The Luckies
The Labelled, Urban, Chilled, Kicked-with-life Indians are here. The most fortunate ever if only for the choices before it, this generation is glib, global, cocky and informed-and chases success with an awesome spending power.

Wages Of Peace
The Centre's decision to extend its cease-fire with the NSCN(I-M)
to three other north-east states leads to large-scale violence
in Manipur.

Man Of Letters
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's skill with the quill has the PMO busy acknowledging his missives. And on occasion agreeing to his demands.

Civil Lines
Pervez Musharraf's assuming the office of President is being seen as a bid to legitimise his position. A look at what this means in the context of his India visit.

Peace In Pipeline
India wants to put on Iran the onus of ensuring safe transit of gas.

BOOKS

Art In Many Parts

An unconventional chronicle of the evolution of Indian art and architecture.

By Jyotindra Jain

The book is best described as concise yet comprehensive, encyclopedic yet interpretive. Partha Mitter's thorough rooting in the studies of 19th century India aptly positions him to take a critical view of Indian art because it was then that the first histories of Indian art were written-imbued with the colonial culture and aesthetic biases. Mitter, in his new work spanning from the Indus Valley to the contemporary period, presents Indian art and architecture from an unconventional perspective.

Circumventing the dynasties-based periodisation and the related notion of unilinear stylistic evolution centring exclusively around the so-called classical genres of Indian art, Mitter devotes a full section to minority traditions and non-canonical arts of tribal people, women and artisans. The author notes that there is a curious silence in Indian art history about these marginalised groups "hidden from history", and comments that "the view of the applied arts being inferior to the fine arts has been an implicit assumption of Indian art history grounded in the Renaissance hierarchy of the arts".

This section highlights the tribal traditions of using the body as a "site" for decoration, women's ritual wall and floor paintings, domestic art of embroidery, and the art of painting and narrating picture-scrolls and takes into account the evolving context of the South Asian popular culture, represented here by a charmingly painted cycle-rickshaw from Bangladesh-avoided in conventional art histories.

After a compendious survey of Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture, Mitter scans through the Indo-Islamic milestones and the miniature paintings of the Rajasthani and Pahari schools to reach the second half of the book which includes the colonial era, the questions of westernisation and nationalism, beginning of modernism in India and the post-colonial and post-independence artistic expressions. Indian art of the Raj is Mitter's forte. After discussing the effects of European academic naturalism brought about by the colonial art school culture and a range of responses that it received from the urban elite ("Salon artistes") and rural artists in Calcutta (Kalighat patuas), the author moves on to discuss the works of the "gentleman artists", especially Ravi Varma, and the rise of the Bengal School. This section ends with a wonderful account of colonial architecture in Goa, Calcutta, Baroda, Bombay and Delhi.

Few would know that as early as 1922, through Rabindranath Tagore's intervention, an exhibition of the works of Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky and several Bauhaus artists was held in Calcutta. Mitter sees the problematic issues of global modernity and national identity as the dominant theme of modern Indian art.

The last chapter, broadly dealing with post-colonial art and architecture, devotes a section to contemporary Indian architecture. Starting with Le Corbusier's work in Chandigarh and Louis Kahn's in Ahmedabad and Dhaka, there is a brief survey of modernists such as Charles Correa who underlines "the necessity to simultaneously both rediscover India's past and invent its future". This brief interlude is welcome because the histories of Indian architecture generally end with the Mughal period.

Besides a short account of the Bengal School (shunning historicism in favour of tradition) and the Bombay Progressives (asserting the "elemental and eternal laws of aesthetic order"), a detailed survey of the contemporary art movements and artists is given.

Here the emergence of post-colonial art criticism and the coincident new pictorialism at Baroda and elsewhere have been discussed at length. Mitter devotes a whole section to woman artists: "The most viable and critical presence has been that of woman artists and art critics, and perhaps in them lies the future development in Indian art".

The book is part of a series, with a fixed format which can only provide a comprehensive but discerning survey. It is a stimulating reference book with invaluable time charts, a classified biography, lists of collections of Indian art and important websites.

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