South Asian art traditions, image making and aesthetic conventions

The underlying idea of a stimulating debate at The Center for South Asia at Stanford is to initiate a broad inter-disciplinary conversation on India’s visual culture and modern art. An explanatory note states from the center mentions: “We aim to demonstrate that the historical experience and visual culture in South Asia as a whole, and India more specifically, has a lot to offer the more general debate on aesthetics, visuality and modern art.”

The institute looks to promote the study of South Asian art so as to reflect the vital position of the region today. Its focus is primarily on the colonial-modern and contemporary post-colonial South Asia from where modernity can be conceptualized and understood in all its historical complexity through debates and reflections.

In the new nation-states of South Asia, every sign, expression and image denoted the tradition and values of a community and also acted as signs of the nation, at another level. Modernist art practitioners faced a peculiar dilemma in the postcolonial states of South Asia. They thought themselves to be part of a ‘modernist international’, constantly in conversation with dominant modernist trends elsewhere in the world; simultaneously attached to the idea of the new nation and also the creative powers that it could unleash. They were keen to provide a new set of forms to this new national imagination, which were distinctly Indian.

As the South Asian art & visual culture is becoming an integral aspect of the international art market, both ends of this tension accentuated by tradition and modernity are more palpable than ever. The autonomy and power of the images do not any longer primarily index a unique religious-cultural experience in themselves but rather the sophistication and depth of modern South Asian culture, making it possible to universalize itself, keeping intact its uniqueness.

Today’s new, emerging and self-confidently global India possesses a new level of self-consciousness, elevated from the debris of the past. This is exactly what ‘Making India Visible: Visual Culture and Modern Art in India’ courtesy The Center for South Asia at Stanford strives to achieve, trying to fathom its new visual regime.