 1943 with the publication of Tar Saptak (‘Upper Octave’), a collection of poems by seven poets edited with an important preface by Ajneya (S. H. Vatsyayan), setting out a new prayogvadi (‘experimental’) poetics, breaking with an earlier pragativadi (‘progressive’) literature (as practised, for example, by Premchand). Ajneya, acquainted with the New Critics and European modernism, himself writing a bookish and literary Hindi, edited the journal Pratik (‘Image’) from 1947 onwards, inspir­ ing the poets of Nayi Kavita (‘New Poetry’: a journal by that name began to appear in 1954) and advocating a formalist concentration on poetic structure, rather than on social or historical problems. This formalist universalism (further enshrined in Dusra Saptak, ‘Second Octave’, 1951) was subsequently rejected by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, whose work had appeared in Tar Saptak, but whose intensely self‐conscious, anguished poetic voice abandons the high modernism of Europe and America for experimental, radical, sometimes surreal sequences that draw equally upon the Bhakti tradition of late medieval India as upon other literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Myth is an important resource in the constitution of a modernist critique, both for Muktibodh and for Dharamvir Bharati in his apocalyptic play based on the epic (‘Age of Blindness’, 1954), Ajneya's novels, such as Shekhar: Ek Jivani (‘Shekhar: A Life’, 1941– 4) and Nadi Ke Dvip (‘Islands in the Stream’, 1951), also emphasized the heroic isolation and alienation of the modern individual. But the chaste Sanskritized Hindi of Ajneya and

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India his followers linked modernism to elite culture: in fiction, especially, the realist, ‘progres­ sive’ tradition of Premchand and Phanishwar Renu still carried greater weight. The split between the literary communities of Hindi and , effected in the late nineteenth cen­ tury, led to unresolved tensions: the most (p. 957) striking modernist fiction was in fact produced in Urdu, by writers like Sa'adat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, and Qurratulain Haider.

Marathi poetry was decisively altered by the appearance of B. S. Mardhekar's Kahi Kavita (‘Some Poems’, 1947), a mordant series of reflections on post‐war disillusionment and hu­ man degradation, using a radically reduced metrical system. Mardhekar was prosecuted for obscenity and remained a controversial figure until his death in 1956. Unmistakably influenced by the modernism of Europe and America, his was also a lonely, self‐critical, auto‐reflexive poetic voice, looking back to the ‘saint’ poetry of an earlier period. Too sin­ gular to start a movement, Mardhekar must nevertheless be placed beside poets like P. S. Rege, G. V. Karandikar, and Sharatchandra Muktibodh in the textual space of Marathi modernism. Sharatchandra Muktibodh, a less alienated voice than Mardhekar, also wrote novels of social commitment in the 1950s, at a time when modernist narrative was being explored by Gangadhar Gadgil and Arvind Gokhale (and in the next decade by Bhalchan­ dra Nemade), and , the most significant modern Marathi dramatist, had begun producing ‘experimental’ theatre in a modernist idiom, but without abandoning re­ alism. In the same period, Arun Kolatkar and , bilingual poets who wrote in both Marathi and English, begin to create a remarkable new modernist œuvre, densely al­ lusive, rooted in the experiences of urban loneliness, the body, and sexuality. Chitre, who translated the medieval devotional poets Tukaram and Jnanadeva into English and Baude­ laire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé into Marathi, spoke of the profound influence these exer­ cises had on his work. The bilingual poetics of Chitre and Kolatkar (comparable to that of in Oriya and English or Kamala Das in English and Malayalam) should, simply because of their location, be linked to the English poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, perhaps the most linguistically inventive, wide‐ranging, and flexible modernist writing in from the 1950s.

Marathi literary culture was thrown into radical ferment in the late 1950s by the formal emergence of Dalit Sahitya, the writing of the oppressed (previously ‘untouchable’) castes. Social protest became inseparable from an avant‐garde aesthetic seeking to radi­ calize the very language of utterance. Dalit writing questioned not just the institutions of art, but a history of violence and injustice that had denied representation, identity, and personhood to the dispossessed. In consequence, the rejection of a formal literary style is only one of the moves that can be adopted by writers attempting to record previously un­ acknowledged forms of experience. From the unsparing realism of Baburao Bagul in the late 1960s to the deliberate recourse to the language and experiences of street and broth­ el in Namdeo Dhasal's Golpitha (1973), and through the work of Arjun Dangle, Arun Kam­ ble, Waman Nimbalkar, Tryambak Sapkale, Hira Bansode, Daya Pawar, Lakshman Mane, or Sharankumar Limbale, Dalit writing rubs literature against the grain, roughening its

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India texture and blurring distinctions of voice and genre, autobiography and fiction, lyric and narrative.

As a literature of difference, Dalit writing in Marathi—however controversial the category itself has subsequently become—offers an alternative modernism not (p. 958) amenable to the ideology of the aesthetic. In Malayalam, too, the representation of the underclass marks the real moment of departure from traditional poetry, especially in the work of the Ezhava poet Kumaran Asan in the early twentieth century (his epic fragment Duravastha, ‘Misery’, 1923, is particularly significant). But a modernist style emerges several decades later, with 's long poem Kurukshetram (1960), a complex, free‐verse treatment of the exhaustion and violence of the age, drawing upon myth in the same spir­ it as Eliot's . The spirit of the new poetry was sustained by periodicals like Paniker's Kavita (‘Kerala Poetry’) and M. Govindan's Samiksha (‘Survey’); poets like Govindan himself, N. N. Kakkad, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, K. G. Shankara Pillai, and K. Satchidanandan employed, between the 1960s and 1980s, an unmistakably mod­ ernist idiom in treating of individual alienation in a rapidly changing culture. Satchi­ danandan, a leftist intellectual who translated Latin American, African, and European po­ etry, has continued to experiment with form and language. It was also in the 1960s that modernist fiction began to distance itself from the social realism of the great ‘progres­ sive’ writers Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, notably in the work of O. V. Vijayan, Zacharia, and Madhavikutty (Kamala Das).

Cinema

Cinema as a form is modernist almost by definition, yet there is a lag between the high period of international modernism in all the arts and its accommodation in Indian cinema. In the auteur films of Satyajit Ray, , and during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a language appears assured and self‐evident. In fact it is confined to a single region of India (Bengal), and it is only in the 1970s and 1980s that an alternative film movement emerges through the work of such directors as , Gopalakrishnan, Kumar Shahani, , G. Aravindan, Saeed Mirza, , M. S. Sathyu, , and : a belatedness that inevitably compromises their ‘modernist’ legacy.

The project of modernity might be seen as Ray's principal cinematic subject, from the time he apprenticed himself to when he came to India in 1949 to make The River, through his own first film, (‘Song of the Road’, 1955), to his last, Agantuk (‘The Stranger’, 1991). In this he is an heir to Tagore (he had studied art at Shantiniketan with Benodebehari Mukhopadhyay), absorbing not just the moral and na­ tionalist imperative of this examination, but also a sense of its delicacy, even peril, espe­ cially in respect of its treatment within a global aesthetic of modernism. Ray's cinema is taken to be neo‐realist, on the model of Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1947), and the ‘humanism’ of his art has been as widely celebrated as his cosmopolitanism. Yet from the point when, in 1948, he began to educate the viewing public about the film medium, he

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India unobtrusively noted his own debts to the (p. 959) modernist masters: Truffaut's tracking camera, Kurosawa's editing, Godard's soundtrack.30 Siegfried Kracauer saw Pather Pan­ chali and (‘The Unvanquished’, 1956), as classic examples of the modernist use of memory to disrupt chronological sequence,31 though in fact Ray departs from classical narrative only in the city films of the 1970s, which steep themselves in the logic of the street. Ray's modernism is most evident in his use of the honesty of the lens to enact a se­ ries of extremely complex negotiations with the ideology of realism (which, we should re­ call, has no real history in Indian cinema). Instead of a collection of objects to be grasped and represented, Ray's ‘realist’ world is a succession of enactments, where camera angle, the duration of the shot, attitude, voice, gesture, and soundtrack compose and recompose the subjectivity of the viewer. Insistently, he questioned what film as a medium could do, in respect of both producing illusion and dissolving it (as in Devi, ‘The Goddess’, 1960).

Ray's contemporaries Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen commenced their careers with the communist Indian People's Theatre Association, a background that may account to some extent for their bolder and more gestural cinematic language. Ghatak's (‘Citi­ zen’) was in fact completed before Ray's Pather Panchali in 1953, but released posthu­ mously in 1977. His own experience of the uprooting and exile caused by the went into the trilogy of (‘The Cloud‐Capped Star’, 1960), (‘E Flat’, 1961), and Subarnarekha (1962), producing an uneven, sometimes raw, sometimes melodramatic, but powerfully original cinematic corpus, constantly experi­ menting with the composition of frames, the intersection of the mechanical and the hu­ man where film begins. Surprisingly, it was Ghatak, the most unconventional artist of the three, who died at the age of 50, who left students (from the Film Institute at ) to carry on his legacy. Mrinal Sen's work in the cinema is arguably more varied, from Neel Akasher Nichey (‘Under the Blue Sky’, 1958) to Khandahar (‘The Ruins’, 1983) and be­ yond. His mature work, however, beginning from the Calcutta films of the 1970s, was both political and self‐consciously modernist, using fragmented or double narratives and repeatedly disrupting the illusionist properties of the image and the complacencies of class.

The art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, and its heirs in the alternative cinema movement, require us to address a central problem of modernism: the place of the popular. Indian popular cinema, both in Hindi, the medium of the ‘Bombay film’, and in other regional languages, clearly dominates the cultural space of modernity. In its various forms (mytho­ logical, social, sentimental, melodramatic) it comes to represent the commoditized mass culture against which art cinema defines itself, and allows for a visible break between modernist high art and popular entertainment provided by the ‘culture industry’, to use Adorno's phrase. It is arguable that in India this break is not visible in any other cultural sphere to the same degree as it is in cinema (with the possible exception of music); yet it is, we should note, the creation (p. 960) of a highly restricted development that takes place from the 1950s onwards. In earlier film history it is non‐existent, and postmodern cinema has already lost the battle against commoditization, though it may effect its own transactions between high and low, elite and popular, the intellectuals and the masses. In consequence, some would argue for a critical reassessment of the popular cinema and

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Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 September 2020 Modernisms in India mass culture of the 1950s and 1960s as contested territory, not so much an oppositional space as a site of struggle and subversion, challenging art cinema's claim to modernist authenticity.

Conclusion

Modernisms in India are deeply implicated in the construction of a secular national iden­ tity at home in the world, and in this respect answer a historical need to fashion a style for the ‘modern’ as it is locally experienced. But the choice is itself ideologically deter­ mined by notions of the ‘secular’, the ‘modern’, the ‘national’, and the ‘local’. How pre­ cisely are these to be understood? The apparently ‘transnational’ character of mod­ ernism, its ‘break’ with a past experienced only as fragment, ruin, or decay (the ‘facies hippocratica of history’, to use Benjamin's phrase about allegory32), its preoccupation with existential loneliness and anguish, its abandoning of naturalism and narrative for an abstract, experimental, non‐sequential aesthetic order, might indeed appear to fit the ex­ periences of a colonial urban culture. But that ‘fit’ is not simply a matter of the transmis­ sion of a set of aesthetic practices, nor is mimicry the end of the exercise. Mitter com­ ments acerbically, and with justice, on the discourse of authority, hierarchy, and power in the consideration of non‐Western modernisms, making them appear merely derived or im­ itative.33 Yet even in the case of the educated bourgeoisie, the modernism of the West contends with a variety of local responses to the intolerable pressures of tradition, colo­ nial authority, and social oppression, producing completely new modernist projects. Modernism's effort to locate the means of release in a new aesthetic order is historically the most critical element of its enterprise (in a sense, implicating the avant‐garde in a to­ talizing vision of the world remade by art). In India, that aesthetic order must carry, at different locations and at different times, other burdens as well: the idea of a secular cul­ ture, the project of the nation, the reaffirmation of regional or local identity, the self‐ex­ pression of the oppressed, and the sense of a ‘speeded‐up’, intensely concentrated, time.

Notes:

(1) See Dilip Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture, 11 (1999), 1–18.

(2) See Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005), 6–18, esp. 11–12. The reference is to Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Min­ nesota Press, 1996).

(3) Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’, New Left Review, 1/175 (May–June 1989), 48–52, reconstructed from a lecture Williams delivered at the University of Bristol in 1987; repr. in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Con­ formists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989).

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(4) Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in In­ dia (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), 298.

(5) Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 250.

(6) Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant‐Garde, 1922– 1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 7–8. I am indebted to Mitter's account for what fol­ lows.

(7) Ibid. 11.

(8) See Benoy Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, Rupam, 9 (Jan. 1922), 8–24, and ‘Agastya’ [O. C. Gangoly], ‘Aesthetics of Young India: A Rejoinder’, Rupam, 9 (Jan. 1922), 24–7; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 16.

(9) Stella Kramrisch, ‘Sunayani Devi’, Der Cicerone, Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler, Kun­ stfreude und Sammler, 17/1 (1925), 87–93; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 43.

(10) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 231 n. 40, notes the influence of Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Herbert Read in the constitution of an aestheticist discourse.

(11) W. G. Archer, India and Modern Art (London: Macmillan, 1959), 43.

(12) Max Osborn, ‘The Indian Exhibition in Berlin’, Rupam, 15–16 (July–Dec. 1923), 74–8, esp. p. 77; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 27.

(13) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 29–32.

(14) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 292.

(15) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 122.

(16) Ibid. 71.

(17) From ‘Children's Rhymes’ (first pub. as ‘Women's Rhymes’, in Sadhana (Ashwin–Kar­ tik 1301; Sept.–Nov. 1894), in Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language, ed. and trans. S. Chaudhuri et al. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 103– 4; my emphasis.

(18) See Amrita Sher‐Gil, ‘The Story of My Life’, The Usha, 3/2, special issue (Aug. 1942), 96; cited in Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 55. For other material on Sher‐Gil, see Vi­ van Sundaram et al., Amrita Sher‐Gil (Bombay: Marg, 1972).

(19) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 3–22, passim.

(20) Ibid. 370–3.

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(21) Jawaharlal Nehru, Inaugural Address, in Seminar on Architecture (Delhi: , 1959), 8; cited in Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture and In­ dependence: The Search for Identity—India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), app. 3, p. 311.

(22) Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 184.

(23) The dictum was developed in Le Corbusier's contributions, in the 1920s, to the jour­ nal L'Esprit Nouveau, and adopted in his revolutionary Vers une architecture (1923).

(24) See Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 211.

(25) On Gandhinagar, see Ravi S. Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Post­ colonial India (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

(26) Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 223.

(27) See Doshi's statement in Mildred F. Schmertz (ed.), ‘Balkrishna V. Doshi’, in Ann Lee Morgan and Colin Naylor (eds), Contemporary Architects (Chicago: St James Press, 1987), 236.

(28) Kapur, When Was Modernism?, 288.

(29) John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 117.

(30) See Satyajit Ray, Our Films, their Films (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976).

(31) Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, ed. M. Bratu Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 234–5.

(32) Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 166.

(33) Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 7.

Supriya Chaudhuri Supriya Chaudhuri,

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