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The earliest English landscape artist to arrive in India in the eighteenth century, William Hodges is known for his fine landscape drawings and paintings of India made during his four-year stay from 1780-83.

What is the role of collectors and collections or archives in the world of art today? Does it simply allude to practices of producing a consumable past today or does it also aspire to question the ways in which history has been shaped by powerful interventions in the form of artworks, performances and installations?  In this series of conversations, we wanted to explore the idea of collecting recent or contemporary art—and how it inevitably takes us back to the moderns who influenced such practices heavily. 

In a career spanning four decades, Amitava’s location as an artist has determined the authority that he brings to his practice. As an artist studying and working in the 1960s, Amitava Das experienced a decade of fragmented locii. The ’60s, the period of his education at the College of Art, was the decade of wars, fiscal difficulty and an uncertain polity in the wake of the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. Further, as a second generation pravasi (non-residing Indian) Bengali, the roiling political violence of West Bengal’s Naxal movement came to him through the filter of poetry, film and art—much as he would have received the existential writing of Camus, Genet and Rilke. Through the 1960s and ’70s, small groups of artists and filmmakers in different pockets in India had a heightened response: the state of the nation found an uncanny echo in the language of modernism, of the artist’s isolation and purity even within a state of uncertainty.

The birth of Amrita Sher-Gil to an Indian father and Hungarian mother bequeathed to the nation one of its most incandescent artists. Known for her luminous paintings, her work changed the face of modern Indian art and paved the course it was to take in the country. In a rare sculpture of tigers made, poignantly enough, in the last year of her life, Amrita Sher-Gil is revealed as someone exploring new directions before her tragic demise in 1941.

Henry Singleton’s The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultaun belongs to a genre known as history painting: the depiction of important historical events, usually on a large scale, as if they were playing out in front of one’s eyes. Author and parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor and art historian Giles Tillotson explain the lively imagination deployed in Singleton’s painting that depicts the British assault on Seringapatam and the killing of its ruler, Tipu Sultan—himself the source of so many stories that it was difficult to unravel the truth from the many falsities spun by the biased colonial administration and historians of the time.

S. H. Raza had begun to paint using oils, moving away from his impressionistic watercolours, on his way to winning the prestigious critics’ award in 1956. Just a year before, he completed a stunning painting of Parisian rooftops, revealing not a daylight scene but one of the night, only yellow lamplight from the streets dimly silhouetting the chimneys and sloping roofs. This period of Raza’s career is somewhat lesser known than his later, tantra-inspired works, as Ashok Vajpeyi and Aman Nath explain to us.

This collection of essays, co-edited by eminent scholars of art history, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, navigate the fraught religio-political contexts of South Asia to bring into relief the fragility and amorphous nature of a contested term like the ‘secular’.

Tipu Sultan’s historical legacy has led to several conversations, among which its visual inheritance has provided room for debate on its particularly skewed European view. Catch our guest speaker William Dalrymple’s reflections on this subject.