The word demography essentially means the branch of knowledge that deals with human population especially the statistical analysis of births, deaths, migrations as illustrating the conditions of life in communities, it looks at society structurally symmetrical and asymmetrical. The resonance and the meaning of the word demography or demographies is taken here from a sociological trajectory and at another level from the discipline of population studies. Shifting demographies looks at the shifting languages, cultures, morphologies, literatures, translations and loss in translations, of movements backwards and forwards, patois, hybridity and the binaries which have been an inherent part of India

From a macro to a micro level my personal engagements has been with issues concerning perception, self, gender, sexuality, identity and representation. Traversing the terrain of the traditional and the contemporary. My paper also deals with these issues but looking at these notions from the visual culture particularly literature, music and dance which I think are so inextricably linked within the context of the now the often used global syndrome, where the deridian difference is being celebrated more than ever.

On of my favorite writers Salman Rushdie has famously written ‘Mélange, hotchpotch,’ he declares, ‘a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world’.

‘Its an intriguing an ambiguous fish, at home in both fresh and salt water. It migrates thousands of miles to renegade itself ; it swims against the current rather that with it ; it risks leaving the water to climb up rapids and thereby exposes itself to the greedy eyes of the bears on the banks, hungry for rich pickings ; and after doing all this, it still has the energy and cunning to spawn something personal and new. Its intentions is to return to the wild and salty ocean, knowing that it has left behind something of value, and learnt something new on each journey. (Gavin Jantjes, “the artist as a cultural salmon”)

With the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the only global organization dealing with trade, the world shrinks and becomes a global village. When apples from Australia find their way into the local fruit markets of Delhi, when Tofu from Thailand is available off the shelf in Hyderabad and Manoj Night Shyamalan of Indian origin makes the film ‘Sixth Sense’ in the U.S. and creates a stir in Hollywood. When Mumbai born Anish Kapoor becomes the British artist for the Venice Biennale, and when Salman Rushdie and V.S Naipaul, of Indian origin educated at academies abroad win the Booker prize and the Nobel prize for literature respectively the cultural Salmon is born.

With media culture becoming increasingly global and a bearer of post modern forms that seem to travel easily across borders, bring with it a sense of homogeneity - with MTV, FTV channels regularly telecasting forms of popular music such as rap, heavy metal, grunge, these styles becoming analogous the world over. As a result the Michael Jackson moonwalk is seen on the ‘thelas’ of a ‘subziwala’ in a remote tehsil of Uttar Pradesh. Both the urban and rural Indian youth is westernizing itself, cultivating dreadlocks, wearing, short skirts and tank tops, coloring hair and using matt make up bringing in a uniform cosmopolitanism. Imitation of Hollywood stars and singers go hand in hand with Madonna look alikes on Indian music videos. This inherent duality, the ontological paradox becomes a virtual reality.

A new pantheon emerges where saints, heroes and martyrs, politicians, screen idols, beauty queens, cricket and tennis champions are established as the new icons of the day.

Turning the indefinable edge of the millennium has a particular significance in the context of a modern Indian art. With the benefit of a new perspective, the basis of modernism in India comes in for fresh examination.

Shifting demographies lead to a shift from the village to the complexities of psychologies and psycho- analysis, from religious faith to dialectic materialism, from evolutionary change to a revolutionary one.

Images change not only with the politics but with every new climate of opinion. Going back in time, early 20th century saw masters like Nandalal Bose reclaiming classical themes from mythology and literature, reviving an indigenous sensibility. Amrita Shergil and Jamini Roy were rediscovering idioms from their immediate environment and folk art respectively. Raja Ravi Verma used tradition against western adaptations which gave rise to new a idiom. It was thus the marking or the beginning of a ‘modern’ era in Indian art.

Post colonial India saw an energy which valorized the context of modernity with the progressives, where artists like F,N Souza, S.H. Raza and other members and associates of the progressive Artist Group helped to give modern art in India an autonomous status. While at Shantiniketan the work practice of Nandalal Bose, Ramkinker Baij and Benodbihari Mukherjee brought through the ruse and reason of indigenous subject- matter a methodological shift in constructing the image.

Turning the pages of history coming closer to the present the 80s, which begins with a period of narratives of Indian art, the traditions of K.G. Subramanyam, Buphen Khakkar and Ghulamohammad Sheikh, we renegotiate several traditions at once. The intertextualiy of their images, the art historical references, the popular idiom serve as a more confident affirmation of a regional and properly differentiated national aesthetic. Art language now affirms its multivalence, opening up the ideology of modernism to the possibility of alternative realities. By its transgressions what is retroactively called the postmodern impulse opens up the structure of the artwork, too- neatly placed within the high culture of modern India. The new narrators rattle the bars of national tradition and let out the parodic forces suppressed within it.

A host of new avatars descended quite suddenly on both the painterly and the sculptural ground. The decade of the 90s saw the rise of many representational tendency in sculpture making a dramatic rupture with modernist conventions and offered a retake on classical traditions.

The first retake on the sculptural tradition came from Ravinder Reddy, Dhruva Mistry and NN Rimzon. Reddys sculpture is about seduction, ornament, gigantism, iconicity, repetition, and fetish. Foxed with a burning gaze he equates the eroticism in the divine and popular, high and low traditions and thereby putting in a kitsch sublime. Whereas Dhruv Mistry feels closer to the metaphysical threshold of the sculptural dimension. In his work there is a vibrancy of movement of the corporeal life of the object which is revealed by the fullness of the surrounding object. His work has an anatomical accuracy, a formal purity further enhanced by his sensitivity to light as caught by sculptural forms. NN Rimzon inspired by German realist and expressionist figuration of the day, did exaggeratedly naturalistic and then distorted figures of human vulnerability and disabling entrapment in wider situations. His idiom imbibed in a unique manner elements of the Conceptual and Minimalist attitudes through which he pared down archetypal imagery in order to reach the core of things, rudimentary states and fine qualities of humanism

90s with the young Turks of Indian artists gained ground and assumed an authorial confidence to handle multifarious references. Certain urban Indian artists started being taken ‘seriously’ by the western curators, their works being acquired by museums overseas. With the 1971 war with Pakistan, the naxalite movement in Bengal, and the curtailing of democracy during the emergency, formed the political backdrop for a new phase in art, The artists of the cities of Bombay, Calcutta. New Delhi, Madras, felt it incumbent to refer to the national situation, to document the pain of their surroundings. A pre- occupation and the need for social responsiveness started gaining greater urgency, leading to a major delineating point of view. Addressing central issues of subjectivity, urban angst, memory and mythic materials. This trend became accentuated with some younger artists, like Nalini Malini, Sheba Chacchi, Navtoj Altaf, Natraj Sharma, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Baiju Parthan Jitish kallat, Sunil Gawde, Shibu Natesan and Amit Ambalal to name a few in painting. The trend been to revitalize the picture- space by bringing a variety of pictorial discourses to bear on its flat surface. These artists propose their pictorial fictions through a regional contemporaneity that is assertively framed, especially by reference to the artistic and curatorial ascendancy of the first world. Nalini Malini, Navtoj Altaf, Sheba Chacchi to name a few are discussed as the new installators, Nalini Malini in hamletmachine a video installation reinterprets Shakespeare's hamlet in the present day political context of India, while Sheba Chacchi in ‘Neelkanth’ installation, relocates the mythological figure of Neelkanth to the contemporary Indian city where the basic elements are all poisoned. Navtoj Altaf ‘Between Memory and History recalls memory into an image in amaze like pattern superimposed with text and ribbons. Subodh Gupta in ‘Vilas’ a photo installation foregrounds the erotic, while at the same time giving him the audacious persona of a vagabond from a local wrestling school. Atul Dodiya, has moved on from his muted photo- realism of the 1980s to an allegorical dramatization of his dilemmas as a painter in the epoch of installation through a series of oblique self- portraits and witty tableaux. Amit Ambalal places a caricatural spin on proverb and folk tale, subjecting to wry satire and occasionally puncturing such venerable figures as yogis and critics. A refashioning of pictorial fictions through a regional contemporaneity started becoming visible. Artists like Baiju Parthan and Jitish Kalat express themselves though a coded symbolism, a secret pictorial language that draws, paradoxically, on public and universal sources of ideas and imagery like the net itself and science. Their art is marked by a play with textures of referentiality, the artists take on questions raised by neurology, genetics, quantum mechanics and the usage of technology. It becomes visible in all the visual arts. artists work out private narratives and public myths in their manifold mediations: in the medium classical for India - painting - as well as photography, video, installation and digital art; combining the national, local, and global

The artists have all emerged from the art academies set up by the British reeking of a colonial baggage embedded in the urban landscape. What sets the artists apart ? what makes them ‘interesting’ to the curators from the developed world. The inclusion of their own culture, their own identities and the indigenenous styles of representation., working through quotage, appropriation and wit, their allegories reclaim an Indian route to post- modernism.

On the other hand with discursive spaces opening up and traversing trajectories the Indian diasporas one such multilayer are gaining ground, regaining their traditions and exploring and making interventions into the same are the British born Indian artists -the twin sisters Amrit and Rabindra Kaur, who are essentially drawing on the Indian miniature tradition while combining in it western and eastern aesthetics to create a unique genre in the British art practice. Challenging existing stereotypes and redefining narrow perception of heritage and identity.

The artistic development we see today is an interplay between irony and contemplation, playfulness and critique. In each line of development, i.e. sculpture, painting, graphic, we see that the availability of new media, materials and technologies has brought about a number of innovations in the form and framing of the artwork and in the manner in which artists now play response- expectation circuitry of the audience.

All arrive at the same issues : the question of either personal or political identities; the creation of new communities ; the dynamic redefinition of art practices in relation to cultural change; the dialogue between the poetic and the technological dimensions of art. The artists work up a friction between the cosmopolitan and the local, between classical iconography and vernacular imagery. In the process, they create new forms and practices that stand on the threshold between the conventional art and the ever changing public sphere. Whether it is studio painting, the sculpture- installation, the internet or the public domain, it is the above which becomes the locus of the new Indian art. Artists are working with the same basic operative variables. They seek new sites for their non- conventional art practices, new art situations beyond the purview of the established studio-gallery - museum spaces. They also attempt to develop new forms of response to their new sites and languages of art- making, acknowledging that conventionally trained or conditioned viewers are baffled by their art works and require the mediation of dialogue in order to engage with the new art idioms. Process and its temporality replace the durable art objects, thus critically examining the notion of ‘timeless art’. Video art has brought a new means of expression to Indian artists. These artists are not video artists per se, but rather painters, sculptors, installation artists and photographers. As video becomes a means for telling the larger story and examining the change and crisis that confront us on many levels, artists are using it to critically interrogate the reality they live in. This innovative appearance in visual culture has come to be applied with many art forms, the big idea of bringing together the dispersed elements in a fresh ensemble making of assembled works. A reliance on interdisciplinary skills in a collaboration with heterogeneous materials. As a medium Installation and video art generally uses space as an element designed to be entered into a part of the process of experience. This has led to the shift of art beyond the confines of the gallery environment, the involvement of location has invoked associations of site specificity as its social history, identity and belonging enter the work of artists. The euphoric marriage between art and technology invokes a never before, the experience of interactivity, transparency, dematerialization, penetrability and mobility.

This new pop culture is not only seen in visual culture but it reigns outside from the ‘folk art to commercial film’ ‘from the classical to fusion seen in music, dance and theater. This syndrome that hitherto defined the urban popular in India. It is in a sense more homogeneous in its purposes but requires diverse strategies and a negotiating wit within the rubric of the ‘new’ media deployed in the hard-sell of consumer commodities.

In music the term ‘fusion’ or remixes is being used both in India and the West. In India, more often than not, it meant Indian music, which had been given a ‘rock’, or western ‘pop-music’ feel, as when Asha Bhonsle re-issued her old hit songs to a disco beat and Susheela Raman, Trilok Gurti, Nitin Sawhny generated amalgams of the east and west. A new language became created in the world of music. One of the most visible of these agents has been the remarkable phenomenon of Bhangra, the emergence of which is very much a part of the ongoing process of cultural plurality. One of its extraordinary aspects has been its ability to act as a pan- south Asian music in the Diaspora. when club music across the world features Bhangra pop. Bhangra, a generic term for Punjabi music began as an Asian fusion music has now entered mainstream, it is being heard in clubs and coffeehouses such a the New York clubs and Berlin coffee houses, emerging from it a new presentation a new dominant strand of world music. This process of hybridization is particularly apparent now in developments within popular culture. The sociologist Les Back describes the bhangramuffin music of the singer/ songwriter Apache Indian as ‘a meeting place where the languages and rhythms of the Caribbean, North America and India mingle producing a new and vibrant culture’. ‘Artists like Apache Indian are expressing and defining cultural modes that are simultaneously local and global.’ Back observes. ‘The music manifests itself in a connective supplementarity - raga plus Bhangra plus England plus India plus Kingston plus Birmingham’.

With dance, and outside India (in spite of discomfort with the word) ‘fusion’ was used to refer to any creative collaboration between different cultures, such as when flamenco dance met Kathak, or Zakir Hussein played a duet with a Japanese shakuhachi flautist. As more and more artists from Africa, South America, Asia, Europe and the US began to interact in performance, the very term ‘world music’, which before had referred to music in general from non-western cultures, now suggested cultural amalgams. The New York-based World Music Institute increasingly promoted cross-cultural encounters of which Indian musicians were often the mainstay.

In India itself we find a divide between the rhythms and synthesis in music within the north south divide. The south which was more Dravidian linked more to tribal music whereas north India which was very hybrid, like ‘Vedic Chants’, ‘Prabandh’, and subsequent additions with central Asian and interface with Islamic traditions where from pure ‘bholeh’ it spread to ‘Durbar’ leading to a form of entertainment, a sensory makeover to present day infotainment.

In theatre, the notion of a ‘world theatre’ drawn from several different cultures grew. India with its treasure of theatrical traditions had inspired productions like Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and Ariane Mnouchkine’s L’Indiade. Casts were international, breaking down boundaries between different ethnicities: a Nigerian played Bhima, a Japanese actor was cast as Drona. The influence of such productions led to more works, which incorporated techniques, conventions - as well as actors - from Indian theatre. A 1996 French production of Moliere’s Tartuffe set in Turkey began with the percussive sounds of a street vendor playing Rajasthani khartaal. A 2000 Hamlet featured three Indians out of a cast of eight.

Kathak meets club dance, Indian dance went international when Uday Shankar first performed with Anna Pavlova in the 20s.This collaborative gestures are giving rise to new trends in the history of dance where Mavin Khoo and ballerina Sheena Chundee perform the ‘parrelel passions’. Shoban Jeyasingh uses film projections within a stage work, using and mixing contemporary music for her work, like that of Micheal Nyman, Kevin Volansand Django Bates. Jayachandran Palazhy uses Bharat Natyam and ballet and taichi in his works. While Dakshat Seth creates a work for the inauguration of the titan watch factory, and in on of his pieces ‘Modern Times’ he added funky and frivolous elements - baggy pants, umbrellas, and walked like Chaplin

In the past two decades of the twentieth century, a new movement began in mass media with the work of South Asian diasporic filmmakers in the West. Asian films no longer lurk outside in the periphery but have entered the mainstream, with the great success of the film by British Asian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha released in 2002, ‘Bend It Like Beckham’. ‘Bombay Boys’ of Manoj Night Shyamalan, Mira Nair’s ‘Monsoon Wedding’ become hot favourites dealing with issues of dislocation of identity and problems of identity fragmentation, the splintering of culture into diverse sub- cultures, and the clash of social values. Trying to reject the ‘westernizing’ influence of globalization and attempting to cling on to or re- invent ‘traditional’ attitudes and ways of life. The world of cinema is also reflecting this hybridization of cultures.

This process of fusion is read even in Literature. Literature in the postcolonial era, have common concerns, their nations having all experienced imperialism and colonization, and their peoples, immigration and frequently more than once. Among the common concerns there are: influences of colonization, possibilities of decolonization and defining national identity, power relations (between the colonizer and the colonized, dominant group and minorities). As we move from Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean, and then to Canada, the diasporic writers (e.g. Indian-Caribbean, African-Caribbean, Indian-Caribbean-Canadian) help connect different regions bringing about a global culture. Where culture clash and metamorphosis is celebrated. V.S. Naipaul an Indian by descent, a Trinidadian by birth, a Britain by citizenship. He has lived in all three societies. In His works is illustrated this concern of culture conflict, issues concerning roots, gender, ethnicity, caste. Celebrating hybridity. Roy's fictional canvas, likewise, renders up a map of misrecognition. Her unusually anti-picaresque heroine in The God of Small Things, enacts a journey in reverse -- from the cosmopolitan wholeness of America to the quiet provincialism of Kerala

Hari Kunzru, in his book 'Transmission' tells a story about men and women tossed around by global forces that are beyond their or for that matter, anyone's control or even understanding. The impulse of the new generation is sometimes money, sometimes sex or sometimes epidemic the sense in which much postcolonial pedagogy is participating in what Stanley Fish has called “boutique multiculturalism”.

Anglo- Indian fiction is experiencing a widely celebrated renaissance.

This seeming crossing currents and moving towards reindexing the international space. It is the ‘scene of translations’. Beyond the demand for assimilation, beyond absolutist notion of difference and identity, beyond the reversible stances of ‘self’ and other in which the euro centric gaze fashions itself as the other, as the intoxicating exotic heady stuff of a Smirnoff add - in the 1990s we have come to see the international spaces as the meeting ground for a multiplicity of tongues, visual grammar and style

Not only does this new emergence in art practices give India a new reading and making of art history, but it also creates a bridge between the cultural divide. bringing in of a new trajectory, while retaining its cultural traditions. The Indian cultural sphere seems to be in a debate between conservative and the liberal, the revivalist and the progressive, the socialist and the consumerist, the indigenist and the international A Duality exists in India where the ancient and cyber- space coexist. From a bowl of spiritual ideas, Buddhism, Gandhi Vendatic thought Yoga it has become the largest bowl of technological outsourcing, to consumer markets. Confusion and clarity compete with each other. In a world of dizzying technological advancements, the Indian youth is searching to define itself. The technological revolution has obliterated time and distance, and transformed the present- day into a global village, resulting in the blurring of boundaries and the inclusion of foreignness either culture. Rebellion and conformity form the two extremes that challenge this generation. This energy felt in the urban centers, is doubling at a rate which is breathless.

In discussion are some of the contemporary Indian artists who have resulted from this complex east- west encounter, from this post colonial, post modern trajectory. Experiencing a sense of expanding horizons, at the same time being confronted with a fresh range of cultural problems.

Modernity which started with Raja Ravi Verma saw an embedding with and came to stay with the west - east encounter. Amrita Shergil with the werstern encounter and the eastern interpretation of the same brought to India all at once a complex and dynamic complementarity of images. Post colonial India saw an energy which valorized the context of modernity with the progressives, where artists like F,N Souza, S.H. Raza and other members and associates of the progressive Artist Group helped to give modern art in India an autonomous status. There were artist who, in deference to the modernist principle of condensation, the Baroda group, converted lyric images into spiritual humans J. Swaminathan., Biren De to mane a few. At one end there was sustained regard to indigenious, living traditions and to merge the tradition /modernity aspects of contemporary culture through a typically postcolonial eclecticism. At the other end there was a desire to engage from the overarching politics of the national by a reclusive attention to formal choices that seemingly transcended both cultural and subjective particularities and enter the modernist frame.

Shantiniketan in a manner stood alone was concerned with the ideas of nationalism an indigenous modernity. They explored and studied ancient and medieval traditions to create indigenous alternatives to the Victorian academic realism with the skeptical position of Ababnidranath Tagore through the first decades of the 20th century to a more complex engagement that was developed by Shantiniketan by Rabindranath Tagore, and taken over at different levels of complexity by Nandalal Bose, Ramkinker Baij and Benodbihari Mukherjee from the 30s Shantiniketan brought through the ruse and reason of indigenous subject- matter a methodological shift in constructing the image. Taken up by Jamini Roy who objectified the tradition by bringing folk iconicity and urban commodification face to face. At the same time Paris trained artist Amrita Shergil gave to this emerging modernism a reflexive turn. By then Indian art had begun to pose considerable formations on modernism. A reckless manner of cultural symbiosis was re enacted by the Bombay progressives. Together these artists achieved in the first decade of independence a positively modernist stance. Several artist group claiming modernism cam into existence during the 40s and 50s in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.

The two enactments of modernism were seen developing together in India. Meanwhile there was a divergent in The Indian art scene itself the Baroda artists like Jeram Patel, J.Swaminathan, Jyoti Bhatt responded to the European modernists. The material, occult, ritual signs reissued the modernist enterprise in the coming years. It came to be situated with peculiar aptness in a visual modernist vocabulary replete with metaphorical illusions. But the surrounding rhetoric of Indianness also grew apace in the 70s and 80s though all tendencies were recycled within the Indian sensibility.

Within the terms of a post colonial transition, artistic eclecticism corresponds to the polemic around Indian identity. There were artist who made free use of tradition by proffering mythic attributes and invested ancestral origins in their work A Ramachandran, Ganesh Pyne, Laxma Gouda, Manjit Bawa, Manu Parekh examples.

The terms national. Secular, modern are so familiar in Indian cultural discourse that modernism as such is not always examined.,

A host of new avatars descended quite suddenly on the sculptural ground. The decade of the 90s saw the rise of many representational tendency. making a dramatic rupture with modernist conventions and offered a retake on classical traditions.

The first retake eon the sculptural trading came from Dhruva Mistry and Ravinder Reddy, Reddys sculpture is about seduction, ornament, gigantism, iconicity, repetition, fetish. Foxed with a burning gaze he equates the eroticism in the divine and popular, high and low traditions and thereby putting in a kitsch sublime.

N. N. Rimzon makes traditional icons a noble pretext for radical deviation. He directs the image, anthropomorphic or symbolic, toward a material asceticism.

Shantiniketan foregrounded the ideas of the rural over the urban, of art as vocation as opposed to profession. They drew upon an idealized fount of inspirational art. Particularly in Nandalal Bose, Ramkinker and Benod Bihari, saw a preference towards the rural and the folk, which set an agenda for a new romanticism in Indian art. However, among the manifold contributions of Shantiniketan we have examples of an indigenous modernism. We see here in an alternative strategy to the modern, perhaps as a re assertion of values.

The Bengal school stood alone taught at the early Indian schools went though radical transformations from the 20s to 40s at Shantiniketan