The Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia

Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 The Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia Sanjukta Sunderason, History of Art, University of Amsterdam https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.421 Published online: 20 June 2022 Summary O!en subsumed within narratives of political “transfer of power” from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization was a longue durée sociocultural process that traversed the long 20th century. Its trails were global and intertwined with parallel metapolitical processes like the Cold War, and it cast long shadows that revealed the a!erlives of political decolonization beyond the events that marked the arrivals of independence. South Asia is a particularly fertile ground for studying such expanded temporalities, sociocultural structures, and shadows of decolonization. While the late 1940s saw the retreat of the British Empire from India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka a!er 1972), as well as the climactic partition of India and creation of Pakistan, decolonization itself remained an unfolding process. It manifested in continuing struggles around cultural sovereignty and the liberation war of 1971 that birthed Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan, and continued in unresolved ethnic conflicts and regional struggles for autonomy and social democracy. The cultural field o"ers a unique lens for reading the more quotidian and less spectacular sites where such longue durée trails of decolonization were experienced, negotiated, and imagined via artistic forms. Aesthetics of decolonization can be read as the sensorial, imaginational, and ethical negotiations of postcolonial freedom, as well as the micropolitical and contradictory dynamics that lay therein. It can loosen the metaframe of the nation-state and the nation-form to reveal both locational and subnational di"erences, as well as the multiple ways in which the global itself was filtered, invoked, or negotiated from below. Aesthetics of decolonization, in other words, is the imagination of a new historiographical modality for thinking through how freedom was visualized in the postcolonies, how such visions produced new cultural modernities unique to such transitional polities, and how such modernities can be read in their transnational trails in the long 20th century. Keywords: decolonization, Cold War, South Asia, freedom, art, postcolonial modernism, internationalism, solidarity, displacement, memory Subjects: Art and Architecture, Comparative, Cultural, Postcolonial Studies, South Asia, World/Global/Transnational The Aesthetic Dimension: Reframing South Asian Decolonization https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 1 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Twentieth-century decolonization is often framed as the transfer of power from retreating European colonial empires to new postcolonial nation-states. To the latter, it signified the arrival of independence and the inauguration of national sovereignty; to the former, the vocabulary of “decolonization”—used more actively in the former metropoles than in the postcolonies—signified a loss of a colonial order that many 1 European nations had become accustomed to. In this arrival/loss binary of the transfer-of-power framework, what escapes is the temporal and material traces of decolonization itself. Denoting an undoing of the colonial empires, decolonization was not a “simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life,” but a “dialogue 2 with the colonial past.” It was a transformational drive—a becoming rather than being—and hence, a formative, imaginational process rather than just a series of watershed political events. Yet events are central to the narrative of decolonization, in both the climactic arrivals of independence and the ruptures of riots, partitions, genocides, and wars that marked its trails. It is this play of being and becoming, of events and their echoes, of ruptures and their afterlives that constitutes the temporality as well as the imaginations of 20th-century decolonization. Decolonization in South Asia in the 1940s predated the later spells of decolonization in Africa. Its modalities were di!erent too: unlike the mandates in the Arab world, or the protracted wars in Southeast Asia, the transition to postcolonial sovereignty and statehood seemed complete in South Asia by the early 1950s. Yet transfer of power in British India occurred with a schism—a partition of the subcontinent into a newly formed Pakistan, with western and eastern wings disconnected on either side of India. Freedom arrived as territories and communities were partitioned along religious lines, sparking riots, decimating minority populations on both sides of the new borders, and inaugurating one of the most significant episodes of displacement and refugee exodus of the 20th century. This strain of displacement persisted through the postcolonial decades, in continued trails of cross-border migration, in individual and community memory, and in continued forms of social and political alienation. While India transitioned from a colonial state to a paternalistic “developmentalist” state that fashioned itself as a secular, democratic, sociocultural agent committed to a national-popular aesthetic, Pakistan, from its very beginning, was on unstable political grounds. With a short-lived democratic phase, a military coup in the late 1950s, and an uneasy grip over its eastern counterpart, the idea of Pakistan itself was internally fractured. The political-economic domination of West Pakistan over East Pakistan was met time and again with linguistic and cultural exclusivism by the east. This began with resistance against the imposition of Urdu as the o"cial language of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan (in what became famous as the Language Movement of 1952) and continued in the struggle for political independence in the late 1960s. This culminated in a war of liberation, accompanied by genocide, that birthed Bangladesh in 1971. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 2 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 The ethnic plurality of the island nation of Ceylon—along with the ethnopolitical streamlining of political citizenship during the late colonial and early postcolonial years (the years preceding and immediately following independence in 1948)—bred a long civil war that plagued postcolonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon until 1972). Tensions between social and political constituencies manifested most strongly in language and literature, where competing imaginations of Sinhala and Tamil modernity made postcolonial language and expressive cultures a shadow battleground for the future civil war that would begin in 1983. It is in the field of cultural imagination that these slower, graduated footprints of decolonization took shape. In the imaginations of freedom, “spaces of experience” in the new postcolonies intertwined with the “horizons of expectations” of emerging 3 (postcolonial) futures. Art captured this imaginational field that was both realist and utopian, both particular and universal. The critical role of art in struggles for freedom, as Herbert Marcuse noted, lay in its “aesthetic dimension”: “not by virtue of its content (i.e. the ‘correct’ representation of social conditions), nor by its ‘pure’ form,” 4 but by the “content having become form.” Aesthetics of decolonization can be read as a mode of conceptualizing, via the question of artistic form, the political and ideological mechanisms of postcolonial freedoms. Such aesthetics remain attuned to the lived experiences of a postcolonial everyday, and capture the sensorial, intellectual, and material formations where material experiences become tangible. It pursues art and its wider discursive worlds via the agendas, anxieties, and contradictions that underlie questions of style, institutions, and artistic subjectivity. The goal of conceptualizing the aesthetics of decolonization will be to understand decolonization and its cultures of freedom dialectically. In South Asia, this necessitates decentering not only the temporal rationality of decolonization as a “transfer of power” from the metropole to the colony, as championed by nation-state-driven histories, but also its spatial coordinates. In particular, we must consider how the experiences and collective memories of war, partition, civil war, and displacement varied across concrete locations and communities, rather than imagining them as part of an abstract “national” history. There were, in other words, distinctly locational imaginaries that grew from contextual, experiential worlds within and despite the hegemonic national imagination generated in the postcolonies. Such locational dynamics not only refracted or displaced national impulses but also captured and reconfigured global currents from below. Aesthetics of decolonization in South Asia thus necessitates modalities for understanding art production in relation to the temporal and spatial complexes that mark the postcolonial experience. Beyond providing an a"rmative account of national-modern art in the postcolony, such modalities must address the plural and dialectical ways in which art creates modes of inhabiting and imagining the question of postcolonial freedoms, in its longue durée struggles and negotiations. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 3 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Some proposed modalities shaping the aesthetics of decolonization across and despite the varied “national” narratives within South Asia include: 1. Entanglements of art and politics in the late colony that produced particular dialectical formations of the political in the art produced during the critical transitional decade of the 1940s. 2. Postcolonial epics as new narrative strategies for imagining a “national- modern” cultural sovereignty that intertwined the classical, the primordial, and the perceived universal. 3. Freedoms in motion that carried transnational values, circuits, patronage, and solidarities, embedding South Asia within the wider decolonizing, post–World War II world in the shadow of Cold War. 4. Shadow lines of partition, displacement, genocide, or civil wars that persisted as afterlives—in tragic sensibilities in art, in palimpsestic cityscapes, and in continued hauntings and memorialization of ethnoreligious conflicts. Entanglements: Art and Politics in the Late Colony Art and politics became entangled in the late colony along lines both attuned to anticolonial nationalism and resonant with transnational political cultures of antifascism and anti-imperialism. Such entanglements also echoed a growing discontent around “content” and “constituency”—both in art and in politics. In art, new demands for social content and subaltern subjects emerged. In politics, the imperative to mobilize from below—from the peasants and the workers, rather than (solely) from the colonized urban constituencies—was reflected in the ruralist populism of M. K. Gandhi and the growing left-wing consciousness surrounding the underground Communist Party of India (CPI). By the late 1930s, both artistic and the political fields in British India carried a shared value and agenda of taking art or politics to the people. This was a call for democratizing aesthetics through an enculturation of politics, as well as a political harnessing of artistic form to foster the “popularization of art.” In the process, the scope of the nation—of nationalism and the nation-form as represented in forms of art, notions of beauty, and artistic values —both expanded and became more nuanced. By the late 1930s, between a Gandhian populism that valorized the local and the folk, and an expanding underground Communist left that sought entry points into informal political spheres, a new cultural field was developing where values of “art for the people” and “progressive art” emerged. Initially, this was visible mostly in the literary sphere, with the manifestos and conferences of the newly formed Progressive Writers’ Association (founded in 1936) announcing a new sensibility of “critical realism” in progressive art. This would expand into performance, films, music, and https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 4 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 visual art with the formation of the Indian People’s Theatre Association in 1943. What has retrospectively been called the “Marxist Cultural Movement” grew in dialogue with transnational currents of war, antifascism, and leftist internationalism of the Popular Front period of the Communist International. Its immediate trigger, however, was a catastrophic wartime famine in the eastern outposts of the British Empire. Figure 1. Zainul Abedin, cover page of Darkening Days by Ela Sen, 1944. Source: Author’s personal collection. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 5 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 The Bengal famine of 1943 killed and displaced millions. It was notorious for being “manmade,” triggered by wartime profiteering, black marketing, and an imperial war policy that used the eastern colonial frontiers as war fronts, but without any 5 socioeconomic protection. The Bengal famine was indeed a colonial theater of the Second World War. The temporal and spatial footprints of decolonization in South Asia in the 1940s include the peculiarly colonial tracks of World War II. Along the eastern frontiers of the British Empire, such footprints not only catalyzed artistic vocabularies of hunger and displacement but also produced a distinctly locational aesthetic that carried resonances of the global, rather than the national. The CPI— marginalized in the political sphere for its support for the Soviet Union and the imperial war e!ort while much of British India participated in the anti-imperial Quit India movement under Gandhi—found a new sociopolitical purpose in cultural activism and famine relief work. The party not only initiated a large-scale famine relief e!ort but also tied cultural production and artistic form to political activism. The vocabularies of social consciousness in art, which had been more active in the literary and discursive domains until the late 1930s, were radically reoriented toward expressionist imagery, revolutionary popular imagination, and revolutionary performance under the shadow of the famine (see Figure 1 for the widely circulated visual art of the famine that would appear as paintings, as prints, or—as in this image —as book covers of famine novels, reports, or political pamphlets). A new genre of visual reportage emerged under the patronage of the CPI as artist cadres like Chittaprosad set about drawing and reporting from famine-struck rural hinterlands 6 and semi-urban refugee camps. Such reportage would dominate the pages of the CPI’s national organ, People’s War, alongside antifascist reportage from global war fronts and the march of the Red Army (see Figure 2 for a typical page from People’s War during 1944, with Soviet Red Army cartoons alongside famine reportage). https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 6 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 2. “Wipe Out the Infamy of Disunity,” People’s War, January 23, 1944. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 7 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Source: P. C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Under the patronage of the CPI and artist cadres like Chittaprosad, a new genre of expressionistic iconography emerged that sought to visualize the political negotiations of the closing years of the anticolonial movement, particularly the crisis around the communal question that emerged in the years leading up to partition. This coming together of art and politics was peculiar: it was not a straight-jacketed “political art,” but an art of the political, a new aesthetics of politicality in art. It formed a “partisan aesthetics,” the politicality of which lay in entanglements between artistic and political fields, new values of political participation and commitment in art, formal and informal a"liations with political agendas, and anxieties around art’s politicization. 7 The distinctly locational footprints of the Bengal famine produced a peculiarly locational dialectical temper in art—by introducing, for instance, the climactic present into cultural imagination. While older tensions around romantic classicism and contemporary content persisted, new tensions between realism and a new modernist formalism were introduced. A new and persisting question emerged around how modernist form could accommodate the realist aesthetic of the social in transitional polities like the new postcolonies? This dialectic was visible in the literary debates and artist manifestos of the progressive artists’ collectives in British India and colonial Ceylon in the 1940s, where the dialectics between tradition and innovation, and between realist and formalist concerns in art, became apparent. In the careers of collectives like the Calcutta Group (formed during the famine years of 1943), the Progressive Artists’ Group (formed in Bombay as India become independent in 1947), and the Group ‘43 (formed in colonial Ceylon in 1943), a shared will could be observed 8 that sought to imagine a cultural modernity at once national and global. What is often assumed to be a symbiosis of national imagination and artistic modernism in the late colony and early postcolony in fact carried dialectical tensions between form and content and between the national and the international. At its moment of “arrival” in the late 1940s, postcolonial modernism was deeply fractured—as histories of “progressive art” show. 9 Progressive art at the arrival of political independence in South Asia captured both the zeal toward a universal modern (while grappling with the pulls of context) and the ideological and political resonances of art’s social commitments. For most progressive groups of this period such dilemmas remained unresolved. The progressive moment itself petered out as the artists comprising these groups—both in India and Ceylon—either left the country on international art fellowships or joined cultural bureaucracies in the new nation-states. The progressive artists’ groups signify a particular moment of entanglement of art and politics, and negotiations around the national and the international in the late colonies—a radical conjuncture that captured the instabilities of self-fashioning that decolonization generated. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 8 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Postcolonial Epics: Arts of Sovereignty in the Postcolonies As the British colonial empire retreated from South Asia in the late 1940s, the new nation-states faced the task of not only consolidating a new political sovereignty but also translating that sovereignty in the cultural field. The cultural field visualized sovereignty by allowing new mechanisms of cultural selection and pastiche, for instance by bringing idioms from classical, precolonial pasts together with those of an unchanging rural quotidian, as well as selective a"liations to plural internationalisms. The production of a “national-modern” art in the postcolonies thus reveals new postcolonial “epic” imaginations—arts of sovereignty where both the artist and the community were implicated, where new artistic vocabularies of “citizen-artists” and “democratic consciousness” were reframing artistic form and 10 artistic subjectivity into allegories of postcolonial nationhood. The ingredients of such postcolonial epics were as much national and locational as they were transnational; they drew in senses of freedom that sought to move beyond dichotomies of tradition and modernity, even as they grappled with the pressing ideological imperatives of visualizing the “nationness” particular to each new postcolonial nation. This assimilative or syncretic element echoed a plurality within that such nations had to accommodate, as well as new modes of imagining regional and transregional cultural identities, following and despite colonial ruptures. Postcolonial epics were also institutional mechanisms to nationalize the practice and patronage of “fine art” and structural assimilations of “folk” arts and crafts within aesthetic canons of the nation-state. Art practice during the early decades of decolonization thus assumed a national-administrative character and made room for artists who were both pedagogues and cultural bureaucrats, both modernists and patrons of folk crafts, who consciously formulated stylistic and material frames for visualizing and framing the nation in syncretic ways. As artists collaborated with the state, or took on public commissions, it was not only mechanistic o"cial ideologies that were at play, but also artistic ventures that sought to imagine the nation and sovereignty via public art—an enculturation, in other words, of sovereignty and citizenship. In India, the aesthetic of decolonization was steeped in the syncretic ideology of Nehruvian modernity—a collaborative project in which cultural patrons, artists, and forums intertwined with the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first prime minister) to generate an epic imagination. An iconic example from India is the journal Marg, established in 1947 by a key figure in the Nehruvian project, the left-wing, social realist writer Mulk Raj Anan. Pages from Marg reveal this pastiche of the classical, rural, and transnational registers: essays on modernist art and architecture from India, South Asia, and global contexts appear side-by-side with keen studies of folk celebrations, craft practices, precolonial cultural production, or debates on cultural https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 9 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 modernity and artistic freedom (see Figure 3 for a representative page from Marg, displaying both new modernist art from the celebrated Ceylonese artist George Keyt 11 and adverts celebrating “peoples of India”). Figure 3. George Keyt, Gopini, cover page of Marg, March 1954. Source: University Bibliotheek, Universiteit Leiden. Public art projects across the subcontinent echoed this syncretic impulse. A striking example is the combination of classical citations and modernist iconography in the artist Ramkinkar Baij’s sculpture of Yaksha-Yakshi—the classical guards of wealth in 12 Hindu mythology—at the entrances of the Reserve Bank of India (see Figure 4). https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 10 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 4. Ramkinkar Baij, Yaksha-Yakshi, sculpture at the entrance of the Reserve Bank of India, New Delhi. Source: Author’s personal photograph. Similar e!orts at assimilating classical art into postcolonial modernist projects were active in post-independence Ceylon too, for instance in the modernist painter George 13 Keyt’s Buddhist murals at the Gotami Vihara in Colombo. The coming together of public art and epic form also became a text for writing in alternative imaginaries of the postcolonial nation. In the epic murals of the Pakistani artist Sadequain—a celebrated example being his sixty-five-by-ten-foot Treasures of Time (1961), made for the State Bank of Pakistan in Karachi (see Figure 5)—a metanarrative of Islamic cosmopolitanism blends with a narrative of universal knowledge revealing a scientific 14 and spiritual quest for selfhood via a “calligraphic modernism.” Figure 5. Sadequain, Treasures of Time, 1961, mural at the State Bank of Pakistan, Karachi. Courtesy of the State Bank of Pakistan, Karachi. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 11 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Similarly in Nabanna (Harvest)—the sixty-five-by-six-foot scroll made in 1970 by the iconic East Pakistani artist and pedagogue, Zainul Abedin, on the eve of East Pakistan’s liberation war against the federal center in the West—a metanarrative of the “region” emerges with narrative stills that cite the region’s journey, from the famine of 1943 through labor and leisure, sowing and harvest. Such epic narratives assumed allegorical echoes of struggles for selfhood and the arrival into selfhood via the region’s locational histories. 15 Abedin’s insistence on a rural imaginary for East Pakistan—often in contradiction with the wider internationalist aesthetic of his peers or students at the Institute of Fine Arts at Dhaka (which he had formed)—reveals the potentiality of the “rural” as a marker of the locational. The rural could serve both as a concretized national site and as a counterpoint to a hegemonic national imagination —one that was particularly active in the dynamic between the eastern and western wings of Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s. The rural in itself is an important ingredient to consider in the epic imagination, alongside classical and modernist ingredients. The rural became an accessible “content,” both for celebrations of a “truth” apparently untarnished by history and for foregrounding “living traditions”—a trope continuing from late-colonial primitivisms in South Asian art. 16 The rural also became a resource for modernist reconfigurations in the postcolony, to generate art that was national in form, rural in content. Iconic examples are the works of the Indian artist M. F. Husain in the 1950s, particularly his paintings Man (1954) and Zameen (1955), which won him national awards. 17 Finally, the rural became the mark of a locational harness for a national identity as art from the former colonies was exhibited in the former metropole, morphing into connotations of local labor, or the marriage of the local (content) and the global (form). Questions of site, location, context were all key to the way modernism—even in its global and globalizing impulses—would seek roots in the new postcolonies, often with active patronage from the state, or with transnational collaborations. In architecture, transnational modernist dynamics were embedded in “locational,” “vernacular” or “tropical” modernisms. This could be seen in public and private architecture steered by invited modernist architects—such as Le Corbusier in India or Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis and Louis Kahn in Pakistan and Bangladesh—as well as in the work of South Asian architects like Muzharul Islam in (East) Pakistan or Valentine Gunasekara and Geo!rey Bawa in Ceylon. 18 Hence, postcolonial epics reveal postcolonial modernisms as arts (and acts) of sovereignty—with freedoms to select, a"liate, or narrate selves and nations anew. Such freedoms displace understandings of the global, often assumed to be one of “Western” influence, and invites scholarship to think internationalisms anew. Freedoms in Motion: Arts and Transits of Internationalisms https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 12 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Postcolonial modernism, while developing in dialogue with colonial cultural entanglements with Europe, was a dialectical formation. Within its forms, it negotiated locational histories and experiences, as well as languages of global art currents, ideas, and values. The idea of the transnational itself needs to be rethought, beyond the hitherto dominant conversations on the “anxieties of influence” of European art on that of the colonies, and along the lines of “worldly a"liations” of the postcolonial modern. 19 Questions of the political and cultural economies of cross- border a"liations and travel should be central to our understanding of the transnational within the aesthetics of decolonization—with or without the actual travel of artists. Such questions point toward the active worlds of traveling exhibitions, the circulation of Euro-American “expert art critics,” the new Cold War values of artistic “freedom” or socialist internationalism, the artistic exchanges upheld by UNESCO’s cultural internationalism, and the art funding from philanthropic firms like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. South Asia was not only deeply embedded in this transnational aesthetics of decolonization; there were also national variations that echoed the cultural politics of the Cold War, and occasionally even countered the ideological streamlining that Cold War geographies seemed to concretize. Artists often played the role of agents in this active transnationalism of the decolonizing period, not only by physically traveling, but also by acting as cultural diplomats and emissaries. Zainul Abedin, the (East) Pakistani artist of the 1950s and 1960s, is an ideal example of an artist-bureaucrat occupying the interfaces of art, diplomacy, and circuits of cultural funds. In the early 1950s, for instance, Abedin traveled to London on a Commonwealth Fellowship, and then to Brussels, Paris, Venice, Ankara, and Istanbul, funded by Pakistan’s ministry of culture. After Europe he traveled to the United States on a Rockefeller Grant, to Mexico, and then, in the early 1960s, to the Soviet Union on o"cial invitation. In the late 1960s—as Pakistan grappled with the civil war that would eventually culminate in genocide and the birth of Bangladesh from Abedin’s native East Pakistan in 1971—the artist sketched the freedom fighters. Invited by the Arab League (a front of Afro-Asian solidarity forums), he then traveled to Palestinian refugee camps to document displacement and destitution. Such trajectories were followed by artists, writers, and patrons of the arts in South Asia at large—for instance, the littérateur and cultural patron Mulk Raj Anand in India or the renowned progressive poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Pakistan. They steered o"cial cultural missions, joined transcontinental organizations of solidarity like the Arab League and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Association (or its a"liated wings like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association), and participated in international exhibitions to visualize new global participations of art and criticism (see Figure 6 for Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s essay on aesthetics in the developing postcolonial world). https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 13 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 6. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, “The Artist’s Role in a Developing Society,” Lotus July 1973 In these multiple institutions, forums, and trajectories, plural and competing values of freedoms in motion can be identified. Such freedoms circulated within the decolonizing world of the post–World War II era, where the retreat of European empires from Africa and Asia intersected with the redrawing of geopolitical alignments in the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1989, such freedoms included: Western “First World” ideas of universalism and freedom from ideology; socialist “Second https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 14 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 World” visions of freedom as the utopian horizon of ongoing revolutionary struggles; and emerging “Third World” visions of anticolonial, anti-imperial freedoms. While the political and ideological geographies of the Iron Curtain demarcated the “democratic” and capitalist First World from the Soviet Union and its spheres of influence in the socialist Second World, a racialized “color curtain” separated 20 decolonizing Afro-Asia from the West. Despite such ideological lines, such freedoms still did intersect in the cultural field as artists, images, and ideas in transit captured both dialogues and tensions between the di!erent visions of freedoms. Movements of artists and ideas were thus political, if not subservient to politics. While scholars have argued for flow, motion, and internationalism, the very idea of travel, when pried open, reveals how it generated “practices of crossings and interaction,” along with contacts that became crucial sites for “an unfinished modernity.” 21 While the “paradigm of travel” is key to these midcentury artistic internationalisms, the idea of travel itself was not homogeneous or free flowing but marked by hidden “ideologies of control,” shaped by the power structures of Cold War cultural funds, racial asymmetries in the appreciation of Third World artists, and tensions between postcolonial nationalism and internationalist solidarities that could undercut transnational transits and a"liations. 22 Such ideologies of control can be seen in the circulation of global photographic exhibitions like the MOMA-funded Family of Man in 1955, in exhibitions of American abstract art across South Asia in the 1960s, or in those that circulated in the Soviet Union and the socialist block countries throughout the 1950s and 1960s (see Figure 7, a cover page from the Bengali art periodical Sundaram featuring a report on the exhibition of Soviet socialist realist sculpture in India in the 1961). Countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan received a steady flow of art funds from the opposing foreign powers under the shadow of the Cold War. In Pakistan, organizations like United States Educational Foundation, the German Cultural Center, and the Asia Foundation were active in generating foreign assistance and visiting fellowships for artists, often with an explicit ideological agenda. 23 Afghanistan’s Maktab-e-Sanay-e-Nafisa (the School of Fine Arts), for instance, received both technical and financial support from Germany, and cultural funds from UNESCO and the United States poured into the Creative Center for Arts that was 24 attached to the Teachers’ Training College. Internationalism was a palpable component in the aesthetics of decolonization. But a notion of postcolonial modernisms that reduces them to the traveling artists or circulations of global currents of modernist abstraction does not do justice to the alternative internationalisms and a"liations that were current in the postcolonies. Striking here, for instance, is the circulation of imageries of the global peace movement in the 1950s, Afro-Asian solidarities and anti-imperialist and anticapitalist imageries that circulated and persisted with or without travel by artists concerned, sometimes through the active ideological patronage of the political left. By the 1960s and 1970s, this socialist internationalism could be seen in the circulation of https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 15 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Maoist imageries of revolutionary people’s war—not only in copies of Chinese posters that were made in cities across India and Pakistan but also in gra"ti and cartoons that spoke to a transnational, anti-imperialist solidarity (see Figure 8 for an example 25 of a far-left anti-imperialist cartoon from Pakistan). Such images could circulate within the spaces of transnational periodicals and publications through an a"liational modality even when artists and activists themselves could not travel, forming imaginative geographies of transnational solidarity. 26 https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 16 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 7: Cover page, Soviet Socialist Sculpture, Sundaram, 1961. Source: SOAS Library, London https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 17 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 8. M. A. Aziz, At Liberty, c. 1967, in Selections of Afro-Asian People’s Anti-Imperialist Caricatures, edited by the Secretariat of the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association, 1967. Source: University Bibliotheek, Universiteit Leiden. Shadow Lines: Arts of Persistence Integral to imaginations of the nation-form and internationalisms in the postcolonies were negotiations—not only of selfhood and sovereignty or of internationalist a"liations, but of the very histories of decolonization. The climactic ruptures of decolonization—partition, genocide, civil war, or the less spectacular structural discrimination against and marginalization of communities—persisted in these negotiations as incomplete processes, persisting afterlives, and memories. Beneath more visible or celebrated sites of national-modern “promise” in art were parallel subtexts of artistic imaginations that grappled with such corrosive trails and trials of decolonization. If triumphal independence is the dominant narrative of the postcolonial nation-state, then in its shadows lay its more textured histories and tribulations, along with the haunting histories of freedoms unachieved. For instance, along the lines that divided the subcontinent were the regional marks of partition and genocide, displacement and refuge influx that not only persisted deep into postcolonial times but shaped how such regions would enter the postcolonial narratives of the nation-states of which they were parts. In India, the partitioned provinces of Bengal and Punjab bore the brunt of the displacements that marked the arrival of freedom, with urban centers undergoing momentous transformations in accommodating refugees from the other side of the borders. While city planning in New Delhi restructured new urban rehabilitations of https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 18 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 postpartition refugees, in a city like Calcutta in the newly formed West Bengal, the lack of urban planning and the more violent and persistent nature of refugee exodus and destitution ruptured the city-space, and determined cultural imaginations of the city-form in the postcolonial decades. The city-space had already been ruptured after the famine of 1943, which made it malleable enough to receive the waves of refugees that would periodically flow in from the 1940s to the early 1970s, with highly inadequate structures of containment. Displacement in Calcutta was both recurring and uncontained, and resilience did not translate to healing. Ruptured spaces receive and negotiate time in altered ways. The trauma of the event/rupture is not only in the disjuncture it causes in its own time but also in the transformation of the very texture of the space and its relation to temporality. The “event” of partition could stretch out in such a space, as a longue durée shadow, in spectral afterimages and afterlives of the 27 trauma of partition. These longue durée footprints of decolonization were reflected in the everyday visualities of the city, as well as in art from the region—both in expressionistic or surrealistic depictions of a city ridden with refugees and political violence and in abstract art that echoed, via form, the “wounds” of decolonization— for instance, the artist Somnath Hore’s abstract series of paper-pulp prints series, Wounds from the 1970s. This aesthetics of displacement and trauma echoes the figurative and expressionistic idioms from Mexico, South Africa, or Southeast Asia, and reveals modes of grappling with the pull of specific contexts, while remaining alert to global footprints of decolonization. The nation was indeed a distant concept in these contexts where freedom itself resonated di!erently, via a persistent fragmentation. In Pakistan, the afterlives of partition, while foregrounded in the works of littérateurs like Sadat Hasan Manto and in the tragic romanticism of the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, 28 remained marginal in cultural narratives. They persisted instead in sensorial and material traces in cityscapes like those of Lahore, Karachi, or Dhaka, through palimpsestic forms of erasures and displacements. For East Pakistan, the afterlives of decolonization were concrete, with the question of freedom left actively unresolved until the liberation war of 1971. For an artist like Zainul Abedin, painting his epic scroll Nabanna in 1970 in the midst of the nation’s liberation from its federal center in West Pakistan, the visualization of displacement, return, struggle, and arrival echoed the nation’s political trajectory since 1947—revealing “shadow lines” that traced the 29 expanded temporality of decolonization beyond the rhetorics of transfer of power. Struggle continued to be a recurring narrative in art from postcolonial East Pakistan, both echoing the language movement of the 1950s and blending into the new popular resistance steered by political icons like Maulana Bhashani (see Figure 9 for Abedin’s painting of a stricken populace appealing to Bhashani at a moment of catastrophic displacement). https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 19 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 9. Zainul Abedin, Maulana Bhashani, c. 1970. Courtesy of Mainul Abedin. The liberation war itself introduced fresh wounds that echoed in the nation’s memory and molded its cultural self-fashionings in art, museological practices, literature, and historiographical negotiations around selfhood and freedom—both from colonial empire and from internal colonization by West Pakistan (see Figure 10 for a 1979 sculpture commemorating students’ sacrifice in the liberation war). The shadow lines of decolonization also appear in these struggles to create shared and contested histories between and within the new nation-states that were born out of decolonization. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 20 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Figure 10. Syed Abdullah Khalid, Aparajeyo Bangla [Undefeated Bengal], 1973-79. Source: Author’s personal photograph. Di!ering from the contexts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, yet echoing the longue durée footprints of the British Empire, is the case of postcolonial Sri Lanka, which has grappled with the long shadow of colonial reorganization of labor and ethnicities within empire. In its bloody civil war and persistent ethnic conflict between the Tamil and Sinhala populations, the postcolony has echoed ethnic reorganizations of empire and the troubled question of cultural identity that continues to plague postcolonial polities. In art, the questions of post–civil war memory and the reconciliation of fractured pasts have continued to inform an aesthetics of 30 resistance. Like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka brings to the fore the political weight of language itself in the invoking the unfinished battles for freedom in the postcolony. The afterlives of ethnic strife and civil war have produced contemporary arts of both memory and reconciliation (itself a modality of the decolonial practice). While the governments of India and Pakistan have not sought to memorialize the violence of partition, in Bangladesh the rawness of the wounds of the liberation war carry spectral shadows that are memorialized and invoked in continued narrative and 31 https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 21 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History museological practices. 31 24/06/2022, 11:54 It is only in recent times, often amid diasporic artists of South Asia, that the trauma and shadow lines of partition have gained tangible cultural forms, whether it is in the work of artists like Zarina Hashmi, in curatorial initiatives that finally seek to conceptualize partition via lines of control, or in the materialities of memory in everyday lives of partitioned peoples. 32 Such returns to and e!orts at making sense of the trials and negotiations of postcolonial freedom— the mechanisms of memory, memorialization, or history-writing itself—are the shadow lines of decolonization, which lie beneath the nation-statist storylines that are driven by events and resolutions rather than the open-endedness of the meanings of selfhood. Cultural forms of imagination, authorship, production, or curation at times become the only methods of foregrounding the irresolution of 20th-century decolonization. Hence, the question of artistic form—of aesthetics itself—makes histories of decolonization and freedom tangible. Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia: Thinking at the Limits The plurality confronting any potential conceptualization of “aesthetics of decolonization in South Asia” is substantial. Not only are there national di!erences, or even regional variations within such national forms; there are also palpable di!erences (and politics of di!erence) of language, of elite/popular binaries in the art worlds, and of memories (and counter-memories) of ethnic and religious communities—to say nothing of tensions that exist between the plural and at times competing notions of modernity in art. What are the stakes then, in seeking such a conceptual framework? Thinking at the limits, conceptualizing the aesthetics of decolonization in South Asia is in itself a productive act: it imagines the subcontinent in its shared relations to particular mechanisms of 20th-century history, not avoiding national frames but intertwining them, and identifying works of artistic imagination and production through their shared modalities as much as their di!erences. As such, aesthetics of decolonization is less a neat typology than a proposal for developing subcontinental questions. The goal is no longer to assert “postcolonial di!erence” against hegemonic Euro-American art histories but rather posing questions from the Global South. Such questions will necessitate the abstraction from art histories driven by individual artists and iconic national art movements, as much as from the horizontal need for representing all genres. Such questions must also generate evernew modalities for conceptualizing connected art histories across the subcontinent and with the Global South at large. Discussion of the Literature https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 22 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 The question of modernity in (post)colonial art has been significant driver of th scholarship on 20 -century South Asian art and aesthetics, from histories of the ways in which art visualized the nation-form in the (post)colony, to the negotiations and reinventions of received tradition—classical or folk—that became critical 33 components in such national imaginations. Art historians have developed analyses of “postcolonial modernisms” in South Asia that both bring national and transnational modernisms into conversation and study the flows of styles and syncretic aesthetics of cosmopolitanism, along with art’s “worldly a"liations.” 34 In such scholarship, the question of modernity in the postcolony has been produced through a dialogical triad of local, national, and global currents. The structural role of the nation-state, however, remains a critical component in the formations of postcolonial aesthetics, and scholars have explored in particular the ways in which visions of a national cultural policy and state patronage shaped the cultural field through the establishment of art academies, film institutes, architectural and public art commissions, and the museumization of histories. Recent anthropological literature from South Asia has showcased the political resonances of postcolonial cultural policies and the uses of culture by the nation-state, as well as the regimes of emotion and a!ect that are generated through museological practices 35 in the postcolony. While discussion of political and cultural transition during decolonization in South Asia remains under-developed, new scholarship have begun addressing the cultural discourse of decolonial transition, asking for instance, what the cultural forms and contradictions of political decolonization were, what ideological dimensions and social networks such cultural forms carried, and what transnational dialogues – in histories and historiographies – can be developed across the political frontiers of South Asian nation-states. 36 A necessary yet less developed field in understanding aesthetics of decolonization is that of the metropolitan shifts that former colonizers underwent in a post–World War II, decolonizing world, which saw increasing loss of colonies, accompanying transformations in national political imaginaries, and wars of decolonization. Recent studies have turned toward analyzing how decolonization molded the destiny of the 37 postmetropole. Scholars of new imperial history have advocated for putting European metropoles and the colonies in Africa and Asia in the same analytical field and treating them as mutually constitutive. 38 They have also asked for radically new “connected histories” that are attentive to the plural ways in which metropolitan 39 institutions negotiated decolonization. A broader transnational understanding of the aesthetics of decolonization in South Asia needs to be developed in dialogue with the entanglements of art and freedom in multiple decolonizing contexts of Africa and Asia. This could be accomplished through analyzing comparatively, examining the role of the nation-states in shaping national imaginaries, or studying the institutional and collective sites for the productions of postcolonial modernisms. 40 Such comparative study is already being https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 23 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 facilitated by an expanding body of scholarship in the field of Third World cultural studies that examines postcolonial cultures in South Asia vis-à-vis the global cultural politics of the Cold War and non-alignment, particularly by connecting the routes, modalities, and dynamics of cultural diplomacy across the sites of the Commonwealth 41 and Afro-Asian cultural solidarities. Scholarship on art and decolonization is entangled with a web of related subfields. These span both understandings and limitations of Third World solidarities, global modernisms, postcolonial histories, and Cold War politics. Some central questions to push the boundaries of these fields would be: How are such boundaries—of nations, ideologies, disciplines, and historiographies—crossed? How can the entangled concept of art and freedoms, aesthetics and transnational decolonization help scholarship cross those boundaries, and hence ask new questions? Primary Sources Archives of aesthetics and decolonization need to be both locational and transnational, and they must encompass both institutional and private collections. They must include cultural objects, artworks, cultural discourse, biographic material, and proceedings of national governments, international organizations, public forums, and informal collectives. They must also include the sensorial and spatial sites—the living archives of postcolonial cities and memories—that contain the traces of the material imprints and transformations of the decades of decolonization. In South Asia, archives of the aesthetics of decolonization can be found in governmental papers and national archives, particularly in the proceedings of the ministries of education, culture, information, broadcasting, and foreign a"airs. The national art academies, cultural academies, galleries, museums, and film institutes set up through the postcolonial decades are also important repositories. Particularly significant libraries and archives are located at the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi), Film and Television Institute of India (Pune), National College of Art (Lahore), Bangladesh National Museum (Dhaka), and the National Museum (Colombo). Equally important as such o"icial repositories are the more dispersed and informal collections that lie scattered in private collections and biographical traces. New archival initiatives, at times led by private art galleries, have built notable collections since the late 20th century, especially the Faiz Ghar (Lahore); the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture, and Design (set up in Ja"na by curator Sharmini Pereira); and private art galleries like the DAG (New Delhi) that have played important roles in collecting the artworks, papers, and correspondence of artists (both important and marginal), art patrons, littérateurs, and film makers. Public libraries in South Asia are also important and rarely explored sites. Smaller libraries in the cities o!en carry promising collections of rare periodicals and local, small-scale “little magazines,” in English or in vernacular languages, which reveal palpable traces of the wider intellectual and cultural milieus of the transitional period of postcolonial cultures. Such publications are important sites for the understanding cultural zeitgeist. The editorials, essays, and manifestos—along with the occasional autobiographical fragments, letters, and diaries of important cultural actors—present a little-explored corpus of primary material for writing histories of aesthetics. Political archive of pamphlets, posters, caricatures, and small-scale grassroots political literature are also very useful in understanding the transnational flows of ideology https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 24 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 and cultural imaginaries. These can be found in the archives of publishing houses and newspapers, and in the personal collections of political and cultural activists. Art foundations, like the Sapumal Foundation (Colombo), the Bengal Foundation (Dhaka), the Shakir Ali Foundation (Lahore), and other institutions dedicated to individual artists across South Asia are important repositories of old art writing, catalogues, correspondence, and wider cultural discourse. The Little Magazine Library in Kolkata is also an invaluable resource for this kind of material. An important component in the archives of art and decolonization—both within South Asia and in the broader Global South—are transnational institutions, collections, forums, and proceedings of intergovernmental organizations. For instance, for understanding cultural internationalism in the postcolony, the foreign a"airs department of other national governments that house the cultural correspondence with foreign embassies active in South Asia are useful. So are the archives of the United Nations (Paris), of forums like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Association (Cairo), the World Peace Council (Prague), the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), and the archives of global philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (New York City). In South Asia, however, access to private—and at times even public—archives cannot be assumed, particularly when it comes to working outside the colonial archive and in the more dispersed cultural field. It becomes important, therefore, particularly when pursuing a thematic like aesthetics and the cultural imaginaries of decolonization, to remain attentive to the amorphous and multipolar nature of the potential primary sources, and thus to pursue the multiple genres of primary sources in dispersal. Further Reading Adesokan, Akin. Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text 17 (Fall) 1987): 3–25. Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Routledge, 2004. Brown, Rebecca. Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Busch, Annett, and Anselm Franke. Year a!er Zero: Geographies of Collaboration. Warsaw, Poland: Museum of Modern Art, 2015. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Di"erence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori, eds. From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 25 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Duara, Prasenjit, ed. Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Elkins, James, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, eds. Art and Globalization. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Enwezor, Okwui. “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 595–620. Gandhi, Leela. A"ective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gaonkar, Dilip. “Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 1–19. Harvey, David. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Harney, Elizabeth. “The Densities of Modernism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 479–500. Huyssen, Andreas. “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World.” New German Critique 100 34, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 189–207. Lazarus, Neil. “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.” The European Legacy 7, no. 6 (2002): 771–782. Lee, Christopher. Making a World a!er Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political A!erlives. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010. Manjapra, Kris, Neilesh Bose, and I!ekhar Iqbal, eds. “Oral Histories of Decolonization: Bengali Intellectuals, Memory and the Archive.” Special section, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 4 (2018): 827–913. Mitter, Partha. “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery.” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (December 2008): 531–548. Mookherjee, Nayanika. Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Ranciére, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Sunderason, Sanjukta. “Framing Margins: Mao and Visuality in Twentieth-century India.” In Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-García, and Victoria H. F. Scott. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019. Sunderason, Sanjukta. Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization. Stanford, CA: https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 26 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Stanford University Press, 2020. Sunderason, Sanjukta and Lotte Hoek eds. Forms of the Le! in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, Connected Histories. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Wickramasinghe, Nira. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History. 2nd ed. London: Hurst and Company, 2014. Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Wille, Simone. “A Transnational Socialist Solidarity. Chittaprosad’s Prague Connection <https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/a-transnational-socialist-solidarity-chittaprosadsprague-connection/>.” In Gregor Langfeld, Tessel M. Bauduin (eds.), Stedelijk Studies 9, Modernism in Migration. Relocating Artists, Objects, and Ideas, 1910–1970, Fall 2019. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformism. London: Verso, 1989. Notes 1. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle, eds., Cultures of Decolonization: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–1970 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016); Elizabeth Buettner, Europe a!er Empire: Decolonization, Society, Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 2. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 89. 3. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 258–259. 4. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (New York: Beacon Press, 1979), 8. Emphasis mine. 5. For substantive studies of the Bengal famine, see Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–44 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015). 6. See Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge, 2005); Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Sumangala Damodaran, The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); and Sanjukta Sunderason, “As Agitator and Organiser: Chittaprosad and the Art for the Communist Party of India,” Object, no. 13 (2010): 75–95. 7. Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 27 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 8. See Ellen Dissanayake, “Ceylon’s 43 Group of Painters,” Arts of Asia 16, no. 2 March/April 1986, 61–67; Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Neville Weereratne, The Sapumal Foundation Collection: A Select Catalogue (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Sapumal Foundation, 2009). 9. See for instance, Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics. For tensions around the idea of progressive within the Progressive Artists Group from Bombay, see Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art. 10. See Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); see also Geeta Kapur, “Secular Artist, Citizen Artist,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate, 2007). 11. See Annapurna Garimella, ed., Mulk Raj Anand: Shaping the Indian Modern (Mumbai: Marg, 2005); see also Devika Singh, “Approaching the Mughal Past in Indian Art Criticism: The Case of MARG (1946– 1963) <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X1200090X>,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 1 (January 2013): 167–203. 12. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “The Endangered Yakshi: Careers of an Ancient Art Object in Modern India,” in History and the Present, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). 13. Sunil Goonasekera, George Keyt: Interpretations (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Institute of Fundamental Studies, 1991). 14. I!ikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 134. 15. Sanjukta Sunderason, “Shadow Lines: Zainul Abedin and the A!erlives of the Bengal Famine of 1943,” in “To Draw the Line: Partitions, Dissonance, Art; A Case for South Asia,” special issue, Third Text 31, no. 2–3 (November 2017): 239–259. 16. Partha Mitter, Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). 17. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ed., Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (London: Routledge, 2011). 18. For discussions of the use of concrete in producing modernist public forms, see Atreyee Gupta, “In a Postcolonial Diction: Postwar Abstraction and the Aesthetics of Modernization,” Art Journal 72, no. 3 (2013): 30–46; See Sarah Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fi!ies: Louis Kahn and the National Assembly Complex in Dhaka <https://doi.org/10.2307/990866>,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52, no. 4 (December 1993): 416–435; see also Farhan Karim, “The Modernist Historic Urban Landscape of Islamabad, Pakistan,” in Cultural Landscapes of South Asia: Studies in Heritage Conservation and Management, ed. Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha (London: Routledge, 2017); See Anoma Pieris, “Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular: Considering Valentine Gunasekara,” Grey Room 28 (Summer 2007): 56–85; and Anoma Pieris, “‘Tropical’ Cosmopolitanism? The Untoward Legacy of the American Style in Post-Independence Ceylon/Sri Lanka,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32, no. 3 (2011): 332–349. 19. Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (December 2008): 531–548; Sonal Khullar, Worldly A"iliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 28 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 20. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report from the Bandung Conference (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1955). 21. James Cli"ord, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–3. 22. Mieke Bal and Miguel A. Hernández-Navarro, eds., Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 17–18. 23. Nadeem Omar Tarar, “Aesthetic Modernism in the Post-colony: The Making of a National College of Art in Pakistan (1950–1960s),” International Journal of Art and Design Education 27, no. 3 (November 2008): 332–345; see also, Aziz Ahmad, “Cultural and Intellectual Trends in Pakistan,” Middle East Journal 19, no. 1 (Winter, 1965): 35–44. 24. Hafizullah Emadi, Culture and Customs of Afghanistan (Portland: Greenwood Press, 2005), 100. 25. For an example of far-le! anti-imperialist cartoons from Pakistan, see Somnath Hore, Wounds <https://www.akarprakar.com/shows/wounds-somnath-hore/>, c. 1970, paper-pulp print, Akar Prakar Gallery, Kolkata. 26. Simone Wille, “A Modernist Transnational Socialist Solidarity: Chittaprosad’s Prague Connection <https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/a-transnational-socialist-solidarity-chittaprosadsprague-connection/>,” Stedelijk Studies no. 9 (2019). 27. For discussion of trauma in the genre of “partition films,” see Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 28. See Aamir Mu!i, Enlightenment in the Colonies: The Jewish Question and the Crises of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 29. Sunderason, “Shadow Lines.” 30. Sylvia S. Kasprycki and Doris I. Stambrau, eds., Artful Resistance: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka (Altenstadt, Germany: ZKF, 2010); Jagath Weerasinge, “Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka,” in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra, Australia: Pandanus Books, 2005), 180–193. 31. See Nayanika Mookherjee, Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 32. Aamir Mu!i, “Zarina Hashmi and the Arts of Dispossession,” in Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, ed. I!ikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar (London: Green Cardamom, 2011), 87–99; Dadi and Nasar, Lines of Control; See Sonal Khullar, “Everyday Partitions,” in “To Draw the Line: Partitions, Dissonance, Art; A Case for South Asia,” special issue, Third Text 31, no. 2–3 (November 2017): 359–386. 33. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a “New” Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Mitter, Triumph of Modernism; Kapur, When was Modernism. 34. See Rebecca Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Dadi, Modernism; Khullar, Worldly A"iliations. https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 29 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 35. Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Nayanika Mookherjee, Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) 36. Kamran Asdar Ali, Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Rebecca Brown, Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics; Sanjukta Sunderason and Lotte Hoek eds. Forms of the Le! in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, Connected Histories (London: Bloomsbury, 2022); Francesca Orsini, Laetitia Zecchini, Neelam Srivastava eds., The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022). 37. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies ⤴ Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy, eds., Visual Culture and Decolonization in Britain (London: Ashgate, 2006); Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Craggs and Wintle, eds., Cultures of Decolonization. 38. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Antoinette Burton, ed., A!er the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: A Reader; Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000). 39. Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, “Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (2015); see also Durba Ghosh, “Another Set of Imperial Turns?,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 772–793. 40. Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Chika OkekeAgulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 41. Vijay Prasad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007); Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto, 2011); and Gupta, In a Postcolonial Diction.”; Simone Wille, “A Transnational Socialist Solidarity. Chittaprosad’s Prague Connection <https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/a-transnational-socialist-solidaritychittaprosads-prague-connection/>.” In Gregor Langfeld, Tessel M. Bauduin (eds.), Stedelijk Studies 9, Modernism in Migration. Relocating Artists, Objects, and Ideas, 1910–1970, Fall 2019. Related Articles The Progressive Writers Association Buddhist Art and Architecture https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-421 Page 30 of 31 Aesthetics of Decolonization in South Asia | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History 24/06/2022, 11:54 Museums and Exhibitionary Culture in Twentieth-Century China Copyright © Oxford University Press 2022. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Asian History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). 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