This is Indian art’s golden moment. It’s important to not stay stuck in the past

This is not to say that the masters should no longer be showcased internationally. They have to be looked at as the prologue, not the main act

This is Indian art’s golden moment.

Having made a big splash at the Venice Biennale after seven years, Indian art is ready for its next major milestone with yet another landmark exhibition: ‘The Meeting Ground’, presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) at Christie’s London. An impressive survey bridging “modern and contemporary practices with folk and indigenous artistic traditions from South Asia,” it is perhaps the biggest showcase of Indian artists since ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’ at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2024. Such exhibitions are cultural milestones that declare to the world: This is Indian art.

It is. Except, that is not all it should be. Indian art today is vast, yet we keep circling back to a select few 20th-century names, mostly from the Progressive Artists’ Group. While this canon earned Indian art its global recognition, returning to them for nearly every international presentation stagnates the narrative. Even for contemporary names, the gamble pretty much stops at the established masters.

The KNMA show does attempt to diversify by including folk and indigenous traditions through the works of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe. However, it remains led by modernists like M F Husain, S H Raza, and Jeram Patel with senior contemporary artists like Neha Choksi, LN Tallur and Simryn Gill presented as inheritors of this legacy, almost to suggest that India’s best art is in its archives.

That is especially perplexing because KNMA holds “cutting-edge, experimental practices across multimedia, including video, photography, monumental installations and new media” in its collection, but these rarely make it across borders. The urge to put your best foot forward with a time-tested strategy is understandable, considering the financial and logistical challenges of moving large multimedia installation works, but by offering international audiences what they are already familiar with, we are inadvertently creating a self-inflicted bottleneck.

By placing our faith in the past rather than the present, we feed into the market’s insular loops. This is evident in how recent record-breaking Indian works — Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna (1890s), and before that, M F Husain’s Gram Yatra (1954) — were scooped up by domestic HNWIs (Cyrus Poonawallah and Kiran Nadar respectively), conditioning the world to look at Indian art as a repatriation asset rather than an evolving ecosystem engaging with contemporary realities. Meanwhile, the international market for mid-career or emerging Indian artists remains flat.

South Korea, which has used both government and private institutional heft to balance the global spotlight between its masters and emerging names (like 28-year-old Minhoon Kim), can be a blueprint. Closer to home, look at this year’s Venice Biennale showcase featuring younger names like Sumakshi Singh and Skarma Sonam Tashi, or the new exhibition, Sediments of Becoming, at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg — the first-ever showcase of Indian artists in the Russian museum’s 260-year history. The historical venue was a seemingly ideal opportunity to spotlight the modernists yet again. Instead, co-curator Tunty Chauhan chose to lead with the voices of the young and the present, putting forth Indian art as a continuum of creativity and dialogue.

This is not to say that the masters should no longer be showcased internationally. They have to be looked at as the prologue, not the main act. The path they paved for their descendants should move forward, not loop backward. If we do not position our young contemporary artists as the vanguard, we cannot expect the rest of the world to do it for us.

The writer is associate editor, The Indian Express. trisha[email protected]