Jun 29 2021 to Jun 29 2021 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Sanjukta Sunderason
Art Historian
Speaker

Priyamvada Gopal
Academic & Writer
Discussant

In this session author and art historian Sanjukta Sunderason discusses ideas in her book Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization with the postcolonial history scholar Priyamvada Gopal.  

The book Partisan Aesthetics explores art’s entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing “partisan aesthetics” as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India’s Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations.

Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives—drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints—and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art’s socialist affiliations during India’s long decolonisation. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

Hero Image Credit- Chittaprosad, Panel for India Immortal, People’s Age, 6 January 1946. Source: P. C. Joshi Collections. Courtesy of Archives on Contemporary History, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Central Library, JNU, New Delhi.