Rebecca Brown, “India's Modern Antiquity: An Unreadable Text, A New Ruin, and the Question of Modernity after 1947”
All that we have in India still lives—several centuries at the same time. The eternity of it all, that is what matters finally.
—Raghu Rai
The simultaneity of India’s past and present often appears in tourist brochures, coffee-table books, and, as above, in the texts of one of India’s premiere twentieth-century photographers. This approach to history and temporality represents more than a stereotype easily sloughed off; it permeates much of how India articulates itself to itself and to the world. If modern approaches to time often privilege progress and place India sometime behind the modern, with one foot in the ancient and always “not yet” modern, then how can artists and architects in the decades after India’s independence be modern? To probe this question, Brown examines two works: K.C.S. Paniker’s Words and Symbols painting of 1964 and Satish Gujral’s Belgian Embassy building of 1980-83. Both artists imbue their works with something of antiquity, but they also provide creative answers to Raghu Rai’s statement—answers that show us India’s relation to its colonial past and ultimately transform the definitions of the modern.
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