"The Aesthetics of Secularism: Modernist Art and Visual Culture in India" by Karin Zitzewitz

Karin Zitzewitz

Deposited 2006

Abstract
This dissertation considers the place of modernist art in Indian modernity. Over the course of these chapters, I will argue that from the 1940s to the 1980s, modernism in Indian art shifted from internationalism to indigenism, the emergence of which hinged on the development of a national visual culture. When classified as art, national visual culture came to be defined as a secular form, a system of visual expression in which signs were disenchanted and could be juxtaposed at will. A largely synchronic structure, the indigenist modernist version of visual culture served as a hedge against the progressive historicity enthusiastically adopted by international modernists. Finding elsewhere within modernism the potential for disrupting notions of historical progress, indigenism has offered itself as a site from which a critique of modernity, post-colonial or otherwise, can be mounted. Throughout these changes, modernist art, be it internationalist or indigenist, has remained in the space of the aesthetic, a domain within secular modern civil society constructed in the colonial period but invested with a series of new meanings in the post-colonial period.

This dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first, I address the three structures of patronage and meaning---the national, the cosmopolitan, and the international---in which the art of the Bombay Progressives circulated from the 1940s through the 1960s. Considerations of the social constitution of taste and its relationship to the meaning of art objects are central to this section of my dissertation. In the second half of the dissertation, I trace the emergence of a notion of indigenist modernism in the 1960s that saw itself as countering the assumptions of the Progressives. Taking visual culture as the basis for modernist art practice, indigenist modernism explicitly critiques the role of historical progress in art. While the first section focuses on questions of patronage and taste, the second favors discussions of art's historicity, theory, and form.