As brought out earlier, one of the most endearing aspects of Indian art and architecture prior to colonization has been the strong impact of folk idioms and folk art on courtly art. Although folk art received little encouragement during the period of colonization, independence brought forward a renewed interest in folk paintings. Historically, folk artists not only provided an important recreational service in village and urban communities, they helped preserve cultural traditions through their illustrations of love stories, popular ballads, epics and folk-tales. Along with playwrights and poets, they were instrumental in the spread of social values and ethics, and religious and philosophical ideas that had popular appeal.

Pre - 1900
During the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries, with the decline of Mughal power, painters who had enjoyed court patronage scattered around the country. Tanjore, Lucknow, Patna, Murshidabad, Nepal and the Punjab Hills became their main area of study.

At the same time a few European painters, such as J. Zoffany, Tilly Kettle, T. Daniell, W. Daniell and others came to settle in India. These were the artists who introduced a romanticized Indian landscape through the medium of Indian oil painting. With the introduction of this academic idiom the art of anonymous Indian Company Painters evolved, uniquely merging Eastern and Western themes and techniques.

The eventual fragmenting of traditional Indian arts was mainly the result of a cultural imperialistic infrastructure entrenching itself, bringing a change in sources of patronage, among other factors, and hence a change in the style of art and attitudes. The conflict between notions of individuality, rooted in the dominance of subjective reason, against attitudes of artistic anonymity, rooted in the dominance of joy and its intuitive faith, became one such transition.

In 1854, the first Industrial Art Society was set up in Calcutta by Rajendralal Mitra, Justice Pratt, Jatindra Mohan Tagore and others. By 1864, this was converted into the Calcutta Government College of Art. Soon to follow were the Bombay Government Art College and the Madras Government College of Arts & Crafts. The fine art education catered to the European tastes, in terms of themes, and mediums, perspective, chiaroscuro, portraiture, landscape and still life to name a few. This academic perspective was not the manner with which the Indian vision had been fashioned.

It was within this context that the art of Raja Ravi Varma and a few others, came to be recognized. Ravi Varma took India back to feudal themes, mixing the decorative attitudes of the Tanjore School of glass painting with his British Academic training, arriving at a fusion of Indian themes and the oil on canvas technique. He was one of the first Indians, to be followed by the likes of Hansaji Raghunath, Pestonjee Bomanji, M.V. Dhurandhar, and later, M.F. Pithwala, A.X. Trinidade, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Atul Bose and others to master the oil on canvas technique. Upheld by the British as a true ‘gentleman’ artist, educated in western techniques, using European aesthetics and mediums and patronized by the British, Ravi Varma’s genius within the Indian context of struggling for a modern language is articulated in several ways. Raja Ravi Varma was the first Indian artist to paint using the oil medium, which up until then had been practiced exclusively by the British and not taught in the art schools - an unverbalised segregation within the artists language. This deliberate choice of medium was a conscious step to be accepted not only by the British but also the Indian intelligentsia and aristocracy as it denoted progress. Ravi Varma’s imagery was influenced by and synthesized the various elements of his traditional Hindu upbringing with his British education creating a pictorial language, which the vast Indian public could identify with and were most visually comfortable. Without blindly aping the English artists living and painting in India, he combined the technique of oil painting with the decorative attitudes of Tanjore glass painting and the drama of Marathi theatre to create a fusion between the east and west. Ravi Varma’s work, which soon became synonymous with ‘kitsch’ and ‘calendar art’, emerged in its time as the first important signifier of ‘modernity’ and ‘nationality’ in Indian art. He took Indian art back to feudal themes. His fame, especially as a portraitist, hastened the stress on artistic individuality. Subverting the medium of printing press to his own objectives, his oleographs were able to reach a pan Indian audience, creating a ‘calendar’ image, which has kept its wonderfully gaudy imagery until today and significantly moulded the Indian eye.

1900-21
Roots of Indian Modernism: The Bengal School
The seeds from which a movement towards modern Indian painting grew were the existing Western academic art education, which seemed against the grain of the Indian psyche; a reaction against the popularity of artists such as Raja Ravi Varma ; the vast cultural Indian heritage which was being denigrated by the British and forgotten by its own people; a growing wave of Orientalism influencing European art and thought, as well as the political climate and its urgent issue of national identity, reflected via the Swadeshi Movement. The trigger, which integrated these issues and created a movement, was the coming together of E.B. Havell, with Abanindranath Tagore and A.K. Coomaraswamy among others, so as to resuscitate the neglected Indian cultural heritage. In July 1896, E.B. Havell was appointed the Principal of the Calcutta Government College of Art. His romanticism was instrumental in rediscovering the artistic and educational relevance of the ancient Indian cultural ethos and seeing it in relation to modern art.

Abanindranath Tagore, the first major artistic figure of Modern Indian Art, evolved a 'national' style and the school of painting, the Bengal School. His early works fused Rajput and Pahari miniature traditions with his training in European painting. Works such as: Last Days of Shah Jahan, announced the arrival of a new direction in Indian modern painting where the bhava, or emotive expression becomes the hallmark. Considered by some the father of modern Indian art, Abanindranath Tagore appeared on the stage at the turn of the century as a perfect foil to Ravi Varma. The construction of a nationalist cause in art in swadeshi Bengal and an alternative school of Indian painting came to be defined by this line of divide. Abanindranath Tagore opted out of his formal training in academic art methods and rejected all realistic replication. In contrast to Ravi Varma’s commercial success, Abanindranath developed the romantic ideal of the artist as a ‘creative genius’, placing inspiration over taught expertise, feeling over form, free of ambition for material gain. This canon now sharply redefined the meaning of ‘modernity’ and ‘Indian-ness’ locating them in the continuous fund of creativity and orientalist imagery of this prodigious artist.

Abanindranath’s artistic language emerged from his encounter with three specific art forms: Irish illuminated manuscripts with gilted designs and decorative framing of ornate calligraphy; 19th century miniature painting from Delhi; and the Japanese wash technique which allowed him to synthesize his eye for detail with an atmosphere of mist and shadow. Out of this amalgam of influences grew Abanindranath Tagore’s own compositions with frail, mannerized figures, intricately patterned foliage, curvilinear drapery and muted, somber palette. As a ‘modern’ artist it became his mission to fill in the missing emotional content into the miniature technique of India’s heritage.

It was left to A.K. Coomaraswamy to provide the relevant aesthetic and philosophic framework that would serve as a link between Indian Modern art and its ancient cultural ethos. His was an aesthetic grasp without parallel.

The Bengal School tried to merge individual artistic differences by creating images in Abanindranth’s artistic lineage though Nandalal and Venkatapa were notable exceptions with their use of flat colors defined by strong outlines. In Asit Haldar, Samarendra Gupta and K. Mazumdar, the melancholy and pathos of orientalism was most pronounced.

There was a parallel movement in Lahore around the Government Mayo College which revolved around textile, furniture and jewelry design. John Lockwood Kipling who was its principal from 1878, tried to mesh mistri techniques with academic training. A notable artist M.A.R. Chughtai (1897-1975) from Punjab and associated with the Mayo College was painting images on the same aesthetics as the Bengal artists but incorporating his Muslim, Persian heritage. His essential impulse was of emotion achieved through a deliberate distortion of the anatomy employing fluid lines. He was a superb craftsman and a brilliant watercolorist.

Rabindranath Tagore also gave his initial support to the Bengal School, though in time his vision demanded a fuller view, hence a separation from the 'movement'. Rabindranath Tagore steadily disappointed by the Bengal School's narrow vision. He criticized the artists’ deliberate unawareness of artistic developments in the world. Known primarily for his literary achievements, Rabindranath Tagore painted steadily for the last seventeen years of his life. He believed that “…only painting has a deathless quality”.

His educational institute, Visva Bharti at Santiniketan devoted to a National-Pan-Asian-Universal vision would be his chosen vehicle. In Rabindranath’s own words, “Visva Bharti represents India where she has her wealth of mind which is for all. Visva Bharti acknowledges India’s obligation to offer to others the hospitality of her best culture and India’s right to accept from others their best”. The school was essentially a patriotic gesture to revive ancient brahamanical norms and organize ‘national education’. But in Rabindranath’s vision this would be achieved through an interaction with world cultures. The art school was built by one of India’s greatest modern artists, Nandalal Bose who accepted Rabindranath’s invitation to take up the post of principal of Visva Bharti.

Rabindranath Tagore, also a poet and Nobel laureate, allied with the school's general goals, but preferred to devote himself to his more personal and universal vision, though one that was expressed in paintings executed in strikingly modernist terms. It would be in the latter's Shantiniketan Institute too that Ramkinkar Vaij and Benode Behari Mukherjee would express their love for nature and its rhythms in work that would be recognised as pioneering only much later.

Thus the Bengal School matured. For the first time, the movement gave rise to an infrastructure separate from British patronage. Various means of discussing and disseminating artistic ideas were growing to counter colonial structures. The artists of the Bengal School included: Nandalal Bose, K. Venkatappa, Samarendranath Gupta, Asit Kumar Haldar, Kshitindranath Mazumdar, Sarada Ukil and M.A.R. Chugtai.

By the early 1920's the parallel streams of British Academic orthodoxy and modern art inspired by traditional Indian sources ran simultaneously. These two stepping-stones would engender enough reaction to open up new paths, as revealed through the art of a few creative pioneers.

Though from the Bengal school Nandalal’s decision to join Shantiniketan was a conscious break from a movement moulded on Abanindranath’s lyricism. His style underwent a drastic change at this point inspired not by miniatures or the orientalists but by his immediate surrounding: actual landscapes and real people. Nandalal attempted to locate art and through it nationhood in the domain of everyday life. The 20’s and 30’s contributed significantly towards Nandalal’s institutional and national status - which also, in the process, established certain new stylistic canons of ‘Indianness’ and ‘modernity’, purging it of any western elements and rooting it firmly in the realignment of ‘classical’ with ‘folk’ and ‘artist’ with ‘craftsman’.

With the Quit India movement enveloping the country, national art and Nandalal as its central figure was called upon to create at a new scale of public exposure and contact. He was asked to set up the pavilions of the Indian National Congress for three consecutive years 1936-38 during which he created the Haipura series for the congress meet in 1937 at Haripura. The emphasis was on economy, simplicity and popular art resources. The materials used were paper pasted on cheap strawboard, locally ground colors and thick brushes; the subjects were ordinary people at everyday tasks; the style chosen was that of the kalighat and Orissa patachitras, with bold free brushlines, loosely sketched forms and a flat bright palette of basic colors framed in a common arch. According to Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ”The painting of these pictures for a national public forum becomes a critical moment in India’s modern art history…blending the ‘classical’, the ‘folk’, the ‘modern’to produce an art that could signify the nation”. The ‘popular’ in Nandalal’s Haripura Congress posters was fully accommodated, aestheticized and absorbed into a modern artistic canon.

Distortion never interested Nandalal. He was an industrious and unpredictable artist who adopted several mediums and constantly evolved his imagery to adapt to the techniques.

The 1920’s also saw the emergence of Gagendranath Tagore (1867-1938), Jamini Roy (1887-1972) and Amrita Sher-Gil (1912-1941) who were experimenting separate from the revivalism in Bengal and creating parallel but independent aesthetics which incorporated contemporary European artistic innovations.

In December 1922, an exhibition of Bauhaus artists - avant-garde German Expressionists - was organized in Calcutta. With the conscious interaction between east and west, the anti-western revivalist art which up until now had been identified as the national art of India, became the expression of yesteryears, leaving the path open for artists to experiment without rigid guidelines of acceptance.

Gaganendranath Tagore was another artist to follow his personal impulses, freely responding to artistic influences from all directions, including from the derided West, and choosing to delineate the hypocrisies of the society around him.

Gagendranath had a very liberal attitude towards experimenting with Japanese and modern western art, from art nouveaux, futurism and cubism to German expressionism. His art reflected the social and religious hypocrisies of his times and ranged from misty images to cartoons combining with his love for pattern show the remarkable ease with which he handled often-conflicting themes in varied mediums and styles.

However, not all artists were prepared to subserve the demands of the prevailing isms. Jamini Roy, taking a more individualised stance, turned his gaze onto the immediate reality around him. It is his studies of the Santhal tribals, with their sharp angular lines and clear colours, which indicated the possible direction that must be taken to discover an indigenous idiom and sensibility.

Jamini Roy, on the other hand, drew inspiration from folk and tribal art. His restoration of traditional motifs was not a spurious elongation of eyes and limbs, which he felt the Bengal school had been reduced to. Though the motifs he used in his work refer to Krishna, Radhas. Gopinins, Madonna’s, cows etc., Jamini’s works are either whole shapes or agglomerations of shapes delineated by defining lines. There is little difference between the way a gopi and a cow have been drawn as the characters of the lines and shapes have much in common. The picture plane is divided along the horizontal and vertical axis and the motifs placed carefully not to overlap and lines not to cross. Even where they do, there is no distortion in the outlines defining each shape.

His art, referred to by some, as ‘modern primitivism’ was a conscious adoption of simplified forms denoting objects and beings without over killing with melodramatic realism. He approached folk art not in the sense of pretentious revivalism but as an inherent part of who he was. He believed that folk art was not dead as in the case of Ajanta murals but a living entity and therefore was in no need of being revived, just synthesized. It was neither a reactionary not a romantic view, just an attempt to create a language, which spoke to the people of India with a vocabulary they understood.

To further achieve his aims he used canvases of cheap home-spun cloth, coated with a mixture of alluvial soil and cow dung followed by a whitewash. His palette consisted of seven colors: red, ochre, green, vermilion, grey, blue, white made from powdered rock, indigo and chalk, mud and black lines by lampblack. He was an exact colorist in search for form.

Though his themes remained consistent to his rural Bengal and Hindu mythology he made a foray into Christian symbolism for several reasons: could his technique be applied to a subject alien to his life and dissatisfied by the reproductions he saw of Renaissance masterpieces he wanted to prove that human and divine could be one using abstract, symbolic means.

A seemingly more direct challenge to the revivalists came in the thirties in the form of the bold, post-impressionistic colours of Amrita Sher Gill, and in the forties through the 'socially responsive' work of the Calcutta Group; the latter artists consciously choosing to integrate foreign influences in their work in order to "enrich our art" and to create an art both "international and interdependent." Amrita Sher Gil was the first artist to openly condemn the Bengal School and address the need of incorporating international aesthetics within the Indian sensibility in an attempt to nudge Indian art forward. She lived and practiced her art not in the creative hothouse of Bengal but in her home in Amritsar and Shimla. Trained in Paris and interacted with artists in Europe, she was not averse to the idea of creating a dialogue between her Indian and European heritage (her father was Sikh and her mother Hungarian). Her vision was executed in flat vibrant colors and her evolved themes came to revolve around the rural people in villages. She traveled extensively and, like the Bengal school though without the mistiness, was inspired by the Ajanta frescoes.

Amrita did not paint celestial beings but placed her gods and goddesses in the silent, patient faces of the common people under laid with a sense of tragedy. She looked to Cezanne for the organization of form and Gauguin for her organization of color though simplicity always remained her guiding principle. In contrast also to the Bengal artists, Amrita painted live models, a practice condemned by Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose.

The 1920’s and 30’s also saw the art of George Keyt (1901-1993), a Ceylonese artist reach aesthetic maturity. As with other artists of the time, George Keyt assimilated the various influences of traditional Indian art and mythology, cubism and sinhalese art and created a dramatic imagery wherein his figures take on an expressive grandeur and intense feeling.

He used line to denote shapes, different planes on the surface i.e. background, foreground and middle ground, movement as well as acting as a decorative motif. His uncluttered, bold simplicity showed George’s appreciation for the human form, especially feminine form. His art was highly romantic, influenced by temple sculptures. His symbols were contained within harmonious lines and color: scarlet background to denote passion, reduction of forehead and nose to a straight line and deliberate use of enlarged eyes reminiscent of Mewar and Basholi miniatures.

In 1941, the year Rabindrananth Tagore and Amrita Sher Gil died, eight young artists formed the Calcutta Group (1940-1953) who worked on the idea that ‘art should aim to be international and interdependent’. Six painters Subho Tagore, Gopal Ghose, Raithin Maitra, Prankrishna Pal, Paritosh Sen, Nirode Mazumdar and two sculptors Prodosh Das Gupta and Kamala Das Gupta had a very liberal attitude towards borrowing from the outside world that which would best assist them in expressing their concern: their immediate social environment. They were determined to steer Bengal away from wallowing in romantic nostalgia and their stated influences were Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Braque and Brancusi. These artists were not interested in gods and goddesses, the Epics and Purana which they felt had no role in society which should place man as the supreme being and thus occupy a central role in the concept of aesthetic expression. Nirode Mazumdar was the first artist to receive a scholarship by the French government to visit Paris in 1946 and Paritosh Sen is the only Indian artist to have met Picasso.

The country's independence from colonial rule in 1947 might have seemed like the right moment for a form of expression that would match the significance of the occasion. However, it appears that art does not always take its cues from events seen as historical or defining; and if it does, seems to make references that appear to veer sharply from the direct. The so-called 'artists of transition', for instance, seem to be engrossed in a contemplation of life's simpler pursuits, the everyday, small and trivial. Perhaps it was a way of suggesting that now that the overriding objective had been attained, it was time to savour the pure sense of being alive. These artists, among them Sailoz Mukherjea, N.S. Bendre, K.K. Hebbar, Shiavax Chavda and K.H. Ara, seem at peace with life around and feel they must capture its fleeting, and now intensely more joyous, moments. This innocent interlude is characterised by simplified forms and lively colours.

The response of the Progressive Artists Group (1947-1956) in Bombay, too, seems apolitical, the fact of their coming together in the year of Independence being purely coincidental. What these artists were more exercised about was the fact that art as practised in India till then had to change; a total break with the past and its stultifying constraints, both cultural and artistic, was called for. F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, M.F. Husain, S. H. Gade and S. Bakre were determined to fashion an art that was 'entirely Indian but also modern'. Their work does contain the latter two elements in ample degree, though the modernism relies a great deal on Parisian abstract Expressionism and post-Impressionism. The group was joined briefly, in the fifties, by Mohan Samant, V. S. Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna.

Up north in the capital, the Delhi Silpi Chakra, a group of artists displaced from Lahore after the country's Partition in 1947, deployed a finely-honed technical skill to register their anguish at the trauma of displacement. They also continued the quest for a national style of expression, turning to local craft traditions for inspiration in this direction. These artists (B. C. Sanyal, Kanwal Krishna, Dhanraj Bhagat, P.N. Mago, K.S. Kulkarni and others) would also prove to be instrumental in the future artistic development of K.G. Subramanyam, Satish Gujral, Bimal Dasgupta, Shanti Dave and others). It is only post-1947 that Delhi received its artistic infrastructure through the efforts of the Delhi Shilpi Chakra (established in 1949) and India’s first private art gallery, the Dhoomimal Gallery. As a post partition phenomenon a number of refugees, including a large number of artists from the Lahore art school, migrated to Delhi. It was a time of confusion and trauma and the artists felt the need to be self-reliant. The group started by, among others, B.C. Sanyal, Kanwal Krishna and Sailoz Mukherjee worked on the motto ‘Art illuminates Life’. The group recognized the central role art plays in life, that it serves as a commentator on contemporary life and can influence the forces of progress. It was the longest lasting group active well into the 60’s.

In the late fifties and intermittently over the next two decades, the centre of artistic endeavour seemed to shift, if ever so briefly, to Baroda, where the Fine Arts department of M. S. University had been very ambitiously put together. The result was the group of practitioners, styled the Baroda Group, whose experiments in abstraction, Pop Art and Neo-Dada would considerably deepen contemporary Indian art's engagement with modernism.

Kanwal Krishna (1910-1993) also studied in Calcutta but his themes emerge from his extensive travels in the Himalayas, Tibet and Sikkim. His oeuvre is characterized by the masterly use of watercolors and graphic media. He was a master in using light to create an extraordinary luminary quality in his paintings. He didn’t paint pretty landscapes but appears to be turning the landscape inside out, celebrating its majestic, textural quality. He probably received the greatest international recognition of the artists in Delhi in the 1950’s and traveled and taught all over the world.

M.S. University with its Fine Arts Faculty was instituted in Baroda in 1950’s as a modern education facility which incorporated in its syllabus, along with painting and sculpture, aesthetics, philosophy, graphic arts, museology, art history and criticism creating a holistic educational system. The pioneers Hansa Mehta, Markhand Bhatt, N.S. Bendre, Sankho Chaudhari and K.G. Subramanyam shaped the art of the next couple of decades and still influence art and artists today.

N.S. Bendre’s (1910-1990) art shaped the painting department at Baroda. It is said that Bendre reworked the history of modernism moving from Impressionist picturization to pointillist surfaces, from cubist stylization to post cubist abstraction. He experimented with spatial relationships on the canvas through the genre of landscape painting in a language understandable to the laypersons eyes. He had a deft control over whichever medium he chose to paint in, though gouache remained his favored medium. He cultivated a natural feeling for light and air despite his training in academic realism. This was heightened by his visit to China in 1953. Bendre, not unlike other Indian artists, discovered his oriental preferences through the modernist lens. He used the harmonizing of color to elicit luminescence and celebrate surface and at the same time approximate atmosphere, in the manner of the Impressionist painter.

Quite in contrast to N.S. Bendre, K.G. Subramanyam (b. 1924) was quietly developing alternative points of view with which to confront the questions of tradition and modernity, of indigenism and ecclectism, of form and language. Subramanyam was an avid enthusiast of the living rural art traditions. Always inquisitive about the internal dynamics of form, he found the structural mechanics of Cubism answering some of the questions about the two-dimensionality of Indian folk art. He used linear patterning as the structural break-up of the painting. The symbol of the window is repeated in his works, the relation between interiors and exteriors, the act of looking in.

As though in reaction, the overarching need for a 'national' art came to a head around the same time. J. Swaminathan and his Group 1890, declared that Indian artists must reject the "hybrid mannerisms" imported from Europe. And a group of artists in south India cocooned themselves in the Cholamandal Artists Village and consciously attempted to distil an Indian idiom through the use of techniques derived from rural handicraft traditions, textile design and the inspiration of Jamini Roy. K.C.S. Paniker, J. Sultan Ali, S.G. Vasudev, K. Ramanujam were some of the artists following this persuasion.

It was also late in this decade that several artists, Biren De, Shanker Palsiker, Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Jagdish Swaminathan among them, turned to a form of abstraction inspired by Indian Tantra art, the symbolic and religio-erotic interplay of circles, triangles and squares. This Neo-Tantric turn, it was hoped, would show the way to an unmistakably-Indian and modern idiom.

The turbulent seventies saw a more intense turn towards the social. The 1971 war with Pakistan, the Naxalite Movement in Bengal, and the curtailing of democracy during the Emergency, formed the political backdrop for this phase. In the cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Vivan Sundaram, Ganesh Pyne and Bikash Bhattacharjee, among others, felt it incumbent on them to directly refer to the national situation and document the pain of the people. A pre-occupation with the role of the artist in a poor country and the need for social responsiveness also gained greater urgency now.

But artistic journeys can also be intensely personal and idiosyncratic. Tyeb Mehta, A. Ramachandran, Rameshwar Broota, Akbar Padamsee, Jehangir Sabavala, Laxman Shreshta, Laxma Goud, Anjolie Ela Menon and others would carry forward their individual pre-occupations, trying to tease out the insights they sensed lurking somewhere.

The decade also saw many more women artists come forward on the artistic scene, the majority of them delineating a point of view that combined the feminist and the subjective. As may be expected, Nalini Malani, Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh, Ira Roy, Veena Bhargava, Suruchi Chand, Navjot and others address the central issues of subjectivity and victimhood, but the introspective and the apparently apolitical also find a voice in their work. The obsessions of their male counterparts (modernism, indigenism etc.) seem relatively peripheral concerns.

This trend would, of course, be a prefiguration of the tone of artistic practice in the eighties and nineties. During these two decades, the preoccupations of the earlier part of the century get considerably attenuated and, with some younger artists, become a non-issue. The hard fact of the globalised economy makes a post-modernised utterance seem de rigeur now. Thus, in keeping with the tenor of the times, installation art, mixed media, and digital representations insinuate their way into public awareness. The "hybrid mannerisms" excoriated by Jagdish Swaminathan now become "hybrid signs", and ironically, begin to seem normal and familiar. The earlier divides blur; the borders between the imported and the indigenous seem to suture, though the edges continue to show.

Thus, Bhupen Khakkar will combine a sinuous mix of both influences, the local and the foreign, but also not hesitate to draw in the viewer to the fact of his alternate sexuality. And M. F. Husain will take further the project that he has made his very own: to mix the religious with the secular and the elite with the popular. His attachment to Hindu icons will, however, not be seen in the proper light by religious fundamentalists, who will vandalise his paintings in protest against his alleged misinterpretation of the true spirit of Hinduism. But in keeping with his image as the painter most representative of the Indian ethos, Husain will also go overboard celebrating his discovery of a woman, the Hindi film star, Madhuri Dixit, who, he will claim, is the living embodiment of the quintessential Indian woman (Bharatiya nari). (Such an entity, it seems, can really exist! Isn't it usually artistic intuition which discovers this before the rest of us?!)

Among the younger artists, the pluralist and fragmentative mood predominates. With the old, archaic bonds loosened, Atul Dodiya's montages will take cognisance of this new place we find ourselves in, while Anandjit Ray will combine his colours as easily as his narratives.

In the work of Baiju Parthan, the past and the present will cohere without too much dissonance. As it does with most of the artists, too numerous to mention, painting today. An unexpected nuance comes into the picture with the work of artists emanating from the Indian Diaspora. Additionally, the opening up of the market for Indian modern art abroad, as also the profusion of art galleries within the country, will mean that the Indian artist now has no choice but to address a more diffuse audience, through themes that resonate with the local and the global.