B.Tech

This Subject Includes

• Course No: HS 104
• Course: B.Tech
• Semester: IV
• Title: Visualizing Postcolonial India: Histories of Aesthetic and Political Concer
• Stream: History

• Preamble / Objectives (Optional): This course will look into the ways in which visuality shaped specific ideas of India in the postcolonial period. These ideas of India manifested in a disparate array of spaces, ranging from international art movements to city planning to public religiosity. Indeed, visual discourses were often the site for negotiating and imagining Indian identities. The course will enquire into elite and popular cultures and their points of intersections to think about the centrality of visual forms in imagining the nation.

  Course Content/ Syllabus

  Modernism: Bombay Progressive, The Calcutta Group; Visualizing industrial India: Sunil Janah, Ahmed Ali; Visuality and the mass publics: Newspapers & magazines, cinema; City planning: Lutyens’ Delhi, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh; Art and Activism: Chittaprosad , The Sahmat Collective; Anxiety of images: propaganda, censorship; Visual culture of electoral politics: M.G. Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu, Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh; Religion and popular visual culture: Calendar art, Ram Janmabhumi Movement

  Books (In case UG compulsory courses, please give it as “Text books” and “Reference books”. Otherwise give it as “References”. Texts: (Format: Authors, Book Title in Italics font, Volume/Series, Edition Number, Publisher, Year.)

  1.

  2.

  References: (Format: Authors, Book Title in Italics font, Volume/Series, Edition Number, Publisher, Year.)

  1. Kaur, Raminder and William Mazzarella, Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, Indiana University Press, 2009.

  2. Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Duke University Press, 2007.

  3. Brown, Rebecca M., Art For a Modern India, 1947-1980, Duke University Press, 2009.

  4. Moss, Jessica and Ram Rahman, The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989, Smart Museum Of Art, University of Chicago, 2013

  5. Pandian, M.S.S., The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran In Film And Politics, Los Angeles, London, SAGE Publications, 2015.