Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2011-Jan. 8, 2012.

Indian Folk and Tribal Paintings introduces you to one of India s most glorious living traditions its tribal and folk painting. Vibrant and full of colour, it is said of tribal and folk painting that it has no beginning and no end. The rich red earth of river deltas, the fine white paste of crushed rice, the juice of fruits and berries, the wine from the mahua tree, the milk and even the dung, continue to provide the artist in the forest and village with his raw materials, while the floors and walls of his dwelling places, the bark of trees, leaves and, latterly, paper, are his surfaces. Whatever the surface or the medium, these paintings are intrinsically linked with the regional historico-cultural settings from which they arise.

This concise yet lively new survey guides the reader through 5,000 years of Indian art and architecture. A rich artistic tradition is fully explored through the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Colonial, and contemporary periods, incorporating discussion of modern Bangladesh and Pakistan, tribal artists, and the decorative arts. Combining a clear overview with fascinating detail, Mitter succeeds in bringing to life the true diversity of Indian culture. The influence of Islam on the Mughal court, which produced the world-famous Taj Mahal and exquisite miniature paintings, is closely examined. More recently, he discusses the nationalist and global concerns of contemporary art, including the rise of female artists, the stunning architecture of Charles Correa, and the vibrant art scene. The very particular character of Indian art is set within its cultural and religious milieu, raising important issues about the profound differences between Western and Indian ideas of beauty and eroticism in art.

Following India’s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an “Indianness” representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India’s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism’s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West’s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernism—in painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, film, and photography—in the years between independence and 1980, by which time the Indian art scene had changed significantly and postcolonial discourse had begun to complicate mid-century ideas of nationalism. Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design, Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of “authentic India” in his acclaimed Apu Trilogy, how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India’s past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of India’s modern visual culture.

Ragamala, literally a garland of ragas, is a unique form of Indian miniature painting developed by combining a variety of sources including musical codes and accomanying poetry to indicate the time of day, or season, in which the melody should be performed. These miniatures were executed in India from 1400 and by the late 1700s had died out. This new book, and the exhibition it accompanies, presents a fine and rare collection of twenty-four ragamala from the collection of Claudio Moscatelli, a painting conservator based in London. Over fifteen years he has amassed one of the finest collections of ragamala in Britain comprising three different groups, Pahari, Rajasthani and Deccani, displaying regional variations.

Indian Painting and the Art of Storytelling / Marika Sardar -- Incarnations of the Bhagavata / Neeraja Poddar -- The Ramayana and Other Tales of Rama / Marika Sardar -- Stories of Music, Love, and the Seasons: Ragamala Paintings / Marika Sardar -- Persian-Language Literature in India / Qamar Adamjee -- The Shahmana in India / Alka Patel

A catalogue to accompany an exhibit held at the museum from March to July 1997. Color reproductions of 83 paintings are presented chronologically rather than in the usual separate sections on Mughal, Deccani, Rijput, and Pahari traditions. Kossak, associate curator of Asian art at the museum, offers an introductory essay. Distributed in the US by Harry N. Abrams. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR