How Secular Is Art?

Tapati Guha-Thakurta was Professor in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, which she directed from 2012 to 2017. Her work is located within the disciplinary fields of cultural history, history of art and visual studies. She has written widely and taught courses on the themes of art, nationalism and modernity, art history and archaeology, the careers of monuments and museum objects, and popular urban visual culture of modern and contemporary India. Three of her most prominent works are The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Primus Books, 2015). Vazira Zamindar is associate professor of history at Brown University, Rhode Island, and her work focuses on decolonization, displacement, war, nonviolence, the visual archive, and contemporary art. She is the author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Love, War, and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 2020). She initiated the interdisciplinary forum Art History from the South (2018–20) and collaborates with the Decolonial Initiative on Migration of Objects and People at Brown University.

List of Images; 1. Introduction Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar; Part I. Secularity and Its Art: 2. Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis Akeel Bilgrami; 3. Art and Secularism in Contemporary India: A Question of Method Karin Zitzewitz; 4. In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History Kajri Jain; Part II. Boundaries of Secular Nationalism: 5. Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations and Their Histories Vazira Zamindar; 6. Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits Sanjukta Sunderason; 7. Making Place for People? Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and 'Indian' Art Zehra Jumabhoy; Part III. Art and Its Gods: 8. Shivaji's Portrait and the Practice of Art History Holly Shaffer; 9. Can a Festival of a Goddess Be 'Secular'? Tapati Guha-Thakurta; 10. A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India Sumathi Ramaswamy; Part IV. Architectures of Devotion: 11. Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of India's Past Santhi Kavuri-Bauer; 12. Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior's Birla Temple Tamara Sears; 13. For the Love of God: Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu Kavita Singh; About the Contributors; Index.