Non-Aligned

A revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art's role in decolonisation and aesthetic discourse across the Global South.

Modernism's peak in the interwar and postwar decades coincided with the eruption of antifascist and decolonisation movements globally, including the League against Imperialism, the Bandung Asian-African Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Viewing artistic practices through the lens of the radical intellectual possibilities that these epoch-making events prompted, Atreyee Gupta uncovers a modernist internationalism incongruous with Westernist cultural hegemonies. Modernism, she shows, cannot be separated from concepts of freedom and autonomy generated by Third World political struggles. Gupta mobilises concepts including liberation, anti-imperialism, development, and modernisation as essential analytic categories for art history, reorienting our understanding of both global modernism and Indian art.

Intertwining stories of art and liberation, aesthetics and decolonisation, and intellectual practices and political revolution in the Third World, or what is now known as the Global South, Non-Aligned follows the far-flung interwar and postwar networks in which Indian artists and intellectuals such as Mulk Raj Anand, Dhanraj Bhagat, Francis N. Souza, Jagdish Swaminathan, and Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore participated alongside interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Octavio Paz, André Malraux, and Le Corbusier in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This riveting account is beautifully illustrated with rarely published artworks.