Modernism at the End of Empire: Decolonization and the Public Lives of Modern Art in South Asia 1950s-60s

Modern South Asia Seminar by Sanjukta Sunderason

Sanjukta Sunderason will discuss the interlocking domains of migration, mobility and modernism that influenced art practices in South Asia at the end of British colonialism and the start of post-partition nation states such as India and Pakistan. Concentrating on artists from Western and Eastern Pakistan in the 1950s-60s, Sunderason will try to explore the routes, spaces, dialogues and dilemmas that shaped the simultaneously dynamic and tenuous contours of postcolonial modernisms. The focus will be on Zainul Abedin, an artist who migrated from Calcutta to Dhaka in 1948, went on to become a critical link between Dhaka and the art worlds of West Pakistan in Lahore and Karachi, and represented Pakistan at various post-war artist conventions during these decades of Cold War. As a committed realist painter, as well as an institution-maker, pedagogue, art administrator and cultural diplomat, Abedin generated critical possibilities in understanding the public lives of modern art during the decolonization.

Sanjukta Sunderason is Lecturer in Modern South Asian Culture at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS). Trained both in Modern South Asian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and History of Art at University College London, her research interests span cultural histories of modern art in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, particularly visual cultures, aesthetics and politics in twentieth century India and Pakistan. Her recent PhD thesis studied formations of left-wing aesthetics and the rhetoric of progressive art in mid-twentieth century India. She is currently working on a postdoctoral research project on the transnational constellations of artistic modernities during the decolonization in South Asia.