The Art of Secularism

Speaker: Karin Zitzewitz
Discussant: Abhay Sardesai

January 24, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

Karin Zitzewitz’s ‘The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India’ addresses the entanglement of visual art with political secularism. The crisis in secularism in India is commonly associated with the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s. A variety of commentators have noted how the Hindu nationalist movement made innovative political use of iconic images associated with Hindu mythology, challenging the relationships between modernism, national culture, secularism and modernity that had been built since India’s independence in 1947. The Art of Secularism describes how that political shift radically transformed the terrain of modernist art, which had often drawn upon religious iconography as a largely secular form of national culture.

In this talk, Zitzewitz examines how three renowned modernists, M. F. Husain, K. G. Subramanyan, and Bhupen Khakhar, grappled imaginatively and very differently with the re-enchantment of signs. Her research attests to the depth and range of modernist experimentation with secularity in India, but also the unequal freedom that artists have to use religious iconography in their work.

Karin Zitzewitz is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Michigan State University, USA. In addition to her curatorial initiatives and writing for more academic audiences, she has contributed to catalogs and short pieces have appeared in the popular art journals Art India, TAKE On Art, and Art AsiaPacific. Her book, ‘The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India’ (2014) has received critical acclaim, and its manuscript was awarded the Edward C. Dimock Prize in the Humanities from the American Institute for Indian Studies.

Abhay Sardesai has been the Editor of ART India, the premier art magazine of India, since November 2002. He teaches at TISS, the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum and the Drama School, Mumbai. He writes in English and translates from Marathi, Konkani and Gujarati. He has written widely on art and literature and read from his work at various places including the University of Princeton, University of Cambridge, Mumbai University, S.N.D.T. University and NGMA, among other places.