‘A secret of their own country’: Or,how Indian nationalism made itself irrefutable

Abstract

In the 1920s, W.E. Gladstone Solomon, the nationalist sympathising director of Bombay's J.J. School of Art, provided a remarkable description of that institution's blossoming hybridity: ‘… the Western buildings in which different departments of the School are housed almost seem, to knowledgeable eyes, to have been draped by the hands of their Indian students with invisible “saris” … in the depths of their dark eyes are the fires of enlightenment, but it is a Secret of their own Country that they are engaged in unravelling in the School of Art’. This ‘partialisation’ and failure of the ‘redemptive’ colonial aesthetic project forms the core of this article which will attempt to place the interventions of the colonial state alongside enduring practices of vision and a radically reconfigured political context, all of which have helped determine the nature of modern India's popular visual archive.