Visualizing the Nation (in their new privileged status and modernized conceptions) became important agents in the articulation of nationalist sovereignty and a middle-class cultural hegemony. From being a colonial import, the idea of modernity, by the late nineteenth century, was fully accommodated within the agenda of Indian nationalism. This entailed 8 a continuous dilution and dissection of modernity to fit it within the project of imagining the "nation'. The new breed of artists, even as they found their modern self constituted through the initiation in western ideas, styles and techniques, were impelled to supersede their colonized status and westernized identity within a reformulated 'Indian' authenticity. Thus, with each artist, a sharp sense of a break with the past would coexist with an urge to selectively appropriate elements of that past (revived, refined and reimagined by nationalism) in the formulation of new artistic idioms. I am concerned, primarily, with this internalized nationalist face of modernity — with the way 'India' as a new cultural and ideological project intervened and moulded this modem history of Indian painting. In this history, the 'modem', in its various pictorial and aesthetic potentials, had to be constantly located within a vast reserve of 'tradition', resurrected as ancient myth, classical forms and themes, folk idioms, or local visual material. Concentrating on the period between the 1880s and the 1930s, I study the strikingly different ways in which this tradition/modernity dilemma was confronted and resolved in the art of Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose. Taking up a select range of paintings, the idea is to map out certain critical 'moments' — moments of both assimilation and intervention — through which a particular kind of narrative can be constructed of the making of a 'national' art in modem India. The idea is also to explore the possibility of approaching these paintings as 'nationalist texts', reading them as allegories, in which one may discern various mythic, cultural and social constructions of the 'nation'. Any exercise in recovering the 'true' intention of the artist in painting a particular picture, and of evaluating the picture in terms of that 'original' intention, is inevitably fraught with problems. Reconstructing the painter's 'charge' and 'brief has been seen as only one way of entering and explaining a pictorial image, recognizing at the same time that these were largely constituted by the process of painting itself and were open to continuous reformulations in the process of the reception of the painting and painter over time.2 The preoccupations of artists, art criticism and art historiography mingled in attributing to paintings their meanings and values in history. In my reading of the selected paintings, I intend probing some of these layers of interlocking concerns — to weave in the individual choices and aesthetics of painters with the broader ideological and cultural formations in which such choices operated. The paintings I discuss were self-consciously both 'national' and 'modem'.3 The ideology of the 'modem', in its specific colonial and nationalist context in India, entailed a redefinition of 'tradition' in each specific phase of painting. A central thrust of this essay lies in exploring the way new, dominant notions of 'modernity' and 'Indianness' (and, with them, accompanying values like 'progress' and 'authenticity') both shaped, and were shaped by, the painterly endeavours of this period. Journal of Arts <&' Ideas