Art and emergency: modernism in twentieth-century India

During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail.

During these precarious intervals, wherein the human potential for violence is released and rehearsed, images also emerge.

This book asks what happens to art during a state of emergency?

Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them.