How Secular is Art?: A Discussion on Art History from the South
Taking as its point of entry a proposition to consider the “secular” as a paradigmatic, theoretical approach, the book How Secular is Art?: On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (2023) offers a multifaceted array of essays on the history, aesthetics and politics of image-making. This timely volume was first conceived as a symposium at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University, in 2018. The publication explores the idea of the secular as a fundamental principle linked to the democratic imagination, which needs to be investigated within the context of its location in South Asia.
The vast area of inquiry is envisaged through four sections, namely “Secularity and its Art”, “Boundaries of Secular Nationalism”, “Art and its Gods” and “Architectures of Devotion.” These comprise essays by philosophers, historians and scholars of art that encompass the theoretical, aesthetic, art historical and cultural dynamics of the secular. The authors investigate the category and question the nature of its existence in art by exploring the diverse dimensions of cultural heritage, colonial and post-colonial practices/practitioners, followed by the modern period and contemporary art. The volume thus asks its readers to consider how the artistic and aesthetic interface with the political, the public, the communal and the institutional within the parameters of our present, which itself tends to be conditioned by positions taken in the past. Through a multipronged inquiry that is temporally grounded, the book manages to tackle larger questions that concern the very nature of our social systems in the present in South Asia. The volume addresses these and other pertinent themes by engaging with the complex, paradoxical, and, at times, ambiguous nature of the term while taking into account its many real articulations in the work of the individual and the state.
In this discussion moderated by Arundhati Chauhan, the editors of the volume, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, present their initial conceptions, the diverse points of inquiry and the larger implications of theorising the secular within art histories from South Asia. In response to the book and the presentations, the discussant Shuddhabrata Sengupta further opens the urgency of thinking through the rapidity of image-making and its materiality, transposed across popular paraphernalia, magnanimous built structures and architectural projects undertaken by the state. The presentations engage with and highlight the productive theoretical positions around the promises of artistic generation and their study in relation to our current socio-political moment.
How Secular is Art?: On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia is edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar and published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Tapati Guha-Thakurta is an honorary professor and the former director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her work is located in the disciplinary fields of cultural history, art history and visual studies. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is a historian at Brown University and works with the visual archive. Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective and is based in Delhi.
(Featured image courtesy of The Fearless Collective.)
Recorded on 18 November 2023.
To learn more about ASAP | art’s public programming, revisit the recordings of Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s talk John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Taking it to the Streets, Rashmi Sawhney’s presentation on Artist as Citizen and Christopher Pinney’s lecture on Photo State.
