Following India s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an Indianness representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the...