Third Text

11 June 2025

Dilpreet Bhullar

The opening image to the introduction of How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History, and Religion in South Asia composes a scene from a protest site led by all women at Shaheen Bagh, a small neighbourhood on the border of Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi. This protest against the discriminatory amendment in the Citizenship Act of the Indian Constitution, put into force by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2019, was hailed as one of the strongest resistance movements in the recent history of democratic India. The incriminatory redraft of the act bars the naturalisation of Muslim immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, notwithstanding claims of religious persecution in their countries of origin. The editors mention how the narrow lanes of Shaheen Bagh turned into ‘both a site of contestation and experiments in democratic practices’ of arts – in the form of installations, murals, poetry and posters – by artists, activists and students, as a fiery display of solidarity extended towards the protestors. The political aestheticisation of arts articulated resistance against the arbitrary amendment of the Citizenship Act. On sifting through the annals of postcolonial history of India, this assertion is seen to be perpetually nurtured on the ‘space of negotiation instead of resolution’ (p 9).

Paper boats in the shape of a heart at the Shaheen Bagh protests, New Delhi, 15 January 2020, image in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, reproduced under the Creative Commons Licence

The term ‘How’ in the title of the book indicates an inquiry into the means by which – or the conditions under which – we define art as secular. The explicit inquisitiveness of the title forces the editor to map the tenets – politics, history and religion – that set the readers on the course of the critical enquiry: whether art can cohabit with the secular on the same terrain. Recurrent events in post-Partition India have diluted the promise of unity in diversity, and have served to deepen religion-based polarity. The same reason was adopted by the British imperialist power in the shape of its partisan policy: divide and rule. Its (d)evolution determined the creation of the Radcliffe Line, the borderline contouring the nationhood of India and Pakistan in 1947 – a parting scarf left by British colonialism on modern history as a marker of the end of the British presence in the Indian subcontinent.

Seventy-eight years after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, ‘secular’ remains a contested term. The 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya not only dismantled the edifice on which the idea of India stood, but also threatened the integrity of the disciplines of history, art history and archaeology. Subsequently, it reoriented the pressing practices of ‘state policy, political ideology and fields of professional knowledge and expertise’ (p 7), which are the points for registering the notion of the secular. With thirteen chapters by authors of different generations – divided into four sections titled ‘Secularity and its Art’, ‘Boundaries of Secular Nationalism’, ‘Art and its Gods’ and ‘Architectures of Devotion’ – How Secular is Art? recurrently underscores by what means the theorists draw attention to the ‘secular’ as an ‘epistemic category’ distinct from the ‘political doctrine’ of secularism, and that secularisation is a process-oriented practice focused on the ‘socio-cultural transformation of thought, belief and lifestyle’ (p 10). This triadic relationship illuminates that the question of ‘how secular is art’ dovetails with the question of ‘how secular are the modern nation-states of the subcontinent’ (p 9).

Between the publication year of the book (2023) and the symposium it was inspired by, ^[1] the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, reinvigorated the question of what leads art to be secular, beginning from the shadows of the history of postcolonialism to the foreground of global modernity in India. The opening chapter of the first section – ‘Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis’ by Akeel Bilgrami – complicates the debate of the secular by the act of introducing the term ‘pluralism’. Bilgrami mentions the infamous case of self-imposed exile by M F Husain as a protest against the vilification – in terms of intolerance and accusations of vulgarity – he received for his nude painting of Saraswati and Bharat Mata. Unlike in the West, where secularism thrives on the understanding of separation between church and state, the ‘influence of religion on art and the engagement by art’ (p 39) continues to have agency over the art practitioners of modern India. Bilgrami sharply juxtaposes Husain’s defamation case with Salman Rushdie’s critique of religious doctrine. If the former was an elderly homegrown artist who was reckoned to be an illustrious artist, the latter was ‘the elite Western, Islamophobic cosmopolitan’ (p 54). The case study of these two creative minds opens a space for Bilgrami to reposition the facets of secularism to the network of pluralism and multiculturalism. In his words, with the absence of ‘unself-conscious pluralism’, ‘self-conscious secularism’ does the damage control. Bilgrami refocuses the attention on the lexicographical display of multiculturalism instead of the glorified undertaking of secularism. The spatial constraints and temporal shifts for Bigrami are a means to redefine and expand the constitutional codes of secularism.

The women in the Shaheen Bagh protest worked to question the stale habits and disposition of democracy. The events of the political unrest of the time underwrite the female body as a site for scripting a systematic narrative on power, violence and remembrance. The interdisciplinary approach of the book emphasises the place of women in the framework of secularism. The intersectional discrimination against South Asian women on the basis of caste, gender and religion buttresses the act of scrutinising the layers of secularism in an effort to protect the rights of a citizen. Rummana Hussain’s body of art – consisting of installation art and performances – explores the possibilities of offering both secular and feminist critiques. Post the demolition of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodha in 1992, the duo of Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur attempt to transfer creative angst from the conventional medium of painting to a profounder medium of expression, ie installation art. Similarly, the installation art and deconstructed readymade objects in the hands of Hussain indicate what Karin Zitzewitz suggests in the chapter ‘Art and the Secular in Contemporary India’, that ‘artists either emphasized their power to reclassify ready-made objects as art or used acts of defacement in order to assert their power to destroy’ (p 68). The variable fragments in Hussain’s installations and performances are a commentary on the architectural elements of the mosque as well as on female body parts. Zitzewitz unpacks the question of secularism by citing the example of Hussain within the framework of art history and exhibition histories – an attempt to ‘connect Rummana’s assemblages and performances to everything from her own biography to transnational feminist debates, to the compromises of present exhibitionary practices’ (p 85).

Female bodies as a symbol of nationhood mapping, on which battles of jingoism are waged by the masculinist logic of ideological purity, are reinvigorated in the narrative to claim the land. The scientific cartographic borders become synonymous with the clinical exploitation of the skin as it bleeds, the perforations of borders signifying the marks of sutures that at once glorify and violate the deified female body. The faultlines of Indian modern history find their stark reality in the physical violence carried out in the aftermath of political upheaval: Partition riots, communal violence and public denigration. Or rather, the one-dimensional maps oversee running of the borders to affirm the numerical supremacy of rationale, borders that are cleaved through the female body as a terrain to assert discipline and possession in the nationalist imagination. Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharat Mata – an anthropomorphic form of the nation – draped in a saffron-shade saree, is touted as the first figure in the history of Indian national arts to embody the conflating ideas of spiritual devotion with territorial nationalism. The ghosts of postcoloniality haunt the materiality of the body, which bears the experiential crisis of external threat and political betrayal in the form of decapitation and terminal cancer, as read in the chapters by Vazira Zamindar and Zehra Jumabhoy, respectively.

From the coveted white cube space of art to public spaces of visual culture is where the idea of secularism in arts is open to witnessing, sensorial experience and popular consumption. Kajri Jain, in her chapter ‘In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History’, painstakingly offers insights into art objects which, when removed from the gallery circuit, oscillate between ‘temple effect’ and ‘museum effect’. Through the pages of art history, the patronage and collection of art has been inextricably linked to the autonomy of religion-based organisations. Jain takes recourse to the settler-colonial history to underscore how crosses are implanted on the lands of the other in order to claim a colonised right over it. The extension of this is seen in the proliferation of statues of Hindu Gods by private patrons – ‘the continuum between ancient temples and mass reproduced ones in domestic or public settings’ (p 107).

The second section of the book has Vazira Zamindar’s incisive chapter, ‘Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations and Their Histories’. The previous chapters explicitly establish that the soil of South Asia fails to eschew secularism, tied to religion, spirituality and the sacred, where art breathes. Zamindar’s chapter, dedicated to Syed Sadequain, looks at Sadequain’s works on the act of decapitation that were put on display at the Punjab Art Council in 1976, but which were attacked as ‘obscene’ and followed by a bomb blast that shut the exhibition down completely (p 134). The condemnation, in the face of the formation of Bangladesh as an independent nation from West Pakistan in 1971, suggested that the term ‘secular’ evades scrutiny, although it nonetheless irks the national question in South Asia (p 133). The exhausted lines of Sar-ba-kaf, the drawing which holds the attention of Zamindar, depicts a headless figure engaged in the act of sketching a self-portrait with one hand, while the other hand grasps a severed head – presumably his own. The representation of Bangladeshi Partition as a decapitation of the body politic thwarts the idea of Pakistan as a ‘Muslim homeland’. Zamindar refers to the journalist, I H Burney, who mentioned that the liberation of Bangladesh marked the end of ‘the “conceptual basis of the country ... that Pakistan was carved out as a haven of safety for Muslims”’ (p 134). The concluding words of the chapter encapsulate the exigency of the hour and the dogma of the book as ‘secular as an ordinary practice of dissent’ (p 150).

Sadequain, A Headless Figure Paints, from the book Drawings, August 1970, pen and ink on paper, courtesy of the Sadequain Foundation
 

The name Bangladesh is a portmanteau of Bangla (the Bengali language) and Desh (country). The conceptualisation of the nation as rooted in the Bangla language celebrated folk practices embedded in the cultural inheritance of the local population. The premises of Sanjukta Sunderason’s chapter ‘Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits’ lie within the decolonisation in Bangladesh. This was not limited to resistance against the political and religious hegemony of its West wing, Islamic Pakistan, it also involved the excavation of a visual and cultural language grounded in indigenous sensibilities. The catalyst for political consciousness – The Language Movement of 1952 – metamorphosed into the larger demand for national independence in the 1960s. As Naeem Mohaiemen cradles Bangladesh as ‘Midnight’s Third Child’ (2020) in his eponymous book, ^[2] the emergent nation sought to revitalise folk traditions and integrate them with social realism, thereby resisting a purely theological interpretation of Islam. Postcolonial modernity in this context must be understood not only in terms of geographical rupture but also through epistemic possibilities. Following the 1971 independence of East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh, the new nation began articulating an identity that transcended the ‘extra-religious’ concerns of language, political autonomy and economic rights (p 159). Artist Zainul Abedin played a crucial role in envisioning an alternative national imaginary within the confines of Islamic Pakistan. In this vision, secularism was not merely a constitutional provision but was deeply intertwined with linguistic and cultural expressions (p 178). A critical gap in institutional support for the arts prompted efforts to reconstruct and redefine aesthetic canons. From the institutionalisation of fine arts to the assimilation of folk art and living traditions, the task was to craft a modern artistic identity rooted in local knowledge systems and cultural memory.

The certainty of Geeta Kapur’s voice in the treatise dedicated to secularism finds home in Zehra Jumabhoy’s chapter, ‘Making Place for People?: Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and “Indian” Art’. To undermine the ascendancy of the BJP and their claim to Hindu Rashtra, Kapur finds the traditions of syncretic mysticism resisting decay. Within this situation, the teleological obsession of the majoritarian cultural agenda overrides spiritual secularism to find a visual representation in the works of Bhupen Khakar and Nalini Malani. The expanse of their body of work that, for Jumabhoy, ‘sits on the fence’ of secularism (p 216) is an ambivalent position to absorb the strident jingoism anchored by the majoritarian cultural agenda. She evokes Rummana Hussain, whose discovery of her terminal illness (cancer) coincided with the deteriorating state of India during the communal riots of 1992 in the city of her inhabitancy, Mumbai. Bhupen Khakhar’s work Gun in His Head, along with Hussain’s performative installation Is It What You Think?, gnaw at the idea of spiritual secularism, of which Kapur is a flag bearer, reflecting a kind of physiognomic transformation of the nation’s identity. Much like the symbolic decapitation of Sadequain – whose art embodied the spirit of secularism which once nourished the nation – the absence of it ensues a current of withering. Positioned within the broader context of postcolonial India, Jumabhoy’s chapter is less a dismissal of Kapur’s legacy than a call to rethink the frameworks through which Indian art has been theorised and historicised. By charting the shifts from secular nationalism to contemporary majoritarianism, Jumabhoy insists on what has been claimed by the editors of How Secular is Art? : intersectional approaches to art that are responsive to India’s changing political and cultural landscape.

If the discipline of art history and pedagogical exhibitionary practices excavate the making of secular arts, then Holly Shaffer, in her chapter ‘Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History’, surveys the image of the seventeenth-century Maratha king Chhatrapati Shivaji, which was incessantly recrafted by artists during the colonial period in India. This first chapter of the third section of the book traces the evolution of Shivaji’s portraits across archival documents and vernacular journals, devoid of any static visual representations but aligned with contemporary nationalist sentiments. Among this plethora of appropriations, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s strategic reconfiguration of Shivaji’s image extended to the elevation of Ganpati from a domestic deity into a potent symbol of public resistance. Tilak transformed the Ganpati festival into a collective event – a counterpoint to the public spectacle of Muharram – an event designed to fuel Hindu solidarity and deepen communal divisions. The art historical framework removes the lid from the strategies behind political mobilisation, where the manipulation of Shivaji’s portrait became a site of ideological contestation. The chapter turns crucial when read against the recent far-right campaign to desecrate Aurangzeb’s tomb in Maharashtra, following the play Rana Ragini Tara Rani (Battle Queen Tara Rani) based on the life of the queen who successfully resisted the expansion spree of Aurangzeb. This slippage from Hindu–Muslim sectarian division to the divisive policies of British imperialism immortalises the current-day social fabric of polarisation in Maharashtra, where Aurangzeb is cast as a foil to Shivaji’s enduring legacy as a venerated nationalist.

Drawing on fieldwork, visual analysis and historical context, in the chapter ‘Can a Festival of the Goddess Be Secular?’, Tapati Guha-Thakurta situates Durga Puja within the ‘dismantling of boundaries’ between aesthetics, urban spectacle and cultural capital to enable religious icons to function as public art. Guha-Thakurta finds the influence of corporate sponsorship, government patronage and mass media have worked to shape Durga Puja into a space of civic pride, political anxiety and regional identity, often divorced from its liturgical moorings. This question resonates with broader debates around representations of feminine divinity in Indian art and nationalism, particularly the contested figure of Bharat Mata. Guha-Thakurta’s exploration parallels M F Husain’s representations of goddesses – including his portrayals of Bharat Mata – a recurrent motif for fraught boundaries between artistic freedom, religious sentiment and the secular state in the book. Guha-Thakurta quotes Zitzewitz, whose proposition – that secularism is less about the definition but ‘more about “how it is practiced” in the circuit of modern and contemporary art’ (p 283) – finds a living example in the secular civic space of the Durga Puja, when Guha-Thakurta calls to catapult this celebration of art from the margins to the centre of public space as a way to ‘secure the secularity of its practice’ (p 291).

Echoing the sentiment of books with visual culture and how they enable and forge affective communities, Sumathi Ramaswamy’s ‘A Historian Among the Goddesses of Modern India’ demonstrates how language, territory and femininity are fused into a sacred form of Goddess to assert regional identity and cultural pride. Against the static theological category, the divine female constructions are in constant flux in accordance with the contemporary times. Through a detailed ground study in Tamil Nadu, Ramaswamy takes the readers onto this sojourn of the variegated representation of the Indian goddesses as they become emblematic of linguistic nationalism and regional pride. In doing so, she underlines the discipline of visual culture as a potent archive for modern historicity, setting the grounds of the sacred feminine through the lenses of regional anxiety and nationalist assertion.

Akin to the material experience of the body, the material existence of architecture is a minefield to be exploited relentlessly to address the enterprise of majoritarian hegemony. The Hindutva narrative adheres to the perception of Muslim rulers’ indiscriminate demolition of Hindu temples and the defacement of Hindu idols. Empirical records, not anecdotal raconteurs, suggest that acts of temple desecration, religious appropriation and the destruction of cultic images were neither novel nor exclusive, even prior to the advent of Islam in India. How Secular is Art? recurrently registers the demolition of the Babri Masjid as the dark communal blot that is the shadow of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. The promise to construct a Ram Mandir at the ruins of Babri Masjid, which saw electoral wins for the BJP for two consecutive terms in 2014 and 2019, was realised a year after the publication of this edited volume. The fallacy of emancipatory politics built on the debris of destruction finds conciliatory solace in the construction on the land of Ayodhya. The pivotal moment of sacrilege has transplanted, under the rule of the BJP, to the demolition of homes of members of the Muslim community as a performance enacted via a bulldozer in the micro-pockets of India for a broad spectacle in the public domain. The regulatory erasure of homes has displaced families under the garb of a misconstrued threat. The latest nail in the coffin is the Waqf amendment, which has been represented as a twisted tale of illegal encroachment and possession, further relegating Islamic law to an archaic rule in need of reformation. The lived reality of built structures in the last section of the book, when read within this context, buttresses the manifold practices put in place to roll out a singular architectural history. Antithetical to this, the presence of a spectrum of architectural edifices belonging to multiple sectarian rulers states the diversity of rulers who have defined the history of the Indian subcontinent.

Central to Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s chapter ‘Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of India’s Past’ is the contention that secularism, as practised in heritage conservation and academic art history, has imposed a liberal positivist logic onto Mughal monuments that fails to account for their historical entanglements with lived religious practices, emotive attachments and sacred geographies. To underline this, Kavuri-Bauer offers a compelling critique of the Taj Mahal. While officially presented as a symbol of India’s architectural excellence and cosmopolitan heritage, the Taj Mahal has been a contested site, wherein its Islamic origins and Mughal affiliations are exponentially marginalised. She discusses the rise of Hindu nationalist politics as exacerbating the disenchantment by reconfiguring the symbolic meanings of Mughal monuments to fit a majoritarian narrative. The academic disciplines she critiques privilege formalist and taxonomic approaches that perpetuate secular disenchantment determined by structure, style and chronology over the emotive, ritualistic and narrative dimensions of architectural sites. This privileging mirrors a broader epistemological orientation within secular modernity that seeks to configure enchanted ways of knowing as subordinate to purist knowledge systems. For Kavuri-Bauer, the architectural symbol of the mashrabiya, the latticed windows that are integral to Islamic monuments, is a metaphor that underlines the transtemporality of its cultural relevance. The 2017 exhibition ‘Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back’, ^[3] co-curated by the author of this chapter and Kathy Zarur, was a window onto contemporary artists who ‘develop attachments with distant geographies, histories and cultural stories’ (p 345). The enchantment with which the artists reimagined mashrabiya recalibrated the visceral affiliation, what Kavuri-Bauer alludes to as ‘the theories and methods of new materialism, puts people, texts, artworks and monuments on the same ontological footing and emphasizes not their differences but interdependencies’ (p 348). As an alternative to this reductive paradigm, Kavuri-Bauer advocates for a re-enchantment of Mughal architecture – a process that entails a reintegration of the emotional, spiritual and intersubjective dimensions of architectural experience. Re-enchantment, in her formulation, is not merely a nostalgic return to the past but a critical and reparative practice that challenges the epistemological limits of secular heritage discourse.

Samira Yamin, January 11, 2020, TIME Magazine, 26.4 x 20 cm, 2016–ongoing, courtesy of the artist and Patron Gallery, Chicago, photo courtesy of Patron Gallery

In her chapter ‘Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple’, Tamara Sears critically explores how the act of architectural reconstruction intersects with broader historical, political and cultural narratives. Focusing on the modern temple built in Gwalior between 1984 and 1988 by the industrialist Basant Kumar Birla, Sears examines in what way this structure – modelled on the thirteenth-century Sun Temple at Konark – functions not only as a religious monument but also as a symbolic expression of postcolonial identity, modernity and the legacy of medieval archaeology. Sears examines the Hindu rhetoric of universalisation through the representational forms of ‘sarvajanak mandir’ – the temple for all. The emulative gesture in the hands of Sears is the symbolic palimpsest hinting at both nationalist aspirations and civilisational lineage.

‘Rather than history it is the biography of the object that is significant’ (p 396), writes Kavita Singh in ‘For the Love of God: Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu’, the last chapter of the book. By foregrounding the agenda of ‘conservation as devotion’, espoused by the REACH Foundation towards the temple in Tamil Nadu, Singh illustrates an approach that is fundamentally not at odds with the temple’s ontological status in Hindu practices: a living, inhabited and ritually maintained space. The scientific minds behind REACH stand antithetical to the secularised clauses of conservation steered by the museums organisations and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The work under the helm of the REACH foundation intervenes in debates about secularism and heritage management by destabilising the presumed neutrality of state-led or expert-driven conservation regimes, particularly those influenced by colonial frameworks. In doing so, REACH translates the vision of Hindutva groups – an Indian landscape repopulated with living temples that are tended by the devout, with no interference from the state – (p 404) into reality. Within the intersecting frameworks of post-secular theory and critical heritage studies, the notion that an artefact reaches its highest cultural status through its classification as ‘art’ is no more the ultimate goal. The contemporary moment signals a shift wherein the primary concern is not merely the ‘monumentalisation’ of disused temples, but also the potential reversal of that process: the desecularisation and resacralisation of structures that have already been incorporated into secular heritage regimes. The pressing question, with which Singh signs off her chapter, and thereby the book, is not simply how secular art is but ‘when’ and for which brief moment was secularisation possible. This demands a reassessment of the epistemological boundaries between the sacred and the secular, particularly in the context of heritage practices, aesthetic valorisation and institutional regimes of cultural legitimation.

South Asia, as a terminological construct, rose to prominence in mid-twentieth century academic and geopolitical discourse, particularly following the aftermath of the Second World War, which was characterised by the period of decolonisation. The adoption of ‘South Asia’ over the more frequently utilised term ‘Indian subcontinent’ marked a critical epistemological shift in area studies: an epitome of regional and cultural implications. During British colonial rule, the region was often referred to as the Indian subcontinent, encompassing British India and adjacent territories such as Bhutan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Maldives, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. However, the decolonial invocation of ‘South Asia’ attempts to dislodge the colonial legacy that privileges India as the dominant civilisation referent in the region. The term shrouds a cultural inclusivity by encompassing a mosaic of languages, religions and socio-political traditions across the national boundaries of these states.

Having said that, this nomenclature reorientation is not a complete negation of the clouds of tension to elicit a plausible elucidation to the perpetual power of India. The invocation of ‘South Asia’ in the title of the book at once indexes the disproportionate quintessential history of a particular nation under the ambit of regional overview. Yet, the concentration of the major chapter on the specificity of the internal dynamics of India is disproportionate to the comparatively sparse discussion on the density of secular practices striving in the neighbouring nation states. India, the world’s largest democracy – and the pivotal nation in South Asia – is confronted by the foundational tensions between demos (the people) and ethnos (ethnic community). ^[4]  The secular terrain, posited to offer social security between the majority and minority communities, serves as a ground on which ethnic majoritarianism recalibrates the principles of citizenship to problematise the ideals of inclusion. As the book underlines, the art and architecture that stands against strident glorified voices on democratic ideals echo the power matrix of identity and appropriation. Consequently, the narrative of the book is a subtle pavement of a long road to reclamation of belonging by the nation states beyond the contours of India.

Lately, as political narratives, cultural spaces and social dialogues recede into skin-deep rhetoric, the urgency to write books on the theme of secularism has grown exponentially. Guha-Thakurta and Zamindar, with their incisive minds, have redirected the discourse from exemplary events to unobtrusive episodes that escape mainstream attention, even if they do not pertain to the entirety of South Asia but are broadly confined to India. The interdisciplinary framework gauges the searing scale of communalism: a corrosion of the Indian body politic. The visual world and the built environment are not disparate disciplines but map and mirror the frictions of the time. In other words, the inevitability of the interdisciplinary lens expands upon the intensity at which the arts, architecture and public discourse feed into each other. The veneer of art and architecture covers the scaffolding created by political and socio-cultural cross-struts, producing an oscillation effect like a compass needle. The disciplines are no longer passive peripheral tenants of the centre but active corollaries of political complicity, negotiation and resistance.

Editors’ note: The images included here are all reproduced in the book
 

How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History, and Religion in South Asia, edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, is published by Cambridge University Press, 2023, ISBN 1009215272

^[1]     ‘How Secular is Art? On the Art of Art History in South Asia’ was organised at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018

^[2]     See Naeem Mohaiemen, Midnight’s Third Child, Nokta, Dhaka, 2020

^[3]     ‘Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back’, curated by Kathy Zarur, Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Mark Johnson and Sharon Bliss, was at the San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery, February – March 2017.

^[4]     See Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006

Writer and researcher Dilpreet Bhullar shuttles between New Delhi and Mumbai, India. With an MPhil from the University of Delhi in Comparative Literature, she has been the recipient of the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellowship at Columbia University, New York, and the International Center For Advocates Against Discrimination Fellowship, New York. Her essays on identity politics, memory studies, representation of refugees and visual sociology are frequently published in leading books, journals and magazines. She is currently Managing Editor of the magazine TAKE on Art, dedicated to South Asian contemporary arts.