Sanjukta Sunderason's Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization is an original, insightful, and generative account of modern art in India that highlights the significance of the 1940s—a tumultuous decade that witnessed the Second World War, the Bengal famine, anticolonial mobilizations shaped by transnational and local factors, and the upheavals caused by Partition—in shaping the “entanglements” (p. 10) of artistic and political modernity in the mid- to late twentieth century. The monograph regards these events as constituting a “conjunctural terrain” (p. 9), read via Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, that animates artistic and discursive figurations of the rural and urban everyday by actors associated with the “cultural left” (p. 10) during the transitional decade of the 1940s and their “afterlives” (p. 31) from the 1950s to the 1970s. Sunderason argues that the aesthetic materialized by modernist art and its criticism in this dispersed field showcases a “participatory” and “partisan space” (p. 11) of “art becoming political” (p. 9), which uncovers an overlooked history of Indian modernism in the post/colony that is critically attuned to the “asymmetries of decolonization” (p. 37) rather than its “triumphs” (p. 33) driven by the “promise” (p. 32) of the nation-state.

Sunderason's archive consists of a range of sources drawn from 1930s–1950s Bengal, including paintings, drawings, and prints made by artists, their exhibition, their art criticism by writers, academics, and poets in English and vernacular-language periodicals and “little magazines” (p. 204), and manifestoes written by artist collectives. In doing so, the book discusses the work of celebrated modernists such as Jamini Roy, Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore, and Zainul Abedin, alongside others such as the relatively marginalized members of the Calcutta Group and contemporary critical responses to them. Rather than focus on particular works of art/criticism, Sunderason analyzes the visual and discursive ways they produced “new cultural vocabularies” of “the social, the real, the people, and the progressive” (p. 18), informed by anti-imperialist and antifascist mobilizations nurtured by the Communist Party of India (CPI), and their late colonial and postindependence currencies outside the ideological domain of the Left.

The narrative of Partisan Aesthetics unfolds over five chapters and a postscript. Chapter 1 explores the “political” (p. 47), “progressive” (p. 55), and “activist” (p. 73) potentialities of Jamini Roy's modernist adoption of a folk idiom to visualize Indigeneity, myths, and the “rural everyday” (p. 69), as identified by a predominantly Calcutta-based circuit of writers in journals such as Parichoy over the 1930s and 1940s, as significant for “bringing modernism and socialism closer together in art discourse” (p. 64). Chapter 2 tracks the development of a more concerted aesthetics of “socialist realism” (p. 87) through the work of the CPI's artist-cadres like Chittaprosad and Somnath Hore, drawing attention to their “visual reportage” (p. 95) of the Bengal famine of 1943 and people's struggles in Andhra Pradesh as activating a critique of the failings of the colonial state and “visualizing bodies and landscapes of resistance” (p. 119) on the ground. Chapter 3 addresses the wider impact of the Bengal famine and left-wing cultural activism in shaping artistic sensibilities outside the fold of the CPI, through an engagement with the work of the Calcutta Group. Chapter 4 traces the varied “postcolonial displacements” (p. 177) of the socially committed partisan aesthetic of the 1940s, which Sunderason ties to the deradicalizing force of the Nehruvian rhetoric of “man” (p. 184) and artists’ disillusionment with the CPI's “party-political patronage” (p. 195). And chapter 5 draws attention to the tamashik aesthetic or a “tragic consciousness” (p. 227), discernible in the work of artists visualizing the “experience of trauma” (p. 242) caused by multiple factors including “refugee destitution” (p. 229) in post-Partition Calcutta, as another kind of displacement that interrupts the de-radicalizing force of the “national-modern aesthetic” of Nehruvian India (p. 248).

By demonstrating the role that a transnationally cultivated “left-wing aesthetics” (p. 29) played in shaping mid-twentieth century modern art in India, Sunderason complicates the art historian Partha Mitter's framing of modernist visualizations of the rural and urban every day in late colonial Bengal as a case of “Indian primitivism” (p. 13). Relatedly, Sunderason deepens art historian Geeta Kapur's analysis of the “disjuncture between the national and the modern” (p. 252) in Indian art, which Kapur traces to the Emergency decade of the 1970s, by highlighting the 1940s as a consequential part of its “longue durée histories” (p. 252). In similar ways, Sunderason's analysis of the consequential role that “new cultural vocabularies” played in shaping artistic and political sensibilities in the 1940s may have benefited from a historical discussion that qualified their “newness” in relation to late nineteenth and early twentieth century visual cultures of famine and nationalism in the colony.

By illuminating the “densities of postcolonial modernism” (p. 32)—a phrase inspired by the work of Elizabeth Harney—Partisan Aesthetics expands the scope of critical histories of the globally and transnationally interconnected nature of South Asian modernisms and, modernism as such, alongside the work of Iftikhar Dadi, Sonal Khullar, and Karin Zitzewitz among others.Footnote ¹ It also stands to contribute new insights and visual and textual archives to historical and interdisciplinary studies of famine, decolonization, and cultural histories of the Left in the twentieth century.