Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization

Partisan Aesthetics explores art’s entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics, and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing ‘partisan aesthetics’ as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s and its afterlives in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers, and cadres of India’s Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through modes of shifting political participation and dissociation. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sundersason activates distinctly locational histories that refract transactional currents. Insisting that art as an archive is foundational to understanding (Indian) art’s socialist affiliations, she generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.