LONG REVIEW: EXHIBITION
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998
at the Barbican Art Gallery
by Jagjeet Lally
13 December 2024
From a state of Emergency to the first nuclear tests, the years between 1975 and 1998 marked a period of significant change and upheaval in India – culturally and politically. Imaginary Institution of India presents these years through the lens of modern and contemporary Indian artistic positions that, in unison, create a kaleidoscopic view into those 23 years. Jagjeet Lally, with the eyes of a historian of Early Modern and Colonial India and an art enthusiast, celebrates the exhibition by highlighting some of the artworks, while at the same time not failing to ask questions the answers to which would have made the exhibition even more rewarding.
Al-Hind, the land described with wonder and loathing in Arabic and Persian-language accounts. The East Indies of European travelogues, object of fantasy and fear. The India formed in the colonial imaginary. Greater India, spilling across Indian Ocean waters, a notion succoured by archaeological evidence and politicised amidst the fight for independence. India as a sovereign, democratic republic; India as a global superpower. Has such a thing as India ever existed, now or in centuries past, except in the (collective) imagination?
The Barbican’s exhibition Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 zooms in on the frequently overlooked 23-year period from the late 1970s to 1990s during which the threads holding together the post-colonial, federal, democratic, developmental state frayed and began to fall apart. It was, writes UCL History of Art alumna and contributor to the exhibition’s catalogue, Diva Gujral, an “intact period of transition, both in art practice and in the many worlds from which India’s artists emerged.”1 These years witnessed the erosion of the Congress party’s dominance (the party of Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi), as well as the suspension of democracy. They were also the crucible of new political cleavages encapsulated by the 3 M’s. Mandal, from the Mandal Commission established in 1979, which sought to address struggles over social injustice, and greater representation for India’s lower-evaluated castes more specifically. Mandir or temple, signifying the assault on secularism accompanying the rise of the Hindu right and its ideology of Hindutva. And the market, the role of which expanded as the state was steadily rolled back (‘liberalisation’). Through 56 spellbinding works by 30 artists – ranging from postcard-sized collages and large canvases, to monumental and immersive installations and film – the viewer learns as much about epochal tumult as they do about the many ways art practice responded and shaped a key moment of transition.
The declaration of a state of Emergency by Indira Gandhi’s government on 26 June 1975 effectively suspended democracy. Protest escalated in response to authoritarian rule, violent crackdown on dissent, and unlawful arrest in the months that followed. Artistic responses were many and varied, a selection of which occupy the first room of the exhibition. At one end is Speechless City (1975), Gulammohammed Sheikh’s rendering of a dystopian townscape that seems to turn upside-down the more one looks at the canvas, its houses evacuated of human life, its streets stalked by dogs, and the eerie sky overhead haunted by flocks of birds. Rameshwar Broota’s Reconstruction (1977), meanwhile, satirises those government stooges whose collaboration sustained the Emergency by transforming them into gorillas, whereas Pablo Bartholomew’s photographs of his friends continuing to find joy and love offer the viewer something more hopeful.
In the near-quarter century that followed, the greater politicisation of caste, the impact of Hindutva (spreading and intensifying through the use of television and other media, in part), and the first tentative steps towards the liberalisation of the economy all left their mark on India and its artists. The decline of unionism and the plight of proletarian labour figure in many works on display, from Sudhir Patwardhan’s early portraits (1977) and landscapes (from the 1980s), to Navjot Altaf’s photographs from the Factory series (1982). The destruction of the Babri Masjid by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992 was, like the Emergency, another tragedy that stirred numerous responses that are all the more interesting in their diversity. Tyeb Mehta reworked Hindu mythology in Durga Mahisasura Mardini (1993) to show the goddess tranquil even as she vanquishes disorder (here taking the form of the demon-buffalo Mahisasura), whereas a wholesale shift in medium and output – away from figurative painting and toward object-oriented art – encompasses Rummana Hussain’s reaction to the earthquake of 1992 and the communal violence that erupted shortly afterward.
Against the backdrop of Green Revolution and in opposition to its developmentalist and populist impetuses, some artists ventured from the city to the countryside to engage with ‘folk’ art, enlivening their own ways of making in the process (Meera Mukherjee, Madhvi Parekh, and Jyoti Bhatt, for instance). A number formed meaningful relationships with Dalit and Adivasi artists, and Navjot Altaf even relocated her studio from Bombay (Mumbai) to central India. Himmat Shah’s works in terracotta, by contrast, took inspiration from what he himself saw as a child growing up in rural Gujarat – namely, the excavation of an ancient site from the Indus Valley culture.
Resisting conventional periodisation, which distinguishes the era of the developmental state (1947-91) from that of market liberalism (1991-present), the exhibition instead concludes in 1998. It was in 1998 that the first BJP-led, Hindu nationalist government came to power and in 1998 that nuclear tests spurred a new imaginary of India as a global superpower. Here, then, the lead curator and Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, Shanay Jhaveri, reveals an ambition greater than simply shining a spotlight on a forgotten quarter-century of Indian art. Rewriting the history of Indian art and reformulating the canon are among the major intellectual contributions of the exhibition and the essays contained in the accompanying catalogue. How does this intervention work with and against other projects of reframing the history of South Asia since 1947?
Photographed by Pablo Bartholomew, A Child Killed by the Union Carbide Gas leak (1984) is among the most overtly shocking and unsettling of the works comprising the exhibition. A hand gestures towards a nameless child partially submerged under pebbles and earth, its pallid head and lifelessly glazed eyes resembling a Victorian porcelain doll. This infant was but one of countless victims of the toxic gas that leaked from the fertiliser plant in Bhopal on the night of 2-3 December 1984; it remains the world’s worst industrial disaster. Run by a subsidiary of the US-based Union Carbide Company, the factory opened in 1969, less than three years after India was forced to devalue the rupee and open to the world economy in what has been described as the first instance of economic liberalisation – structural adjustment, even – in an otherwise planned economy.
Although widely viewed as the ‘big bang’ of liberalisation, therefore, the infamous 1991 reform budget can be placed in a longer trajectory, one encompassing the piecemeal deregulation of the economy by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, in the 1980s; the 1966 devaluation; the defanging of the Planning Committee shortly after its founding in 1950; and the impact of the Bombay Plan, written before Independence by India’s leading industrialists, which was to subordinate development planning to capitalist interests. More broadly, the critique of established periodisation and the imaginaries of India upon which they are based, has lately preoccupied historical research. Partition has been reconceived, no longer merely as a single event unfolding in 1947, but a decades-long process; the myths sustaining the notion of a Nehruvian ‘golden age’ have been busted; and a fixation on the Cold War and its chronological-geographical frameworks oriented around Superpower rivalry has given way to an interest in Non-Alignment and South-South networks.
On the one hand, then, Imaginary Institution of India diminishes the significance of 1991 as a watershed and as a marker, contributing to this scholarly agenda. On the other, it reinscribes other rapidly less-convincing truisms, while the choice of 1975 as a point of departure can seem arbitrary (the catalogue essay by Rahaab Allana proposes 1971 as a more significant turning-point from the perspective of visual imagery, valuably critiquing the authority of the exhibition’s timeline). What, though, of the value of thinking with the ‘long 1980s’?
The pink glow of evening sunlight as it passes through the September monsoon gives Two Men with Hand Cart (1979) its dominant hue. Painted by Gieve Patel, whose works are dotted throughout the exhibition, the canvas greets visitors at the gallery entrance and acts as a prism, refracting many of the exhibition’s major themes: “friendship, love, desire, family, religion, violence, caste, community and protest”.2 Imaginary Institution of India thus shares much in common with The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain (until 5 May 2025), which surveys a similar period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and covers similar themes, even as it considers a single medium. The renewed interest in landscape and the return to ‘folk’ traditions, the urgency of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the greater prominence it gave queer artists and subjects, the stand against racial prejudice and social injustice, and even the fixation on Margaret Thatcher (compare, for instance, Vivan Sundaram’s The Famous Mrs G (1974) with Anna Fox’s portrait of Margaret Thatcher from her Friendly Fire series on view at Tate Britain). These are but a few of the connections between art-making in Britain and India in these turbulent decades.
Identifying these overlaps at once helps pinpoint a weakness of Imaginary Institution of India while revealing tremendous prospects for future research and exhibitions. India was neither a closed economy nor a closed society before its ‘opening’ in 1991, yet the focus on domestic upheavals in the exhibition makes India and its artists seem inconceivably insular. What, therefore, of the global connections and global contexts to Indian art? Much as the Cold War and Non-Alignment had global impacts on artistic output and practice, could we productively begin to speak of such a thing as, say, Art in the Time of Structural Adjustment?
Sudhir Patwardan trained as a medic before he was an artist. His landscapes populated by labourers – inspired by his commute from Thane to the clinic he ran – is consequently an outsider’s gaze, one that empathises with the individual in the process of diagnosing the state of the body politic. Several of the featured artists took an interest in marginalised groups, be they fellow women (Nilima Sheikh and Sheba Chhachhi, for instance) or gay, trans, and queer people (Bhupen Khakhar, Sunil Gupta), as well as Dalits and Indigenous communities. And yet, most of the 30 artists hail from India’s bourgeoisie, many of them based in north or west India and in urban centres like Bombay, making the exhibition feel lumpy and like something is missing (much as The 80s can seem London-centric). Was the perspective from south India radically different or much the same? What other Indias might have been refracted through the eyes of a different set of 30 artists? Who else ought to occupy a place in the canon?
Imaginary Institution of India is a powerful, paradigm-shifting exhibition – the first on modern and contemporary Indian art at the Barbican in over 30 years. Indian artists have featured in solo or group shows since then, of course: Nilima Sheikh was featured at this year’s Frieze London, Nalani Malani presented a major new work at Whitechapel Gallery in 2020-21, and the resonance of Sunil Gupta’s to a fresh wave of queer activism has given it newfound visibility, to take a few examples. Many of the works on display have not previously been exhibited in the United Kingdom, however, where modern and contemporary Indian art – let alone that from the long 1980s, more specifically – has too frequently been sidelined in favour of the magnificence of Indian’s royal courts or the arts and crafts of the Raj. Many of the 30 artists in this show are unknown or underappreciated in Britain, yet they are the tip of a vast iceberg that Imaginary Institution of India has brought into view.
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 is on view at the Barbican Art Gallery until 5 January 2025. It is organised in collabration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
JAGJEET LALLY is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India within the UCL History Department and the author of India and the Silk Roads (2021) and India and the Early Modern World (2024). He is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, and Director of the Centre for Transnational and Global History.
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Proofreading by CATHERINE STOKES
Lead Image: Detail of Gulammohammed Sheikh, Speechless City, 1975 ©2024 Gulammohammed Sheikh. Courtesy of The Artist and Vadehra Art Gallery.
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