Founded in 1949, the Delhi Silpi Chakra emerged at a moment when New Delhi was still reeling from the social and cultural ruptures of Partition. Formed by refugee artists who had migrated from Lahore—B.C. Sanyal, P.N. Mago, Kanwal Krishna, K.S. Kulkarni and Dhanraj Bhagat—the collective arose from urgent need: for shelter, for solidarity and for a space where artists could work, exhibit and think together. Dissatisfied with the institutional conservatism of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS), then the dominant art body in the city, they sought to create an independent platform that allowed freedom, experimentation and dialogue at a time when the city lacked sustained cultural infrastructure.
The Delhi Silpi Chakra, one of India’s longest-running artist collectives in India, was never defined by a single aesthetic or stylistic programme. Rather than functioning as a conventional art group, it operated as an open-ended creative assembly—one that understood modernism not merely as a visual language, but as a civic and social practice. Guided by its deceptively simple manifesto, ‘Art Illuminates Life’, the collective rejected the idea of art as an elite or isolated pursuit, positioning artistic practice as inseparable from public life, collective responsibility and social exchange.
Through mohalla exhibitions, workshops, lectures and public discussions—and through the establishment of Delhi’s first artist-run gallery at Shankar Market—the Silpi Chakra fostered an inclusive, democratic space that welcomed artists across generations, alongside writers, poets, critics and intellectuals. Its activities intersected with the broader project of nation-building in the early decades after Independence, engaging questions of public patronage and the social role of art.
Within this vibrant milieu, artists such as Devayani Krishna, Amar Nath Sehgal, Satish Gujral, Avinash Chandra, Ram Kumar, Arpita Singh, Paramjit Singh, and Rameshwar Broota, among many others, found both support and a sustained forum for exchange. Though their practices differed widely in form, material and theme, they were united by a shared belief in art’s capacity to respond to a society in transformation.
This exhibition revisits the Delhi Silpi Chakra not as a peripheral episode in the history of art but as a vital experiment in postcolonial modernism—one that imagined art as a shared social practice and collective act of rebuilding in the aftermath of Partition.
