About Book
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 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.
About Author
Sanjukta Sunderason is Associate
Professor, Art History, Department of
Arts and Culture, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. A
historian of aesthetic and intellectual
formations of 20th-century
decolonisation, she researches
interfaces of visual art, left-wing
thought, and transnational histories
of postcolonial modernities.