Bloomsbury Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art)

During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. During these precarious intervals, wherein the human potential for violence is released and rehearsed, images also emerge. This book asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Replicating the temporal caesura of emergencies and the resulting discontinuity of historical events, Art and Emergency avoids the linearity associated with ideas of historical progress. Instead, it plots a history that looks backwards as well as forwards; considering each emergency in relation to the previous ones and of all those yet to come: from the State of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, back to the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre of 1919. How can images interrupt the course of history? This book reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's compositions echo Partition s traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah s photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore s lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, Art and Emergency also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.