A Tradition of the Modem Baroda and there he was a student of Subramanyan. I'd like to add that though Subramanyan is an exceptionally erudite person, who brought this sense of the past, of history, of so many different kinds of art forms, including crafts both high and low, to our attention, he seems to refer to things and pick up their language from the borderline of a modernist position that would not acknowledge the idea of a historical lineage. At least he would never do what Sheikh does when presenting his pictures. 34 Referring to the general subject of 'inventing a tradition', I would like to continue from yesterday by moving the ground a bit from what Sheikh presented, to state what I feel is missing: the effort to actually locate the tradition of the modern as the point from which one starts. I think that site has to be located. I don't believe in being deterministic, but this is actually denied to our practice today. The effort to locate this immediate history of which we are specific products, in concrete and sensuous terms, in terms of knowledge as well, this is the present need. I think one of the problems is that once one suppresses the relationship with one's immediate past (which artists seem to do the moment all the apparatus they need to begin their career is in their hands), there is nothing left to battle with, nothing to contest, therefore nothing to really start with. And most of the history one has is residual: one's relationship to the local and the regional: to one's teacher right here and some well-known artist somewhere else. Nothing in between. There is such a fuzzy notion of what this past is all about, our own modem past, unlike the west where modernism is recognizably part of a continuous tradition which artists attack and break in reflexive action. Here, in India, artists proceed on their own, supposedly original, beat and what happens then is that the larger tradition — whether Ajanta, or the miniatures, or on the other hand Picasso and Matisse—is somehow placed outside any historical period; the way Cubism or Expressionism was worked out by Ram Kinker or an Indian artist of the fifties, is simply never examined, as artists go yet again to their de-historicized, disengaged, Beckmanns and Chagalls. Simultaneously, because of nationalism and its contemporary manifestations around us, it's always 'Indianness' which is foregrounded, both in terms of subject-matter and linguistic reference. It is interesting today that an artist like Ram Kinker, or the mid-thirties era which is very important as the experiment with modernist language takes very concrete root at this time — as one looks back to some of these artists, the subject matter of Ram Kinker, the fact that he painted the peasants, or the rejection of western training in Amrita Sher-Gil as she took from Ajanta or the miniatures, all this is given greater importance than the struggle they themselves went through to develop a modem language. Looking at Amrita's work with Kumar, during this film project, which forces one to look at 'objective' representation in a different way, perhaps, one sees the extent to which she struggled to move from one tradition to another. A material experience of oil-painting and of seeing the object in space and on the ground is evident in a painting like The Swing. It is so full of obviously Indian Journal of Arts <& Ideas