A Modern Heritage

Abstract

In early 1968, New Delhi’s national institution of art, Lalit Kala Akademi, organized India’s first Triennale of World Contemporary Art, an exhibition of unprecedented scale intended to initiate a new Modernist exhibition culture in India’s capital city. This grandly envisioned exhibition was jointly held in the Akademi and in the nation’s first dedicated institution of Modern art, the National Gallery of Modern Art, and featured more than six hundred works from thirty-two countries.
The Triennale was spearheaded by one of India’s leading advocates for the arts, the litterateur and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand, who made clear his intention to both institutionally advance India’s place in international circuits of Modern arts, and Modern art’s place in Indian discourse through the Triennale. However, this ill-fated Triennale was protested by many of India’s leading young artists and critics by its second iteration, and neither ambition was achieved. This paper looks at the Triennale in its effort to institutionally enshrine Modern art in the nation as a field of representation, in the promises that it held. Departing from the conventional scholarly focus on the emergence of the non-Modern work of art in the production of Indian national heritage-culture, this thinks about the Triennale as a heuristic of Modern art in the (failed) service of national-culture.