2. Amrita Sher-Gil, Banana Sellers, 1937, oil. Coll.: Vivan Sundaram, New Delhi. both may stand in for a quest of selfhood. For Indian as well as other third world artists, even the tasks of subjectivity are unresolved and require acts of allegorical exegesis — often via the nation. It is no wonder, then, that modernism, or the specifically aesthetic aspect of the modern, even as it manifests itself in Indian national culture, is still ideologically speaking, a vexed site. It is possible to argue that Indian artists have scarcely yet internalized modernism; that they have moved on from a pre or antimodern position held by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Abanindranath Tagore through the first three decades of this century to a kind of protomodern condition developed in Santiniketan by Rabindranath Tagore himself, by Nandalal Bose, and by younger artists of the School, such as Ramkinker Baij and Binodebehari Mukher-jee, through the 1930s and 1940s. This is differently taken up by Jamini Roy in Calcutta during the same period, who 'objectifies' the tradition by bringing the questions of iconicity and reification face to face. There is an anachronistic return to a form of interwar realism initiated by the part-European, Paris-trained artist, Amrita Sher-Gil, with her intelligent masquerade as the oriental/modern/native/woman artist of her times; when she dies a sudden death in Lahore in 1941 we are finally at the threshold of what one may call primary formulations of modernism. Artists' groups in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras come into existence through the 1940s and 1950s. Of these, the Bombay Progressives are the most correctly progressive in the sense of being modernists; they are succeeded by Group 1890, that reissues and also, perhaps inadvertently, certainly prematurely, closes off the modernist enterprise in Indian art in 1963. Thence we enter into a pop/postmodernism where the Baroda School as well as the urban realists of Bombay become especially important, developing narrative ramifications through the 1970s, which culminate in the Place for People exhibition in 1981. So that modernism, or properly modernist art, occupies only about two, at the most three, decades between 1935 and 1965. It remains therefore a somewhat tenuous affair. The same proposition can be stated differently if one brings in the very real factor of mediation. The content of modernism in India is a crucial consideration. Indeed the characteristic feature of Indian modernism (as perhaps of much post-colonial modernisms) may be that it is manifestly social. That is to say modernism Numbers 27-28