Fragile Inheritance

Saloni Mathur is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, and coeditor of No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia.

“This critical retake on the work of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram offers a deeply informed reading of their joint and separate works but also turns the biographical norm inside out, reading their lives as illuminations of their tempestuous times and not simply as cases or examples of larger processes. It will be read with keen interest by anyone who cares about the making of modern art worlds in places like India.” - Arjun Appadurai, Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University “Saloni Mathur's A Fragile Inheritance immerses the reader in the long march of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, leading figures of India's avant-garde in criticism and artistic practice. Against the background of the indescribable complexity of India's many languages, political parties, and aesthetic movements, Mathur traces parallel and intersecting careers with a brilliant sense of the improvisatory, provisional, and timely character of their numerous interventions over half a century. Renouncing any claim to survey the art of India, or to provide a progressive narrative of relentless novelty, Mathur provides an in-depth account of works, projects, ideas, and the situations in which they arose. Writing ‘alongside’ rather than ‘about’ the work of these two essential figures, Mathur offers a striking model of engaged critical practice in a project that is far from finished.” - W. J. T. Mitchell, author of (Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics) “Mathur’s condensation of two difficult-to-summarize careers is a remarkable achievement.... To return to Kapur and Sundaram is a radically generous and participatory act, an invitation to reimagine our limits by slowly going over things we thought we were ready to leave behind."- Meghaa Ballakrishnen (CAA Reviews) "This densely written book encounters not only fundamental questions of art and its preservation, but also of writing about art, and itself can be seen as an innovative example of the latter. Further, it addresses the sociocultural and political embedding of art in the postcolonial context, touching also upon ethical questions. Therefore, this book is by far not only relevant for readers who want to know about or deal with Kapur and Sundaram." - Maja Jerrentrup (South Asia Research) Rich and luminous…. A Fragile Inheritance is an essential, thoughtful and riveting work that asks the addressee to co-participate in the making of its meaning. - Emilia Terracciano (Third Text) "Quite unlike any other study of the art of modern and contemporary South Asia, A Fragile Inheritance is a deeply informative work that stresses the intellectual and political stakes of modern art practice and its discourse in India and the Global South.… Mathur's analysis …, superbly informed by methodological insights and comparative work by other international artists, are among the most accomplished readings of modern art from South Asia, and can be easily assigned as stand-alone essays in undergraduate and graduate university syllabi." - Iftikhar Dadi (Oxford Art Journal)

• Preface  viiIntroduction: Radical Stakes  11. Earthly Ecologies  402. The Edifice Complex  723. The World, the Art, and the Critic  964. Urban Economies  129Epilogue: Late Styles  160Notes  185Bibliography  211Index  225