When Was Modernism in Indian Art
Modernization in India is a real if incomplete historical process. Dating from the British colonial enterprise, it dovetails with the efforts of the Indian national state after independence to establish through a large public sector and a planned economy the balanced growth of industry. Despite the nomination of postindus-106 trial societies as global arbiters in the management of capital, the process of mdustrialization is still underway in this hugely agricultural country. Among the political formations, the centrist along with the socialist and communist parties of India, support in some consensus the irreversible project of modernization with a reasonable, that is secular, nationalism. They also support through their cultural fronts the struggles of dalits against caste, the struggles of minorities, the struggles of women, as indeed of all other exploited groups. This is their declared position with its incumbent rhetoric. What can be said with more certainty is that the left fronts in India may now, in the overwhelming growth of fundamentalist reaction, be the only organized movements to speak the language of modernity. Tills may seem paradoxical in the first world situation: for in a postmodern world where not only current cultural initiative but even the historical modern is attempted to be taken out of the hands of socialism (or parodied by quips that make Stalin the greatest modernist by virtue of his successful modernization programme), it may be worth recalling these forceful anomalies in the third world developmental process. Here indeed the modern continues to be placed nowhere more correctly than along visibly socialist trajectories.
If modernity is a way of relating the material and cultural worlds in the unprecedented period of change we call the process of modernization, it is also an existential state with its particular forms of reflexivity, its acts of struggle. Modernity still takes a precipitate historical form in the postcolonial world; there is a praxis of modernity in the cultural dynamic of the postcolonial world whereby autonomy, identity and authenticity are desired as markers of sovereignty but sought to be gained in terms of collectivity. As sovereignty is ever challenged in the postcolonial world, modernity continues to provide a cutting edge: it marks necessary historical disjunctures within the discourse on civilizational identity, even as this is in the process of being inscribed as national identity.
There is indeed a chronological fix between nationhood and modernity, and
1 jamim Roy, Vaishnava^, c 1935, tempera Coll National Gallery of Modem Art, New Delhi