 Welcome to the British Library's South Asia Seminar series, which is part of a research and digitization project called Two Centuries of Indian Print. We are delighted to have amongst us today, Dr. Sanjukta Sundaresan. She will be speaking on partisan aesthetics, Indian art and 20th century decolonization. Dr. Sundaresan is a historian of 20th century aesthetics, working at the interfaces of visual art and political thought. Her first monograph, partisan aesthetics, modern art and India's long decolonization, which came out last year from Stanford University Press, studied left-wing aesthetics in 20th century India. Her current projects span connected histories of modernism and fragmentation from post-partition India, West and East Pakistan and Bangladesh, and formations of the transnational in the art of decolonial liberation movements. She's assistant professor in history of art at the University of Amsterdam. We're also very happy to have Dr. Zehra Jumaboy as the chair for today's session. Dr. Jumaboy is a UK-based art historian, curator and writer, specializing in modern and contemporary South Asian art and its diasporas. She was a Steven and Elena Hein scholar at the Port Old Institute of Art in London, where she completed her doctorate and has lectured on undergraduate and postgraduate programs between 2016 and 2020. She's currently a visiting lecturer at various academic institutions in the UK, India, Pakistan and Singapore. Her authored books include The Empire Strikes Back, Indian Art Today and the Progressive Revolution, Modern Art for a New India. About the format of today's session, Sanjupta will be speaking to us for around 45 minutes, after which there will be a short discussion between the speaker and the chair, following which we'll open it up for audience questions. During the presentation or the discussion, if you would like to send us your questions, please use the Q&A box or the chat box to do so, and I will take them in order during the question and answer session. So without much further ado, I would like to invite Dr. Sanjupta Sundaresan to speak on partisan aesthetics, Indian art and 20th century decolonization. Over to you, Sanjupta. Hi. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. It's quite a privilege to be able to speak to a talk series hosted by the British Library, given how much time one has spent in one's PhD years, working with the material and probing the material and all the discoveries and serendipities that happen as such at the archive. So I'll try to share the screen and let me see. Yes, I hope all of you can see the screen. So the talk today is tied to, let me see if I can just talk today is tied to the book, partisan aesthetics that came out last year. So I guess I will begin by talking a bit about the book because I'm picking up a particular set of material from the book, material I used in the book but didn't explore to the extent I would have liked to. So this was a good occasion to kind of go back to that. So partisan aesthetics, modern art and India's long decolonization is really a book that tries to think about the entanglement between visual art and left-wing politics during the transitional kind of period of decolonization. I've called it India's long decolonization because while I began with the 1940s in the work initially, as I proceeded with the work, I realized that the conversations that I found so active around political art or the political in art in the 1940s really had lineages in the 1930s. And in the post 1940s period, in the 50s, 60s in post colonial India, such conversations were going through some very interesting mutations. So one really had to look at long decolonization not just the late colony, but the colony in transformation, the colony in transition. So the questions around the aesthetic then had to be looked at in its long-duration to really follow the mutations within what political art meant. So the book overall is not a study of key modernist painters or even the idea of modernism or key figures on modernism but rather a broader conversation around what were the discursive vocabularies, what were the ways in which an intellectual history as it were of the category of the modern, the category of the modern as it interacts with political change. A central to the book was the famine of 1943. Many of you in this gathering might know that the Bengal famine of 1943 is really a critical juncture in the late colony where the scales of the locational, the regional, the scales of the national and the scales of the transnational as it were come together. The famine happens along the eastern frontiers of the allied war front along the provinces of Bengal and it begins in about the summer of 1943 and 1942 and really accelerates. It kills and displaces a millions, more than 3 million and the famine is notoriously described as a man-made famine. So a famine that is not necessarily tied to natural causes though it was preceded by the cyclone and flood but it was actually exaggerated by the lack of access, the lack of access to resources, lack of access to food. So accessibility was a key issue and what I am profiteering and a kind of wider crisis of capitalism was seen as central to the way the famine was unfolding. It brought masses of people. It's actually quite ironic to talk about this now in the context of what's going on in India but I'll say it nonetheless. It decimates rural Bengal. It brings a hordes of refugees from rural Bengal to the city streets as it were and puts pressure on what the city streets look like. It puts pressure on visuality of the city. It puts pressure on how space is visualised. So that's why the question of visuality and representation get tied to the famine. So the famine in other words produces a crisis not only in the socio-political economic fabric but it poses a crisis in representation and that's why visual art is quite central to that conversation around representation. So for me, the famine really becomes a mobilising ground to rethink how values of vision are transforming during this period. So when we really talk about modern art in the late colony, what does this pressure exerted by the famine, this transformation of visuality, how does that transformation shape, how modernity is being discussed, how modernity is being articulated in form, how those changes are happening. So for me, those ended up being the questions that I followed. The famine also as a historical agent that not only transforms categories of visual art but accelerates conversations that were already happening from the 1920s, 30s and also the famine as a kind of metaphor, the famine putting pressure on questions of representation in the post-colonial period also. So I've given here the content page so that before we proceed with the rest of the talk, you have a sense of what the book contains really. So I divided the book into two segments and that's quite foundational to what I mean by partisan aesthetics. The first part really looks at the coming together, the entanglement as I called it, the coming together of art and politics. And art and politics comes together in the 1930s and 1940s mainly, not just through dialogues, not just through synchronies but also through dissonances. So artists and political activists are coming together, not just through affirmation but through a kind of projections, through negations, through discomfort and through debates. So both the discontent and dialogues. So I track three kinds of, three modalities as it were in this dialogue and dissonances. The first and what you see on the screen, the chapter titles really within quotes are those modalities. The first is that of political potentiality where a group of Marxist writers, poets, academics are projecting a kind of political value to the art of Jamini Roy, the artist who himself is not particularly left wing, if anything he's a Gandhian. But he is seeking a kind of space where the modernist value of his work can be discussed, where he can be understood beyond a village scroll painter which is often the way he was kind of seen in urban Calcutta. He was very prominent in the very much present in the city's conversations in the 1930s but he didn't really find among his viewers in the city a kind of intellectual acceptance, intellectual acceptance as a modernist, which is what from the mid 19, mid or late 1930s he finds in a group of modernist and Marxist writers and poets. And in the very projection of a political content a particular modality of politics as potentiality not just as content comes up. So that is something that I try to capture as a part of a long-dury history of what the left or how the left was entering visual art in this case through projection. In the second chapter I looked at more kind of more active political art where artists like the artist Chitra Prasad many of you might be familiar with his works who were active members of the Communist Party in the early 1940s, mid 1940s who went and documented the family. So after 1943 this was a major impetus for the Communist Party to really come in and generate a kind of anti-imperialist critique and combine it with an anti-capitalist critique given the man-made nature of the famine. And it employed artists who would then go and do a kind of documentation of the famine as a socio-economic rupture. So as agitator and organizer really is that kind of active authorship of a Communist visual vocabulary in art which is very different from the projection that I initially talked about. And the third chapter which is what I will be kind of focusing on today talks about a group of modernist artists who are formed as a response to the Bengal famine and who really are interested in engaging with a socialist aesthetic but on their terms. So they are interested in being both committed to social realism but through a very modernist kind of exploration of what artistic form should be. So the unique part of this modality is a kind of what I called a vacillation of sometimes they are with the Communist Party sometimes they are kind of opposed to the Communist Party. So there are three different ways in which I tried to map how the left enters the space of visual art and these different modalities are really sit at the core of what I understand to be the idiomatic and the ideological textures of modern art in the late colony. And in the rest of the talk I'll try to kind of elaborate on why we need to understand the political through these nuances just through political content. So the way I conceptualized parties and aesthetics was not about was not around the political content in art. So often there is a tendency of calling political art propaganda art particularly when we are talking about Communist Party and Communist aesthetics. To me propaganda is not necessarily the entry point but a more nuanced discussion around what the political should be. Should the political be realism? What kind of dialogue should modernism have with realism particularly in contexts where active social political economic ruptures are taking place. And that dialogue between realism and modernism is quite key to our understanding of the aesthetics of decolonization which is what I'm also kind of trying to develop work on now. In the second part of the book just very quickly I look at how these histories of the political in art that are very active in the 1940s, 1930s how they are transformed in the post colony. So the second half of the book heavily talks about the 1950s, 60s and early 70s where I show how this dynamic of left-wing cultural ferment that dominates the 40s what happens to that after partition and after the arrival of independence. So when the enemy quote unquote is no longer imperialism what happens to the radical ferment in art. And how does the famine keep putting pressure on the visual idiom and the visual imagination of locality in this case in post colonial Bengal. So how does the famine mark the way artists and art critics from the region will continue to imagine modernity even in post colonial India. So for today's talk I have selected when Priyanka asked me to give this talk and I thought it would be a great occasion for me to go back to an album that I found at the British Library a completely out of circulation it's extremely difficult to find this album and also to know even the existence of the album really. So Bengal painters testimony an album that was published in 1944. It accompanied an exhibition called the visions of Bengal that happened in 1944. It's a very thin really paltry looking album and as you can see I've given you the first pages the cover page has artwork by a print by a Germany Roy by then a very, very prominent artist in Bengal. As you can see the album is edited by you see four names here Arun Dasgupta, Kamrul Hasan Adinath Mukherjee and Safiyuddin Ahlan. It is important for us to pause a bit and think about who they are really. So in the 1940s these are basically students at the Calcutta at the Government School of Art in Calcutta. They are also activists of the All India Students Federation who are organizing the exhibition in the context of the annual annual conference of the All India Students Federation. Arun Dasgupta and Adinath Mukherjee. I mean all of them their works are are present in the album of course it's also very interesting to know that Kamrul Hasan by 1947 would be kind of forced to move to East Pakistan after partition and would then become quite integral to the formation of modern art in East Pakistan. They artists like Hasan and Ahmed who were quite integrated as it were in the way art students from the art college were reimagining realism and reimagining the social in art professionally they were very rooted and that uprooting in 1947 itself would have a strong impact on how they would re-imagine their own works but that's another story but this is really an album that is created by activists that is something I want to highlight here. So what I'll do here is take you through what the components of the album really are and who are the people whose works were depicted and that range is quite critical to what I'm arguing in the talk. So in the album itself you have a very broad range first there are art school students here you have Khushal, Adinath Mukherjee Obani Sen the top most figure and then established realist painters like Devi Prashant right the right hand side bottom right image. So these are artists who are practitioners of realism and these are some of them like Devi Prashant is a very prominent figure in developing realist iconography and sculpture painting and people like Obani Sen and Adinath Mukherjee Khushal they are more junior artists who are getting trained at the art school at that point of time. Many of them were quite formative to conversations around realism since the 1920s 1930s. These are artists who are in a way counter operating counter current so they are not part of the more mythological idiom of the Bengal school that was dominant both in the art movement in Calcutta under Abhinav Nath Tagore and his students but also in Shanti Niketan which had a more rural kind of idealized rural sensibility around the modern. So these are artists who are working in the city and from the 1930s they had this wider conversation around depicting the subaltern, depicting the margins of the city depicting ugliness as it were in art. So you have works of these artists, more junior artists in the album. You also have works of dominant kind of quite active senior artists like Jamini Roy in this case. Jamini Roy's own works which actually had nothing to do with the famine but there is an idealization contained rural idiom that is also quite actively modernist in its treatment of flat planes and anti-naturalist kind of depiction. Incidentally Jamini Roy is also very close to academic painters in Calcutta. He doesn't share much affinity with either the Bengal school under Abhinav Nath Tagore or even Shanti Niketan. So he has a very unique space in Calcutta and he is a patron himself of academic artists. So one can understand how he would get involved with this kind of exhibition. You also have a famine work, a unique work actually, an abstract depiction of the famine from Ram Kinkar Bej by that time a very prominent figure also a teacher at Shanti Niketan. He was trained in Shanti Niketan in mid 1940s. He is a teacher at Shanti Niketan. So here is one of those figures who while being trained and teaching at Shanti Niketan which had a very distinct kind of anti-naturalist anti-realist position he himself was interested in realism and that kind of a very complex nuanced understanding of realism that is defined, that is kind of rooted both in the social and the formal at the same time. So in Bengal painters testimony we find Ram Pinkar Bej's work on the storm that really brings up the famine through a radical reorientation of the corporeal so you have skeletons in a kind of abstractscape so there is a kind of way in which the famine also generates abstract imagery which is what one sees in the 60s and 70s when the famine keeps putting pressure on artists in Bengal but in Ram Pinkar Bej's work you see that very early on you see that already in the 40s. So prominent artists like Roy and Bej you also had in the Bengal painters testimony album works by artists who very recently in 1943 had come together to form the Calcutta group of artists. Many of them were trained in the realist tradition so for example you have here the sculptor Pradosh Dasgupta then Gopal Ghosh whose work the bottom right hand side who were trained in the realist idiom they were students of the Calcutta art school and they were kicked out of the Calcutta art school and later received training in Madras under Devi Prashant Roy Choudhury. So there is a wider politics of patronage that was provided or not provided to followers of the naturalist realist style that there is a hidden history of that so artists like him were trained from outside Calcutta and they came back in the early 1940s artists like Nirodh Mohjumdar the bottom left hand side and then Shubhote Gore they were trained in the Indian style aesthetic Shubhote Gore himself was very committed to the socialist movement and also quite committed to the revival of indigenous art and indigenous aesthetics within the spaces of modern art so these were artists who were coming from different lineages as it were and under the within the context of the Bengal famine of 1943 they come together because they feel the pressure to capture the social and the political in the way the modern is articulated so that's very clear when they begin there is no manifesto as such the manifesto arrives slightly later but in their conversations which are kind of present across little segments of exhibition reviews or newspaper kind of reports on them you see that there is a wider desire in them to combine realism with modernism the social with the formal so Bengal painters testimony actually has quite a big range of their works you can imagine that as a new group who are sort of in the circuits of the left not entirely so my third chapter the concrete contextuality chapter is on them where I talk about how the Calcutta group at various points throughout the 40s either associates or dissociates themselves from the left kind of cultural movement of the period so you have you have artists of the Calcutta group who are represented in the album apart from that you have the work of an artist like Jainul Abedin who at that point of time is a teacher the youngest teacher at the government school of art Abedin later becomes one of the most iconic artists in East Pakistan later Bangladesh and actually gains a particular kind of reputation by portraying the family drawing the families drawing the pavements of the city as he would walk from his mess to the art school so you really are seeing the album is the album in itself is a defining document of what was the conversations in the city in 1943-44 so the work of Jainul Abedin very poignantly titled the citizens is depicted in the album then the album has works of activists so from art school exhibitions to iconic artists like Jamini Roy or modernist painters you then have this new category of artists who are also activists and as we discussed activists are also organizing the exhibitions you have Kamrul Hassan work after the cyclone like I said the family was preceded by a cyclone interestingly the portrayal of catastrophe the portrayal of displacement would continue the works of Kamrul Hassan and Zainul Abedin after they migrated to east Pakistan but here you see the early kind of absorption in trying to arrive at a visual language that can capture rupture on the left hand side of course is the work of Chitra Prasad this was the cover image of his very recent album that was published in 1944 or maybe this album was Chitra Prasad's album Hungry Bengal I think was published late 1944 but this was the cover image of his album that he his diary rather that he wrote during his commission as a reporter an artist reporter from the communist party of India when he traveled across rural Bengal to document the famine so in a way both Kamrul Hassan and Chitra Prasad here are documenting rural Bengal while many of the other artists were also portraying urban Calcutta and displacement particularly Zainul Abedin portraying famine displacement in the city so these are artists who are active members of the communist party so they have a particular kind of you know activist signature as their works are being brought together in this kind of album so this range of artworks that are depicted in a journal in an album like this there is a tendency in scholarship to very rightly for other reasons to depict the whole set of works as art of the family so you have multiple depictions of whenever one talks about the famine and art in Bengal in the 1940s we tend to bring together a very broad range of artists who were for obvious reasons portraying the famine in their works and it is often brought under the rubric of social realism so a realist portrayal of subjects a commitment to the social a kind of active commitment to social social rupture as it were or social struggles in art so social realism more broadly is often used to talk about art in Bengal in the 1940s so this blanket idiom however needs to be read with caution particularly and this is what I have argued in the book particularly because this kind of blanket idiom can flatten the stylistic and the ideological nuances that are hidden in this very kind of overarching album with all these different components there are hidden within this overarching structure stylistic and ideological differences and by pursuing those ideological stylistic nuances differences we actually arrive at a more complex understanding of what constituted modernity in art during these transitional decades of decolonization and that is where I am kind of locating this talk to really understand what are the components and what can we really glee from this range instead of going with art of the family that is so social realism in the context of the 1930s in a transnational in the context of the transnational popular front anti-fascist popular front where social realism globally became a very important aesthetic. Social realism in that kind of transnational sense has been described as an attitude and quoting an attitude towards the role of art in life that emerged it's not so much a style but an attitude towards the role of art in life and this was a very kind of active sense of social realism in the 1930s and that sensibility is also active in Calcutta in the 1930s and to trace that sensibility one doesn't really find artist manifestos or you know important exhibitions but a very scattered field of art critical writing or little newspaper reports on very insignificant exhibitions small collectives where you see a kind of a murmuration as it were of a new discontent among artists who are very dissatisfied with the way the Bengal school uses idealized imaginaries of the nation where either it is in lyrical mythological themes as was common in the early Bengal school of the early 20th century or the idealized rural everyday that by then was very dominant in Shantiniketa led by kind of ruralist aesthetic ruralist revivalism. So there is a kind of discontent in young academic painters who were very marginal in the art in the city's art conversations. So artists here the first slide that I showed you let me see if I can some of these artists so actually Zainul Abedin also who was a student in the 1930s many of them were really struggling in the 30s and they formed these collectives like the art rebel center or youth cultural institute and I'm talking about let's say 1931, 1933 where they were trying to articulate a particular kind of discontent and at the core of that discontent was the question of beauty what constitutes beauty in art. So the question of beauty and ugliness which kind of gets very active with the famine had this long lineage in the 1930s so in the 90s I'll just give you some examples of how this discontent was expressed in art writing so for example noting the quote unquote unreal tendency of Indian artists to create images of untarnished beauty unmediated by contextual representation a critique like Jamini Sen in 1935-36 I think commented that such imageries of myth and fancy that he saw in the Bengal school were and I quote bereft of the reflection of the motherland while literature had made this transition to realism he writes the plastic arts too needed to portray the harsh truth of contemporary reality instead of seeking refuge in mythology what was required in art he says was a new shuttobod which translates to a sensibility of truth an era of new nationalism as he calls it that would recognize the changing landscapes and sites of the nation now that's very important to see that how in the 1930s itself the very understanding of artistic beauty was being challenged so Jamini Sen's appeal to quote unquote new truth in art reveals on one hand new values for thinking aesthetically about the city and on the other hand new values of portraying ugliness or the margins in art as opposed to sustaining an idealized nation form so there is a kind of prehistory of the famine iconography that we see in Bengal painters testimony that's quite important to keep in mind discussing the question of beauty in early 20th century writing some Calcutta historian Shudipta Kaviraj has noted for instance that insistence on and I quote beauty in the narrow sense produced a crisis of sorts in writing about the city for modernity of this notion of beauty could not accommodate and I quote the teeming disorderly ungainly modern city of Calcutta that was not by any definition a beautiful theme so what you see is that there's a wider question of how to portray the city in art something that has you know we tied to the rupture of the famine but there is a wider anxiety around the urban and modernism that's very much present in the 1930s and that is often missed in the way art historians think about wider questions of the urban in the 20th century nationalist imagination in colonial India as the Peshchakravarti has noted in discussing the poet Rabindranath carried two different and contradictory ways of seeing the nation he argues one way of seeing the nation was through an adoring eye that he calls adoring eye that hailed the beauty and beauty of the nation and the other was the critical eye that probed the defects of the nation so there are these two contradictory ways of seeing the nation that Chakravarti identifies in Tagore's writings in the early 1930s the difference between these two ways of seeing I have tried to argue in the book is both aesthetic and political it is foundational this difference is foundational to the contesting values of beauty tradition, commitment, form and freedom that inhabited the practices and discourses of modern art and it animates in fact that broader question that is quite foundational to modernity in the mid 20th century in India how must the nation be visualized in the 1930s itself this question of how should the nation be visualized this discontent as I was talking about remained an isolated scattered kind of erratic conversation no concrete direction emerged out of it reflecting for instance on the dirt of and I am quoting here the dirt of revolutionary content in Bengali painting the sociologist writer who was actually a front line figure in the left cultural movement in the late 1930s onwards he argues that a new type of sympathy and he is writing this in 1938 he says that a new type of sympathy was required in artists in order to convert visual observation into motives for creating novel forms of art for technical changes to become real for art to play its critical historical role for emotional content to fall in line with the environment no art can progress he argues unless society changes through crisis this is Mukubadhai writing in 1938 like I said many of these conversation in the 30s remained kind of directionless they were there there are these erratic conversations but it doesn't lead to anything concrete because in a way that big contextual push never arrives and of course given these artists are themselves marginal things do not add up too much that crisis in fact is where a direct historical agency of the famine at least for our understandings of modernity in visual art lies so famine actually then generates that crisis pushes the conversations towards new directions of the social and as I would argue also the socialist so an album like Bengal paint this testimony then can be read as an expression of this new sensibility this new sensibility of truth yet it has to be remembered that the album in itself is a conglomeration of artists who were not necessarily committed to social realism some of them like a rung pinker badge in the dugar whose work I have not put here they were practitioners of the Bengal school many of them were trained in Shanti Niketan and were very rooted in that ruralist kind of aesthetic some of these artists were modernist painters who sought to combine modernism with socialism like the with social content like the Calcutta group and indeed some of them were communist artists here as we see Kamrul Hasan and Chitra Prasad for them the social was more a socialist than a pure reflection of society so this difference among different artists carries a critical historical footprint in our understanding of the entanglement of art and politics in the late colony that difference becomes something important to probe to begin with this difference it generates and consolidates a kind of dialogical so by remaining close to the difference we actually arrive at how the famine itself and this album in itself becomes a way of containing difference so it becomes a kind of front-building exercise that allows the left in this case the student federation with close ties to the communist party allows them to create a kind of forum where artists across stylistic and ideological boards can come together so what brings the artists together is a response to crisis to socialists communists and nationalist leaders coming together under the wider rubric of witnessing and representing crisis the visibility of the famine in the city had made it a part of the freedom struggle in a decade that was marked by a mass movement the documentation of the famine kind of became an actively different way of portraying society portraying context and the way this of course speaks to the wider visual culture around portraying famine that was very common in the official governmental discourse and pictorial reviews of famines of India that colonial documentation had so here you had a documentation of the famine through activists of vernacular lens that kind of gave a very different radical edge to hunger itself so depicting the famine was seen as an act of patriotism as a a surgeon in I do the nationalist leader the congress leader who wrote the forward to and let me move this to the next slide a surgeon in I do who wrote the forward to the to the album as she writes homage of love and pity to the vast anonymous Legion of hunger stricken and heroic people of Bengal. I do was the chief guest of the visions of Bengal exhibition all proceeds of the exhibition were committed to the Shelter relief fund and night initiatives forward to the album exhausted artistic talent to become and I quote the handmade of humans suffering to offer a little amelioration of great distress. This patriotic kind of tenor was kind of carried over to the editors the young artists from the art school who hailed the united action of theー the the bottom right page that you see the you The united action of painters, publishers and press workers, Hindus and Muslims in the patriotic act of dedicating the album to the service of the famished. So there is a way in which a political front building and idiomatic front building were coming together. The second historical footprint of the of exhibitions like this was symptomatic of wider changes and radical transformation in the values of vision. That in the context of 1930s I noted that gets consolidated in in via the family. So the album like the Bengal painters testimony can be, you know, can be taken as an example of a typical exhibition of modern art in the early 1940s in Calcutta. So while working in what I should call the non archive, which was because so much of the material was scattered all over. I came across an album of like famine art family cutouts of photographs and so on at the library I should say, of the government school of art which is now government college of art and craft in Calcutta. And the cartoon I've used it in the book is quite striking so the cartoon depicts a gallery of modern art and exhibition of modern art you have a catalog on the table, and you have this kind of. There is a gilded portrait of the noted nationalist poet the general Roy, who is noted as a composer of celebrated patriotic songs in colonial Bengal, and you see him thrusting out gaping in horror at the paintings on display. Around his portraits are paintings of destitution's vulture piles of rotting bodies and graves bewildered the poet seems to be tearing apart his own famous elegy to the motherland. The contradiction between an idealized motherland and a ruptured reality cuts through the cartoon, as it asks to make it a bully chubby should put a liquor, are you a mere portrait conjured on canvas. The cartoon in a way points to the contradictions between the two kinds of vision that I was talking about an adoring I and a critical I and the tensions between the two, which actually marks what I would call then a dialectical modernism a dialectical of modern art in the late colony, how and from where in other words, must the nation be viewed addressing an exhibition salon, where these contradictory vision seemed to collide. The cartoon in a way announces both the transformed subjects of modern art, as well as the inverted values of beauty in art. Incidentally, the catalog essay of Bengal painters testimony in the catalog essay the Marxist poet and cultural activist of the left Bishnu they talks about precisely this changes in the values of vision. Now Bishnu they by that time is a critical figure in the left's cultural movement. He's not a member of the Communist Party he never was but he was quite closely tied to the way the left was, you know, you know extending itself into the cultural sphere. So he for instance was the person who kind of wrote about Germany Roy projecting a kind of and I quote, political potentiality in Roy's work a socialist potentiality in Roy's work. In the context of the Calcutta group. It was Bishnu they again who would try and kind of articulate a socialist possibility a socialist iconography in the works of the Calcutta group, a socialism that was intrinsically connected to modernism which is their own kind of aesthetic distinguishing the Calcutta group for instance from other exhibits in the album. Bishnu they who was by then very prominent in the left's cultural movement projects a kind of radical agency in their works. These artists he writes departed from both early 20th century mythological romanticism of the Bengal school and the early paintings of Shanti Nikita, as well as from art school, academic naturalism. He reveals he says a new change of values in art and I'm quoting a conscious quote, a conscious quest for form and color, which represented a new spirit of quote unquote revolt in Indian art. A continuation he says of the legacy of Germany Roy and Rabindranath Tagore. He writes, asserts not revolt he asserts was not limited to social crisis, or to a unilinear artistic sympathy for the downtrodden, but was geared towards and I quote, a wide new world healthy and devoted to the vision of the eye. There is a way in which you see a scattered but a resonant vocabulary of modernism formalism that is developing around this album and around the wider kind of writings. Here is. Let me see this is Bishnu they writing on the Calcutta group in the Communist Party's periodical people's war. So there is a kind of. So he really produces some of the earliest remarks on the formal values of realist compositions during this period, a theme that he would continue in his kind of sustained writings on the Calcutta group. So, and these writings are actually very interesting so they emerge across multiple forums. I came across some of the most actually where concrete contextuality was mentioned. This was a very thin, like a very random booklet that was issued for an exhibition of Neerod Mojumdar one of the artists and that little fragment is in the archer papers at the British Library, and me discovering that was a complete serendipity arriving at that and then seeing this text written by Bishnu they're talking not only about Neerod Mojumdar but the wider Calcutta group so kind of for me it became a major kind of archival flash one could say to really conceptualize this third modality of a vacillating aesthetic that became quite key to the way I, you know, I shaped the idea of partisan aesthetics. So the Bengal painters testimony becomes a signifier then of a wider nature of the political in the 1940s in visual art so one that is both of alignment and vacillation. One that needs an eye for, I would argue an eye for incompleteness and contradiction, rather than consolidation and affirmation. To me an album like this puts pressure on us to rethink what front building and what political and social in art actually can mean. To me as for many of the artists represented in the album the Bengal painters testimony becomes an expression of a progressive cultural ferment, progressive within quotes. I do have so there is a tendency in scholarship to kind of relate to the progressive to the formation of the progressive writers association in the 1930s, then the formation of the Indian People's Theatre Association in the 1940s. And then with the formation of the Bombay progressive the progressive artists group in Bombay in 1947. And if you really go into the archive and by archive here I do not mean a fixed collection or institutional collection or file or whatever one calls it. But this very scattered kind of miscellaneousness of conversations and murmurations as it were, if you really go there we see that there is a very unstructured conversations around the progressive so here in the left hand side image. And you have at the bottom Prokotishil Chitra Kalar or green of a song also collection of a unique collection of a progressive visual art from the early 20s, from the early 1940s. And I know for instance that the vocabulary of progressive was very much active among artists. The Calcutta group picks up that vocabulary gives it a particular kind of form. And it is said that it is their exhibition in 1945 in Bombay that kind of forms the groundwork for the eventual formation of the progressive artists group in in in Bombay. And there is a wider kind of not only a historical lineage of vocabularies like progressive that emerges across the 1940s, but it also raises a broader question of broader question of the archive. If one has to really rethink what the progressive has meant in the field of visual art. Where do we go. How does one what does one do with this, this, you know all these fragments of material fragments of thinking about the social and the political and the progressive and how does one harness that. So in other words as a historian, if you are working on art, what do you look for in the archive. It does not go to studies of art institutions or colonial exhibitions colonial institutions. If one is looking at a more chaotic locational field of art discourse. How does one conceptualize that kind of material as an archive and what kind of questions emerge then from that miscellaneousness that that scattered kind of form. How does it put pressure on our understanding of the archive in itself, for there is this broader kind of quote unquote I could say an absent discourse around the progressive. It is absent not because the conversations were not happening. It is absent because it does not enter art historical research. The kind of questions we are asking in art history or even cultural history are often tied to either iconic artists or an already over determining narrative of modernism, whereas what I've tried to bring out here that even like an insignificant film like bengal painters testimony puts forth is a wider textured conversation around modernity that often doesn't lead to anything it doesn't add up to something bigger because the the collectives disperse the movement disperses. There is a kind of remains unconsolidated gets dismantled, the artists themselves are not really famous. So what does one do with this kind of fragments of potential conversations and potential histories that often do not find home in the way that art history writing is structured in art history at least. There is a need of course to counter an overtly Eurocentric narrative of art history by expanding and enhancing the canon of modernism and that is what has been happening in the past two decades that we look for narratives of let's say Indian modernism or Pakistani modernism or Nigerian modernism whatever be the case. What is this wider kind of miscellaneousness, a more chaotic and potential field of art discursive material, of which bengal painters testimony is an example, and it kind of puts forth a wider question a larger question which is how do we write an art history of modern art in this media without taking the entry point of either modernism or the nation. So what what do we do with this miscellaneousness in other words, a document like the Bengal painters testimony gets tied to something that is a specifically regional rupture, so tied to the Bengal famine, which of course has transnational echoes, whether that is the Second World War for empire or that is a global anti fascist left wing cultural movement. And this also has a particular kind of potentiality to nuance what constitutes modernity at the exit of empire, but it all depends on what questions we are willing to ask really. So in lieu of a conclusion, then I will argue that Bengal painters testimony becomes an entry point into rethinking the wider vocabularies of progressive art that are hidden often in vernacular locational idioms. I would argue that formations of progressive art are not really national stories. These are vernacular regional stories and therefore need more archival work with vernacular material. And that there is a wider politics of discursive politics of writing in and out that marks the historiography of mid century modernism. And that's why often materials like this remains outside the narratives of 20th century modernism in India. And also what should become and should we become more attentive to such kind of contradictions and completeness dissonance etc. And retrieve thereby either to marginalized or missed sites figures collectives. What must such retrievals lead to words. So if we are retrieving rare albums like this rare, you know scattered figures like this, what becomes what emerges what big story emerges out of these. Anyway, there is a way in which I have tried to use visual art as archive to then think about what histories emerge from. If you start reading visual art as archive rather than assign posts for modernity modernism, etc. What histories emerge out of looking at visual art as archive for me that history has been about, and which is what I work on now, the wider aesthetics of decolonization. This is a question of fragmentation and freedom. My proposition, which is also my current work is to nuance the aesthetics of decolonization, not just via modernism, then, but by via fragments, erratic art movements, and of course, incomplete archives, which Bengal Painter's testimony to me at least remains like a major signpost, as it were. I'm going to stop here, maybe and let Zehra take over. I'm very glad that Zehra is has agreed to be the discussant for very obvious reasons which she will elaborate on I'm sure. Thank you very much. I do not know if I've overshot my time but Thank you so much. Yes. Yes. Thank you so much and I would like to invite Zehra to have a conversation with Sanjukta. Oh, I didn't realize my video was okay just a minute here. Yeah. That was just absolutely that was fascinating. So I'm going to be a little selfish and ask this question which I'm burning to ask before like actually like having a proper discussion. And that is, did you see that you thought that the progressive artist group which is obviously the research that I get quite obsessed about is would have seen this show in Bombay before they decided to form in 1947. Oh, where the artists of the Bombay progressives would have seen. Yeah, not this exhibition, but the Calcutta group carried their works in 1945 as a group, but also artworks of particular artists like Rothene Moitro. So there was, yeah, they absolutely did see and their work conversations around the progressive. And this, this, this, I don't know, for want of a better expression cultural ferment, let's say. So there was a dialogue for sure. So I mean what kind of really fascinates me about this is, so I'll put it a little bit in context as to what my recent project with the progressive artist group has been. And that is, you know, it's not the new, it's not the New York show, which sort of trying to sort of dismantle the idea of, you know, what the term progressive does in sort of conjunction with ideas of modernism, would you bring up quite a lot in the introduction of the book that I read. And so that's, that's one issue that I'm kind of looking at. And then the other issue that I'm sort of researching now with somebody called Samina Iqbal. Yeah, so Samina is actually like doing things with the Lahore Art Circus. And so the two of us have kind of teamed up and tried to join our little dots of research. And currently we've been advising on and trying to sort of give curatorial advice but also like write a bit. We show in Germany that's that's going to be opening in October for collective modernities. And so Samina has advised on the Lahore Art Circle and I've done stuff on the progressive artist group. And what was so fascinating in that sort of interchange between us was not just that they were echoes in terms of visual forms because they were, you know, connected members in that group. Yeah, that the terminology of progress and progressive and also weirdly related to that this term that you also use secular. And so what I found was that as far as a progressive artist group went, even on this sort of eve of their first show, which was 1949, Suza writes this article where, you know, where he sort of lambasts the whole idea of the progressive. And he says he has a real problem with it it's a leftist term. Why should you know why should he be associated with that why should his group of the associated with that. Leave it behind he says in this article. And then he signs the article as secretary of the progressive artist group. And of course their show is happening under the banner of progressive artists group that's there. That's the first two shows. So, um, you know, this tension between what a progressive art could look like, and it's sort of socialist as you say and sort of realistic elements that's you know the issue to do with realism is where for Suza he draws the line and he says you know I'm not that I'm not leftist in that way, where you know I'm modern, and by modern means that eventually we've left behind this terminology of the progressive. And so I wondered you know how how that sort of dovetails with what you're looking at and you know where the tensions are between you know something like that happening in a in Bombay with Suza articulating progress in in those terms. And you know the kind of artists that you're talking about were also using the progressive, but who don't have that kind of a version to do the progressive as sort of coming full scale. Into tension with the modern in that way. Yeah, thanks thanks for this. No, they do not have an aversion in 1944 45, but they very much have an aversion by the time it's 1949. And I kind of go at length into these. That's what I called vacillation. Suza is alive and kicking in the late 1940s. And you did that excellent show what I loved about the show was that you brought in a lot of early works of the Bombay progressives. And that's very interesting because of course Suza to was began his trajectory through a close kind of association with the Communist Party or the spaces of the socialist. Right, including hanging out in the party office and such. That's very similar to the trajectory of the Calcutta group. What happens in the late 1940s is of course the wider transformation in the socialist movement itself. So globally you have a consolidation of socialist realism as an official aesthetic of the Soviet Union, and you had the pre, you know, the wartime kind of the front popular front to with nationalists, or communists or more fellow travelers that coexistence is dismantled in the late 1940s and you have more and more artists dissociating themselves from anything to do with the socialist. So for example, in the 19 very interestingly the 1949 retrospective of the Calcutta group, you had Pradosh Das Gupta the sculptor who later becomes the director general of the of the National Gallery of modern art of course. And he talks about in his memoirs how they were having this big exhibition and the left some and the Communist Party's cultural critique, Gopal Haldar. He manages to kind of come to the exhibition and then he says that, oh, but the works here are not socialist enough. And then Pradosh Das Gupta retorts and he says but we never said we were socialist, we were always social realists. So for me that slippage between social and the socialist is a very, very typical to the late 1940s, and the cat and the Bombay progressives of course that that quote that you're talking about is bang on right that this is from the legacy of the leftist legacy of the progressive, which then would be assimilated with a broader vision of Nehruvian socialism that keeps the people, but removes radicalism from the understanding of the people. So which is what I end up doing in my third and fourth chapter to really see that to capture this moment the slippage between multiple notions of the progressive so the Calcutta group very much marks this shift that that Bombay does in a Bombay progressives do in a more visible way because they are written about. Yeah, absolutely. And you're right that it's also they written about, which brings us to another kind of crisis point of, you know, the things that are written about. So the stage at which these are really written about, which is, you know, when they develop their individual styles as it were having left. And kind of, you know, that's what the auction market wants and hence that the writing is based around the fact that we do have to deal with a lot of the, you know, where there's there's money involved. And the early the early part of their sort of development of an aesthetic is actually not so much looked at. Yeah, you know, and not just is it is it ignored. And now it's becoming, you know, it is being looked at, but it's sort of, it's kind of red and given value only in the light of what comes afterwards. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I mean this is, this is an issue. I also wondered whether, you know, we could sort of talk a little bit about, you know, the other the other huge political issue that was well around at that time and continues to haunt us which is, how do these terms, the modern or progressive or, you know, intersect with the idea of the secular for instance, but also with religious identity, and the fact that then Bengal fractures itself twice. You know, first with as East Pakistan and then as Bangladesh along religious lines and how, how, how does the, I mean, how do you see that trace. Thanks, thanks for that. But secular appears in the 1949 the first manifesto as it were of the calculator group actually appears in 1949. So the sources that I gathered around what the group stood for are drawn from what people were writing on them and people in the sense of who was very close to them right in the 1949 text they talk about a new secular turn in art. And by secular, they mean moving away from the mythologism of the Bengal school. Right. And the secular also echoing an hero VN kind of fermentation. The secular also stands for the citizen. So there is a hollowing out of religion, actually from the conversation there is very little on partition in these conversations. And there is a way in which actually some of the protagonists of this radical realist aesthetic, they themselves, you know, they leave, they leave in one way you know you have artists like Kamrul Hassan Zainul Abidin moving on to East Pakistan and then struggling with another version of the secular, which is there is a very little interest institutionally in visual art, and they have to negotiate with the federal center to kind of set up art institutions, and they have to negotiate around how then the art institution could be around the long history of Islamic civilization. So they have to do all these ploys to get money to set up even an art school. So they start doing a different kind of negotiation around the secular to so in a way to create a secular space of an art institution they have to play with religion in a particular way in India the conversation around religion is absent in the late 1940s and early 1950s. So there is a very much and I would be very intrigued to hear what you find found in the rich body of material around the progressive artists that there is the category of the citizen trumps everything, or the category of democratization of Nehruvian art trumps everything I think. So there is very little conversation around partition, even in Nehruvian art discourse, you do not hear conversation around partition. So it is mainly about this kind of the promise of the nation state, and, you know, diversity, right. So, kind of this kind of eclectic vision. So this kind of democracy. So I, my fourth chapter, for instance, is a little quote from Jaya Apasamy in the 1950s, which is titled all the more real for not being preached. She talks about the social in 1950s modern Indian art that is all the more real because it is not being preached. So there is a very active negation of socialist values. So that negation both removes socialism, but incorporates it nonetheless through a Nehruvian idea of the, of the, of the socialist right one that is again foregrounds rural India as the site of the modern, but insists nonetheless on containment and not rupture. So my sense is that because there is a rejection of imaginaries of rupture, there is a conscious kind of erasure or an amnesia around partition in visual art, very different story in literature or films. Yeah, I think that that's a fascinating point and it's a proposition more than a point I hope. Well, yeah, it's a proposition and I think that you know, if we have further conversations, we might actually come up with something a little bit different. You know, because what one of the things that I was looking at when I was really looking at the progressives and art around the period of partition. What I've been said a lot, for instance, about Christian Kanna, for instance, is that, you know, why, why these artists, you know, who in some way have become these kind of quintessential moderns. Why is it that they've never, they don't paint partition, what's happened to that history of partition, why is it that there is that kind of amnesia. And, you know, when you revisit their work, and with Christian Kanna, when he went back into his own archive, or his granddaughter did, we discovered that actually this is not true he was making work on partition he just, it's like he forgot about it and we didn't want to talk about it. And it's only at the sort of start of COVID and the migration crisis that Modi caused, that he sort of start like some kind of damn breaks and he gives an interview to a newspaper where he actually says, you know, I have painted about partition and what's happening here reminds me of that painting of partition and the work suddenly appears. And then the other thing is that somehow I think, you know, abstraction becomes a way for a lot of the moderns to deal with partition. When the second partition of the subcontinent happens, so you know with the formation of Bangladesh, you see suddenly this is a point Sonal Kular made in her book and then I followed up on it and I sort of traced this and it is absolutely true that Hussein Raza, Christian Kanna, and a series of other artists who in the 70s suddenly start, you know, disrupting their work and talking about a kind of fracture in a sort of stylistic vein that is obvious reference to Bangladesh. That reference then is obviously a kind of a recall of what's going on, you know, during the first partition. And Samina and I like, you know, putting our heads together and like researching things have discovered that exactly the same thing was happening with Pakistani artists. You know Ali Imam suddenly has this broken moon, Shakir Ali. And so, you know, I think this is something that we one can look at in the characters, the fact that, you know, now we know. Yeah, there is a way in which the 70s then becomes a kind of, you know what Stuart Hall has called, you know, he says that the conjuncture is also a cyclical thing. The conjuncture returns. So that's why many people are talking about 1947 today because what you see now in India reminds one of 1947 I would say 1943 also. So, so in a way 70s brings that back for short but also in the context of India the emergency. So in a way the problem is that in art history writing we often relate political art to what's happening happened in the 1970s. Whereas there is a very long-dury complex contradictory history of the political that needs to be brought out, because in that way you de-center who are the moderns or what modernism or modernity is. So the 70s has been talked about and should be talked about, but the 40s does has something to offer for the 70s, not being explored in writing, right. And also when we explore what would that exploration amount to like I struggled a lot about what is then the big story in the book, because it was very hard to find the big story because it's not a consolidated movement that I will say here is. Yeah, so that's the thing so you're very correct the 70s brings that back abstraction and also four decades after independence abstraction can arrive in a particular way. So in a way I stopped in the mid 1970s, because I know what the story of the 70s is. So I'm more interested in knowing the story of the 50s and 60s where so many things are hazy right so so that's that as a historian that's what I'm interested in. So if I worked on the 70s, I would find a more comfortable archive, a more complex aesthetic also you know the artists are rethinking there is a rich nuance. And there has been work on that right so I can draw from that work. Then I am more interested in these contradictions that follows so yeah I'm it's fascinating what you said about Christian Kanna and that the resurfacing of partition work. That's very interesting isn't it I'm sure artists did work on partition. They were not published, they were not printed, they didn't enter our discourse that that absence is interesting right so a person like me would be interested in that absence. But it would be so fascinating to go dig around in these hidden works to look at this kind of a hidden history of partition in visual art and there is something to be said if artists chose to forget right. That's very interesting. But I think there's also a particular trajectory of Nehruvi in India which is very different from Pakistan. So when you do not have disillusionment at a national scale, a dissonance does not show. In visual art at least vision dissonance shows only in the 70s when the emergency actually breaks that dream. Interesting point. I'm thinking aloud at this stage so my sense in Pakistan is it's different. There is this undercurrent of dissonance that rejects both realism and abstraction of a particular kind at the same time in the 50s and 60s. In East Pakistan to to a certain extent so I'm very interested in looking at what happens to the social. After 47 in these kind of these three contexts, India, East and West Pakistan and I'm saying that because that is what I'm kind of beginning to work on now. So Samina's work of course I follow it very closely to work on the Lahore Art Circle is fascinating. Shakir Ali, somebody I'm beginning to work on. Yeah, that's why. Yeah, I can imagine that the Shakir Ali connection would be really interesting because of his apartment with the left almost. And his rejection rejects everything. Yeah, that's quite fascinating to me. But you are right that I mean that unequal relationship of these different, you know, movements or groups or whatever or collectives whatever we call them, and purely because of money in a way in the scene is that you know where we sort of have. Only one kind of visibility. True, true. Very much so. It's something one pushes. Yeah, yeah. So there's a way in which art market also shapes what gets to be really thrust into the canon of course, of course, yeah, and accepted as you know. Now on a slightly different tangent, you know what I wanted to ask was also how these this particular sort of period that you're looking at in these artists that you're looking at, how do they actually deal with the concept of the modern on as an international phenomenon, you know, as the progressives were so very, very aware obsessively aware of what was happening outside. You know to the extent that then they, they left the second day code. But so what, what, what was the trajectory here, you know how, how was modernism, like talked about in terms of the international rage. Yeah, I mean internationalism as a word is very actively used in their writing in 1949 and further down. So the Calcutta if you're talking about the Calcutta group that is they disband the sort of in the early 1950s very similar to the progressive group actually. So there is a few some people, most of them join cultural institutions. Some of them go off to Brazil to Paris, so then an artist like Poritosh Sen for instance, and he leaves so it's a similar story. There's a way in which the social persists in their works. There's a different case, but there's a, there's, there is that either they are absorbed in cultural institutions, or they travel globally, but keep returning to the social, or some of them just to retreat, or continue to practice without really entering this course. So they would have engaged with internationalism, some of them, you know, reflected on let's say, you know, even the assassination of Patrisse Lumumba in the 1960s got engaged in a kind of affirmation solidarity in their works. But because their voices are not present in our discourse on narratives of modern art. It's very difficult to capture that. There is a way in which internationalism reproduces itself in the narrative, right. And the more I look at this, the more I feel one has to conceptualize the transnational in a different way, because there are multiple internationalisms at work. Modernism chooses to pick one kind. Right. So there is, I think more work needs to happen there, particularly for the 50s and 60s. So I didn't pursue the calculator group for the 50s and 60s really, because the book itself had already become pretty big. So I had to stop with them at some point, but pursuing them knowing what happened to them in the 50s and 60s I can see that there is a wider engagement with the international in their works, which didn't just mean abstraction or international modernism or Paris London, but a more kind of resonant association with third world modernisms. You know. So that's something, I guess. Sorry to butt in. I don't think we have any questions as yet. So if you want to carry on with the conversation, but I did have a question if I can quickly ask it. And it's largely about the afterlife of the famine and the ways it got represented and I'm thinking of this particular instant from the 1950s early 1950. In East Pakistan where there's an industrial and agricultural fair in Chittagong. And this is where, you know, a dancer like Google Jo3 performs for the first time and comes in conversation with artists like Zainu Labidin and Kamal Hassan. And then it probably reshapes his choreography or based on the Bengal famine called Lest We Forget, which he then brings to London in 1953 to perform for the Queen's Coronation Week in Ireland and in the UK. So I was thinking when you spoke about the nature of the archives and, you know, what we need to do to go beyond iconic figures and a possible way to bring these dialogues into see how we can write the history of the IPTA and go beyond it. We cannot focus on, you know, singular figures but also bring in these dialogues to see what kind of contributions they have in each other's work, I mean, be it choreography, be it art. So that's that's what I was thinking when I was listening to you. Well, thank you very much, Priyanka you should have been in the forms of the left volume. So I think you started working on this in 2016, which is when our conversation started, which is actually then about the trans border but also transnational ways in which post colonial left reshapes, echoes, transmutes the conversations around cultural activism. So in the second half of the book, I am actually very interested in what happens to the left's cultural movement after it's high noon right. At least I know what the story is everybody knows what the story is, but historically I'm more interested in what happens so they're the question of the afterlife is what I have called. I read it under post colonial displacements. So the displacement of an aesthetic solidarity what happens to that in the, you know, in this case on the post the example you're giving around dance sounds fascinating. I think that Abeddin and Kamrul Hasan and others continue that conversation in East Pakistan, of course, one has not looked at the archive completely for multiple reasons. I know, and I've written about this of course, Zeynul Abeddin and how the famine keeps haunting Zeynul Abeddin's works and I in that article called shadow lines. I talk about how the famine remains as a kind of shadow line and subtext and you know that continues to inform the way in which artists like Abeddin understand modernity. So in a way a post colonial modernity that is forever haunted by hunger. And I was following somebody's Facebook post the other day and they had given this little thing of Che Guevara visiting India in the 1950s, and he talks about how the question of freedom has to be tied to the question of hunger. So that's like a big rigging in my head unfortunately the book is written. But so in a way there's a way in which hunger and freedom speak to each other. And one sees artists like Bulbul Choudhury, artists like Abeddin and others, Shumna Thore in India, who then tie the question of aesthetic form to this precise question of afterlife, which echoes what Zaira says in the context of abstraction in 1970s that there is a way in which the 40s comes back via abstraction via a return. So that so that's very fascinating but it is very interesting to me to hear that lest we forget was brought to the Queen's coronation. You know Abeddin's work on the famine were displayed in 1948 at the Royal Academy. So there's a there is an undercurrent of hunger and freedom then. It does depend on us on what as historians what questions we are willing to ask so sometimes one just has to follow certain unspectacular non signpost tea let's say parts. And then you encounter these afterlives so the afterlives often do not come in evident signposts let's say so there is a wider textured history of haunting maybe. Yeah, or I guess a different kind of modernist use of history, very actively in the works of these artists, whether in dance or art or films. So there is a I guess then hunger produces its unique modernism. So that would be my gap thinking allowed kind of very fascinating we should talk about this. Thank you and I think we are close to our closing time. I want to thank both of you. First, for that fascinating presentation I'm still reading your book show that to finish it. But the dialogue between the two of you and I'll go back to Sarah's book The Progressive Revolution which I have a fascinating work. Thank you for your audience for joining us tonight. Our next talk is on the 14th of June. It's called Workers Libraries in Colonial Bombay and it's by Dr. Arun Kumar from University of Nottingham. So do join us at the same time 530pm. I look forward to seeing many of you here and thank you once again stay well stay safe. And yeah, thanks again. Well, thanks to Sarah. Thanks to all of you. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.