European artists travelling to India provided the first views of the country and her people to their patrons back home. As such, they accepted only prominent commissions and painted subjects that were exotic enough to appeal to an elite audience. It fell upon subaltern artists based in the interiors and in cantonments to document ordinary people, their life, plants, birds, trees and animals, giving rise to a canon of art practice that came to be known as Company Paintings. The ushering in of Western techniques resulted in training in art schools that included copying the Ajanta frescoes, as well as a rejection of academic realism in favour of Asian practices recalling Chinese and Japanese techniques, laying the foundation for a new style of oriental art defined by the Bengal School—often described as the first foothold of Indian modernism.

Folk artists were quick to absorb Western techniques that suited their requirements, none more so than the patua or scroll artists in Calcutta who painted sacred images of gods and goddesses for pilgrims to take back home from the city’s popular Kalighat temple. An element of shading became an important attribute of their art. In turn, they went on to inspire generations of artists among whom Jamini Roy became popular for his ability to marry the Kalighat pat with a minimalistic modernism, thereby creating a fresh, new vocabulary, earning him the pedigree of a National Treasure artist.

Folk art went on to inspire modernists around the country, particularly when recalling or subscribing to mythological elements in their work, such as J. Sultan Ali whose paintings are exhibited here, Madhvi Parekh for inventing a language of playful naivety, and Rabin Mondal for drawing inspiration from primitive tribal art.

The modernists, like their predecessors, were invested in narratives of the land and its people—with one exception. Theirs was now an India seen through Indian eyes. Landscapes and portraiture had become incorporated into a new style of practice that, while diverse in its range, attempted to portray her people as they were: a mirror that reflected society, warts and all. These were trained artists who had gone beyond the domain of academic realism to make allowance for emerging Western trends and tropes that ranged from impressionism and expressionism to cubism as seen through an Indian lens.

Art centres were no longer restricted to a few cities, and artists moved beyond collectives to traverse individual paths resulting in distinctive identities. The one quality common to Indian modernism was a rootedness to the soil.

The 1960s, in India, saw the emergence of a robust abstract movement that moved away from distortions in figurative art towards a new direction that obliterated all that appeared familiar. Colour became dominant and American colour-field artists became a source of inspiration over their earlier European counterparts. Influences were often found in their own backyards, and artists moved freely between memory and experience to create artworks in which the clues to their interpretation were often closely bound with their own lives.

This gave rise to a new art movement based on tantra’s traditional precepts of symbols, thereby creating a language of abstraction borrowed from the past as a uniquely Indian response to the genre. It freed up the artists from the necessity of ritual symbolism while allowing them to explore the tenets of a language with deep roots in India.

An important aspect of modernism in India was the ability to borrow emerging expressions from the West and apply them to the unique culture in which the artists were rooted. This ranged from life (and lifestyles) in cosmopolitan cities that slowly gave way to a lampooning of its ingenues. Magic realism reflected the artists’ ability to tell different stories within the same composition unmindful of time and space.

The fractured picture plane, the line—now bold, now absent—the distortion of the familiar, became tools for artists to playfully manoeuvre their compositions, often delivering double entendres beyond the merely aesthetic. This was an artistic device that allowed artists to deliver societal indictments while being mindful of their art.