Diverse Registers Of Meaning

The author accepts as a logical base Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan to read the genesis of modern art in the Indian subcontinent, in the book under review. The neat narrative selectively picks up threads from art history to base its arguments for Pakistani modern art, with an obvious objective to justify the basis of the creation of the nation of Pakistan. Modernity as broadly projected in western art historical scholarship is indeed a phenomenon that has happened in the East in small doses till the native intelligentsia found European modernism and then gradually adapted itself to it. However, the current emerging historical perspective would be inclined to see that the colonized state of the subcontinent had nothing to do with its discovery of or absence of its modernist artistic vocabulary.