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.

Trends in Modern Indian Art is a study of Indian Art from the end of 19th century to 1990. Indian Art started with academic realism of Raja Ravi Varma at the close of the 19th century. Abanindranath Tagore who was trained by Samuel Palmer and Japanese artist. Okakura, established the wash process of water colour painting known as the Bengal School in the beginning of the 20th century. His disciples like Nandalal Bosa and Ventappa further elaborated the style of the Bengal School later known as the Oriental Style.

The Essays Here, Challenging The Boundaries And Assumptions Of Mainstream Art History, Question Many Preconceived Notions About Meaning In Representations Artistic And Art Historical. Emphasizing On Specific Visual Cultures Within The Dynamics Of Historical Processes, They Raise Critical Issues Of Art Production, Circulation And Consumption And Attempt To Rescue Traditional Arts From A Past That Is Hermetically Sealed Off From The Present.

Dehejia has tried to create a place within the main frame of culture and philosophy of Indian art for a legitimate analytic theory called despair. Dehejia's effort creates a space for the modern within Indian classicism by negotiating the philosophy of despair in classical terms. As a result the basic schism that has grown in recent years between the philosophy and history of modern art on the one hand and the philosophy and history of traditional arts is today cloder to being breached.

'The fulfilment of a modern Indian artist's wish to be a part of a living tradition, i.e. to be individual and innovative, without being an outsider in his own culture, will not come of itself, it calls for concerted effort.' K.G. Subramanyan, the eminent Indian artist, offers a theoretical groundwork for that effort in his critical study of modern Indian art as it has evolved through continuous interaction with several traditions, foreign and indigenous. In the course of his study, he touches on the natural distinctions between India's folk tradition, and on the attempts of several thinkers and artists to identify an Indian artistic tradition or to deny it altogether in a quest for personal expression or universality. A generous selection of illustrations accompanies the text and greatly contributes to the enjoyment and understanding of Subramanyan's discourse.