Marking Independence projections, offer a rich allegory of history and nationhood. We can also read in it the same trajectory of a culmination and a beginning that surrounds the moment of Independence. On the one hand, we can see it as the outcome of a long earlier process of the nationalization and institutionalization of Indian art—lending a new canonical frame to a subject that had already been constituted through art-historical writings and museum collections. On the other hand, we are also compelled to read it as the occasion which presaged the formation of a new National Museum in the capital. Out of this temporary display emerged the plan of retaining as a permanent collection at the centre this assemblage of the best and most representative of the country's art.4 The concept of 'Indian art', like that of the nation, comes to us at this point of history as laden and loaded entities, each inextricably woven with the other. The historicized and aestheticized object of Indian art had emerged as a chosen field for the self-representation of the nation. Long available for nationalism, it now became a specially vital trope of the new 'nation-form' of independent India.5 From an object of colonial tutelage and orientalist and nationalist discourse, Indian art now emerges as a special area of investment of the nation-state. This essay situates the exhibition as a strategic nodal point in this transition, drawing out its threads backwards and forwards in time. One can argue that the year 1947 is in itself of little relevance in the history of Indian art: it marks no major point of rupture or break, still less any notable shift in artistic ideologies or directions. If anything, the forties in centres like Calcutta or Bombay most decisively signalled the passing of the age of nationalism in modem Indian art, and the disengagement of artists from the demands of nation, history and tradition. Even in writing the history of the recovery of India's artistic past—in charting the course of museums, collections or art-historical trends—there is little that spotlights the year or the period as notable landmarks. Yet, it is in this context that I wish to rethink the uses, meanings and deployment of art at this symbolic juncture in the life of the nation. I wish particularly to highlight the way the invocations of a 'national art' at this point, in marked contrast to earlier invocations, objectifies and memorializes the past in sharp dissociation from the present. The event and the surrounding practices I focus on this essay is marked, we find, by one resounding absence: the absence of the 'modern' in the spectacle of India's art heritage. Such an absence becomes easily naturalized in the event (as even in my essay), as the attentions veers predominantly on celebrated notions of 'history' and 'heritage' that halt the narrative of India's achievements well before the 'modern' age. So, as we return to the scene of the 1948 exhibition in New Delhi, we find ourselves entirely in the grips of an art-historical past: a past that effectively dislodges the present in staking its singular civilizational claims over the nation's art. Journal of Arts & Ideas