Nation, Region, Modernity

This volume explores the Indian artist, K. Venkatappa’s life (1886–1965), his works and the political and cultural contexts that influenced and inspired his art. It looks at the artist’s style and examines the question of modernity in Indian art through the interstices of the regional and the national.

This richly illustrated book contextualises Venkatappa’s work in the milieu of Calcutta, princely Mysore and later Bangalore in the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when boundaries, horizons, and identities were in great flux. It complicates a unitary history of modern Indian art and, indeed, modernity in colonial India with its engagement with the question of region.

The volume discusses Venkatappa’s engagements with Indian artistic nationalism, the Bengal Renaissance, asceticism, as well as western modernist art and highlights the ambivalences and contradictions in his work. Through an in-depth reading of these diverse contexts, the essays in this book examine the artist’s legacy and his contemporary relevance, while showing how the trajectories of regional modernities can unsettle singular accounts of a nation’s art. This volume, part of the Visual Media and Histories Series, will be of interest to students and researchers of history of art, history, modern Indian art, visual studies, and cultural studies.

Deeptha Achar is Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat, India. She has co-edited Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (2003), Discourse, Democracy and Difference: Perspectives on Community, Politics and Culture (2010), and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012) apart from academic articles and catalogue essays. Her research interests include visual culture studies and childhood studies.

Pushpamala N. is an internationally recognised independent artist, writer, and curator and one of the pioneering conceptual artists in India. She is known for her strong feminist work, informed by cultural theory and social science. Her essays have been published internationally and she has presented papers at several major conferences on visual studies, cultural studies, contemporary art, and art history in India and abroad.