Partisan Aesthetics: Indian Art and 20th-Century Decolonisation
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-06-02

A history of Indian art and 20th century-decolonisation with art historian Sanjukta Sunderason.

This talk will raise some of the key arguments and methodological propositions from Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020), by focusing on a rare album from 1944, addressed in the book Bengal Painters’ Testimony (Arun Das Gupta et al eds., published during the 8th Annual Conference of the All-India Students' Federation, December 1944).

The album was produced in late-colonial Calcutta under the shadow of the Second World War and the notorious 'manmade' Bengal Famine of 1943 that killed and displaced millions. It carried works of artists both well-known and young entrants, committed or distant from political action, and representing plural artistic styles.

How do we read this convergence – for art and for the late-colonial polity it sought to address? Produced under burgeoning 'communist' cultural activism geared towards famine relief, Bengal Painters’ Testimony, as Partisan Aesthetics has argued, allows us to understand the formations of a fluid political affiliation in the artistic field – one that vacillated between participating in and dissociating from an active 'socialist' vocabulary in art.

This vacillation was in itself a modality of 'partisanship' in art, one that provides a unique entry-point into the dialectical formations of modern art during decolonial transition.

Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian of 20th-century aesthetics, working at the interfaces of visual art and political thought, particularly on the ways in which art reflects and reframes struggles, imaginations, and dialogues around 20th-century decolonisation. Her first monograph Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) studied left-wing aesthetics in 20th-century India. Her current projects span connected histories of modernism and fragmentation from post-partition India, (West and East) Pakistan and Bangladesh, and formations of the transnational in the art of decolonial liberation movements. She is Assistant Professor in History of Art at the University of Amsterdam.