Sonal Khullar's Worldly Affiliations takes its readers on a deep dive into the production and praxis of four of the pillars of India's twentieth-century art scene: Amrita Sher-Gil (1918–41), Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011), K. G. Subramanyan (1924–2016), and Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003). The book's four interior chapters begin with Sher-Gil's paintings during the 1930s and end with Khakhar's paintings and performative works of the 1970s. Whereas Husain, Subramanyan, and Khakhar continued to work into the twenty-first century, Khullar restricted her survey of these artists’ works to the 1970s, a decade generally understood within art historical discourse to lie at the chronological frontier between modernism and postmodernism.
Why were these four artists selected? Khullar indicates that each was an exemplary representative of Indian modernism by dint of his or her biography, exposure, and access (p. 12). As a group, they were insider-outsiders; they exceeded or escaped cultural regionalism and parochial nationalism to forge “worldly affiliations” (pp. 13, 14). Their independence enabled each artist to develop a modernism “that would bridge the domains of cultural practice that had been constructed as separate and opposed” (p. 174).
Sher-Gil, Husain, Subramanyan, and Khakhar share other qualities that make them attractive to art historians. Each wrote extensively about artistic practice, and all have received intensive critical attention.Footnote 1 Juxtaposing artistic and critical perspectives, Khullar challenges previous interpretations of these artists’ practice that, in her opinion, have often resulted in “reducing their achievement to a personal struggle with gender and sexuality and rehearsing logics of a dichotomy between private and public spheres” (p. 37). Instead, her methodology focuses on the visual and verbal arguments embodied in their production of art, rather than on developments in the artist's life.
Throughout the book, Khullar identifies the domains of influence and expression as East and West, rural and urban, colonial and national, elite and popular, and sacred and secular (p. 175). Thus, for Khullar, the artworks and the artists’ own writings are key to understanding modernism as “a practice of affiliation emerging from a global phenomenon of modernity rather than a set of disparate modernisms situated within differential modernities” (p. 15).
Whereas Khullar's multi-perspective presentation of this mountain of material is certainly scholarly, for the reader, there can sometimes be too many voices at work. When that happens, Khullar's voice is lost—which is unfortunate. I found the author at her best when offering her own analysis. For example, her perspectives on Sher-Gil's painting Brahmacharis (1937) and Husain's key work, Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956), are enlightening but buried among pages of text presenting an overly rich review of other critical perspectives. Some may enjoy such scholarly completeness. However, I much preferred those portions of the book in which Khullar held on tightly to the reins of the analysis—which she did in the chapter on Husain, which featured a lively discussion of Husain's first film Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967). I also appreciated Khullar's original and absorbing analysis of Husain's connection to cinema and performance. Had she devoted somewhat less space to other sources of artistic criticism, perhaps she could have extended her analysis to include some of Husain's later film and performance works.
There are other high points worth mentioning. In the chapter on Bhupen Khakhar, Khullar presents an innovative perspective outlining the connections between Khakhar and Salman Rushdie (pp. 168–71). Likewise, in a compelling analysis of two important works by Khakhar, Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers (1975) and You Can't Please All (1981), she introduces the reader to the sociopolitical context of the period as well as biographical details of Khakhar's affiliations with his artistic contemporaries (pp. 200–209).
I am less enthusiastic about Khullar's chapter on Subramanyan. Her discussion of Subramanyan's terracotta works, for instance, would have benefited from a closer analysis of the sociopolitical period of their production. By comparison, Geeta Kapur's richly contextual analysis of the artist—uncovering biographical as well as sociopolitical underpinnings in his work—succeeds in establishing the urgent radicalism of Subramanyan's works in terracotta, as well as in his later Bahurupee series of the 1990s.Footnote 2
I recommend this book. I find that students have grown impatient with the university's preoccupation with European and American art. They know there is more. They clamor for an expansive version of modernism and engagement with the contemporary art of the non-Western world. Books like Khullar's Worldly Affiliations provide educators with resources to expand their curricular offerings in the field. Khullar's engaging writing style; the inclusion of numerous, high-quality, color illustrations (funded by a College Art Association award); and her extensive bibliography on Indian art will make the book in its entirety, or particular chapters, an excellent resource for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary art.
