R. Siva Kumar - Art and Anticolonial Activism in South Asia

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

This lesson examines the artistic movements and practices that developed in South Asia in parallel and in conversation with the struggles for independence from British colonial rule, highlighting how visual, literary, and performative arts reflected and shaped the aspirations for freedom and social change. Beginning with the Bengal School, it is discussed how artists such as Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose revived local traditions while responding to European academic conventions, shaping a modernism rooted in cultural specificity. It also examines the experimentations brought forwards by artists like Rabindranath Tagore, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij in Santiniketan, combining visual arts, literature, philosophy, and pedagogy. The lesson discusses figures such as Amrita Sher-Gil, Nirode Mazumdar, and the Calcutta Group, and briefly turns to a selection of artists from the region that later became Pakistan and Bangladesh, whose reinterpretations of local narratives and visual vocabularies seeked to affirm cultural autonomy and challenged colonial aesthetics.

R. Siva Kumar is an internationally recognized art historian, critic, and curator, known for his pioneering research on early Indian modernism and the Santiniketan School. He has authored influential books, contributed to major reference projects such as Art Journal, Grove Art Online, and The Dictionary of Art (Oxford University Press), and curated landmark exhibitions including Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism and The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, as well as retrospectives of key modern Indian artists.