Description: A look at how prominent Indian visual artists created modern art for the postcolonial nation in the years between India's independence in 1947 and 1980.
Review Quotes: "Rebecca M. Brown weaves a rich and layered narrative of Indian postindependence art, connecting painting with a wide range of references that include the architecture of Charles Correa, the 'high' cinema of Satyajit Ray, and the demotic art of Bollywood. All the while she balances theoretical sophistication with penetrating insights into the singular achievements of these artists as they negotiate the predicament of local versus global modernism. In the process, she unravels the indebtedness of modernity to colonialism. There has long been a crying need for such a work, and Brown's pioneering opus fulfills this admirably."--Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947