Paper Trails

India is a nation of conflicting realities, where the old and the new, the traditional and modern regularly coexist. Here, the artists are concerned not solely with telling their own tales but also with exploring what it means to live in a nation steeped in tradition.

Within the context of modern and contemporary India, works on paper offered artists a way of cultivating transnational modernist expression while continuing to explore the potential of a medium that had deeper roots in older artistic traditions native to the subcontinent. This volume features over 100 watercolors, drawings, etchings, sketches and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, born primarily before the 1950s and who came of age in the decades directly following Independence in 1947. These artists span the transition from colonial to post-colonial India, embracing both realism and abstraction, exploring complex metaphors, and making political statements that directly engage India’s past, present, and future.

With contributions by Tamara Sears, Michael Mackenzie, Paula Sengupta, Emma Oslé, Darielle Mason, Rebecca M. Brown, Jeffrey Wechsler, Kishore Singh and Swathi Gorle.

Dr. Tamara Sears is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Michael Mackenzie is Professor of Art History at Grinnell College. Dr. Paula Sengupta is Professor at the Department of Graphics-Printmaking at the Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Emma Oslé is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Darielle Mason is the Stella Kramrisch Curator and Head of the Department of South Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and adjunct professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rebecca M. Brown, Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian visual culture and politics. Jeffrey Wechsler has been Senior Curator at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and has authored numerous publications on art. Kishore Singh is a former journalist and editor, who has been a columnist, documentary scriptwriter and also authored several books. Swathi Gorle is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.