We impose stereotypical ways of perceiving the world, usually bracketing communities or places by their religions. India was typecast in particular ways in the 19th century. A land with jungles where man met the spirit of the wild, yogis who harnessed the deepest powers of the mind, destitutes who had no more want than the veracity of their tradition, valorous aryans who were also “warm and brown”, and profligate maharajas whose extravagance could outdazzle any other court of the world—the contrasts of temperament, habitat and colour, depth of spirituality and sumptuous sexuality became the standard fare of the clichés that typified India in the intellectual and artistic circles of the West at the height of colonialism. The narrative and display in most major museums in the West confirms these clichés.
Less well known is that this was accompanied by a strong move toward a particular vocabulary of abstraction in visual form, spiritual discourse, music and theatre. The exchanges with ideas Indian, and with Indians themselves, had a decisive impact that contributed to the eruption and shape of Modernism in the West. In his recently edited volume, Prof. Ahuja examines the great modern artists of Europe in light of their fascination with India.
Apart from touching on the foundations of New Age movements, this talk, based on a new book, A Mediated Magic: The Indian Presence in Modernism 1880-1930, also reveals how the modern perception of India fed back to India, and reconfirmed the Indian intelligentsia’s self-image. So enduring is this legacy that it has been invoked repeatedly: most famously in the 1960s hippie counter-culture, and again, today, with the rise of religiously grounded identity politics. Who were the key mediators of the idea of the magic of India to the modern world, and what was the nature of that mediation?
Dr Naman P. Ahuja is Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Co-Editor of Marg Publications. He has curated a number of exhibitions on classical and contemporary art; most notably – The Body in Indian Art and Thought (2013: Brussels and Delhi). In collaboration with the British Museum, he recently co-curated India and the World: A History in Nine Stories (Penguin, 2017) at the National Museum, Delhi and CSMVS Mumbai. His writings have been translated into various languages and have drawn attention to the foundations of Indian iconography and transcultural exchanges at an everyday, quotidian level. His recent book is The Art and Archaeology of Ancient India, Earliest times to the sixth century (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 2018).
