Paper short abstract:

This paper will foreground the vocabularies, agendas and anxieties that constituted the field of left-wing cultural discourse in late-colonial and early-postcolonial Bengal, concentrating in particular on fluid art critical categories of the progressive, the organic and the popular.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will discuss the agency of visual imagery in rethinking and deconstructing the history of the left-wing cultural radicalism in India in the mid-twentieth century, retrospectively idealised as the 'Marxist Cultural Movement'. Consolidated in literature and performance through platforms like the Progressive Writers' Association (1936) and the Indian People's Theatre Association (1943), this radical aesthetic, however, had sparse affiliations in visual arts, without dedicated platforms, manifestoes or journals. Even when the notion of the 'progressive' came to be associated with artist collectives in post-war period, most notably, the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, it's signature was unstable, with member artists actively questioning its ideological baggage. A closer observation of visual resources and art discourse during the 1930s-40s, as this paper will elaborate, reveals a more dispersed domain of discursive nuances layering a negotiated terrain of socio-cultural interactions that constituted left-wing cultural production in these decade, and configured the dialogues between aesthetics and ideology, art and politics, realism and modernism.