Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia

Sanjukta Sunderason is Senior Lecturer (UD1), in History of Art at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. A historian of aesthetic and intellectual formations of 20th-century decolonisation, she researches interfaces of visual art, left-wing thought, and transnational histories of postcolonial modernities. She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art & India’s Long Decolonisation (2020). Lotte Hoek is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her ethnographic research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies and explores the public and political life of the moving image in South Asia. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (2014).

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia
Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason

Chapter 1
A Melancholic Archive: Chittaprosad and Socialist Art in Postcolonial India
Sanjukta Sunderason

Chapter 2
Kagmari Festival, 1957: Political Aesthetics and Subaltern Internationalism in Pakistan
Layli Uddin

Chapter 3
Between Neorealism and Humanism: Jago Hua Savera
Iftikhar Dadi

Chapter 4
Lotus Roots: Transposing a Political-Aesthetic Agenda from South Asia to Afro-Asia
Maia Ramnath

Chapter 5
What got “left” behind: The limits of Leftist Engagements with Art and Culture in Post-colonial Sri Lanka
Harshana Rambukwella

Chapter 6
The Conscience Whipper: Alamgir Kabir’s Film Criticism and the Political Velocity of the Cinema in 1960s East Pakistan
Lotte Hoek

Chapter 7 Look Back in Angst: Akaler Sandhaney, the Indian New Wave, and the Afterlife of the IPTA Movement Manishita Dass

Afterword, Kamran Asdar Ali

Bibliography
Index