Is there a better time to be reviewing Emilia Terracciano’s Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India than in lockdown, with a virus wreaking apocalyptic havoc? Terracciano encapsulates the purpose of her book in a simple, yet pointed question – ‘Could it be that art moves in when politics fail?’

I read these words as the Covid-19 death count in the UK steadily mounts, as healthcare workers discover they do not have the protective equipment they need, as virus-induced care home fatalities are tragically being uncovered, and as black and minority ethnic communities in particular lose their lives. State-controlled politics has let us down: we are living through an ‘emergency’. This lends Terracciano’s argument on the disruptive, resistive and ethical value of art a peculiar resonance. Somehow, the 1943 Bengal Famine or the 1905 Partition of Bengal, or even the more literal ‘Emergency’ that Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced in 1975 – all of which the book discusses – seem closer: visceral, tangible crises rather than ones relegated to the past.

How do we navigate this past, Terracciano asks, in her attempt to ‘pervert the forward-marching logic of triumphal progress’? The book defamiliarises our chronological understanding of Indian history by deliberately adopting an anti-linear narrative. We begin with independent India in the 1970s and make our way backwards, into the trauma of the 1947 Partition of India, the world of the Bengal Famine in 1943, the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre of 1919 and Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal in 1905. Artists, Terracciano argues, are held together by their protest against oppression, and to understand the significance of their intervention, we need to unravel the neat, teleological narratives that attempt to reconstruct the past for us. 

Using Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic symbol of the angel of history, which he obtained from a watercolour by the artist Paul Klee, Terracciano makes the persuasive claim that what we might conventionally think of as ‘progress’ is often ‘catastrophe’, and it is art that tells us so; “to go backwards is to discover the contingency of politics”. At the same time, art, by dramatising forms of opposition to dominant narratives, reveals to us not only its tragic but also redemptive dimensions, where another future can be imagined. The artworks under discussion, are “entwining hope and despair” to “keep history open so that other emancipatory and utopian possibilities may emerge”.

In conceiving of emergency as ‘tragedy, violence and states of acceptance’, Terracciano draws our attention to visual forms of colonial/postcolonial resistance from India. These artworks ‘provincialise Europe’, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, legitimising their place within a global reworking of modernism. Little studied previously, the three Indian artists under consideration in the book – Nasreen Mohamedi, Sunil Janah and Gaganendranath Tagore – are brought together across different time periods in the twentieth century because of their affinities to international modernism and ability to break away from the colonial or national idiom in undercutting paradigms of power.

The book’s outstanding chapter focuses on the photographer Sunil Janah (1918–2012), and his work documenting the Second World War and the Bengal Famine. Janah, a member of the Communist Party of India, documented famine victims for People’s War, the Party newspaper, and his work was highly influential even during the famine years themselves. About 36,000 copies of one of Janah’s photographs, ‘Bengal Famine, Mother and Child on a Calcutta Pavement’, circulated via People’s War into Indian homes, bringing distant impoverishment and hunger into domestic, intimate spaces. 

Terracciano alerts us to the man-made conditions that led to the Bengal Famine with its three million dead – colonial wartime policies of resource extraction coupled with Churchill’s overt racism and refusal to accept food aid. As a context to examine Janah’s “affective technologies”, she analyses Bengal’s long history of hunger in the nineteenth century and its documentation by British photographers such as Willoughby Wallace Hooper, contrasting his visual complicity in the slow death of starving bodies alongside the more humane aesthetic of A.T.W. Penn. Gandhi’s performative hunger as an act of political resistance, on one hand, and the “famine chic” of fashion photographer on a wartime commission, Cecil Beaton, on the other, highlight different national and imperial propagandist impulses against which Janah’s work is especially resonant. 

Terracciano’s analysis, supplemented by references to Communist artists Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Zainul Abedin’s famine sketches, argues that these images resulted in “one of the most compelling visual attempts to create and mobilise a mass public” during colonial rule. And the famine, she believes, continued to have an afterlife in Janah’s later photography. Following independence, Janah took up commissions to represent industrialisation in Nehruvian India and then documented idealised versions of tribal life. His artistic response to the famine seeped into both these disparate bodies of work. Terracciano argues that Janah never lost the “repeated desire to capture the fugitive in the moment of extinction, and to fix the ephemeral and transitory in a stable and stabilising image”.

While Janah developed a form of photojournalism during the famine, another marginalised Bengali artist, Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938), the focus of the book’s third chapter, drew upon European and Japanese modern art influences to critique colonial society and the pretensions of the colonised ‘babu’ or gentleman through sharp, grotesque and indigenous humour. Nephew of the renowned poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath remained aloof from the romantic pictorial depictions germinating from the Bengal School of Art during his time. These had developed out of a new aesthetic consciousness in Calcutta and Santiniketan in the early twentieth century, with the latter forming the site of Rabindranath’s radical experiments in anticolonial education. Gaganendranath, however, did not visually romanticise the past: his is an urban sensibility emanating from a “virtual cosmopolitanism” . To him, “civilisation is a joke (and a bad one)”. 

Terracciano analyses the conundrums of Gaganendranath’s life and legacy through three sets of prints, highlighting his responses to the 1905 Partition of Bengal, the post-Enlightenment values of English colonialism and the 1919 Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, where thousands of unarmed Indians were shot by colonial soldiers on British orders. Terracciano’s formal analysis is detailed and carefully observed in this chapter as she reveals how Gaganendranath’s prints become “sly allegories” and a “social whip”. For example, Gaganendranath’s print, ironically entitled ‘Peace Reigns in Punjab/Terribly Sympathetic’, created just after the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre had taken place, depicts the tyrannical colonial master as a repulsive ogre, ready to pursue terrified miniscule figures who are fleeing. Again, if for Homi Bhabha, colonial “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace”, Terracciano analyses how, for Gaganendranath, mimicry itself has no empowering value – human beings who ape their colonial masters are simply vulgar and objects of ridicule. 

It is not only the structures of colonialism that Gaganendranath derides; the corruption inherent in indigenous caste and patriarchal structures receives equal scrutiny and derision. The watercolour entitled ‘Imperishable Sacredness of a Brahmin’ from the pamphlet The Realm of the Absurd (1917), for instance, depicts a Brahmin priest with four arms, corpulent and repellent, guzzling rice wine into his vast, dribbling mouth. Cradled in his left arm is a diminutive woman holding a hookah or smoking pipe. Terracciano notes Gaganendranath’s pronounced sympathy for women, his artwork repeatedly questioning why female subordination needs to form part of the Indian nationalist agenda. She convincingly concludes that the artist’s experiments with satire and caricature cumulatively generate “a release of explosive tension under colonialism”, formally expressed as a series of “graphic screams”.

Before assessing the contributions of these two male artists from Bengal, Terracciano’s book begins by studying the work of north Indian female painter Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990). Indian and Pakistani nationhood, with its dark underbelly of Partition violence, followed by the coercive methods imposed by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency (1975–77), are discussed in the first chapter through Mohamedi’s non-figurative abstract art. Terracciano explores the myriad influences on Mohamedi’s style – silence, nomadism, the landscape of the desert and a lifelong obsession with the literature of Albert Camus. This form of abstraction, to Terracciano, defies classification – are Mohamedi’s “fugitive lines” paintings or drawings, writing or images? An understanding of Sufism, an attraction to European modernist practices and an appreciation of Arab calligraphy fuse together in this artist’s work, in her “poetics of refusal”. Mohamedi, in Terracciano’s words, “maximised the minimal in her graphic movements, tracing line after line on paper with quiet, resolute compulsion”. 

Mohamedi’s work remained determinedly abstract at a time when her friend and art critic Geeta Kapur was asserting the need for figurative practice in India. But how did such abstract practices respond to the politics of the time? Terracciano argues that Mohamedi’s artworks “resist classification and narrative capture” and, drawing from the experiences of nationhood and Partition, generate “powerful forms of (un)belonging and politics”.

What will the artistic responses to our own ‘emergency’ be? Will they emerge just as defiant, resolute, sardonic and poignant as the photographs of Janah, the prints of Gaganendranath and the abstract lines of Mohamedi? However, rather than the future, Art and Emergency locates its message of resilience in an uncharted past. According to Terraciano, “There is no danger of turning memory into a disempowering, melancholic activity: the danger lies in forgetting”. The book ensures that we do not forget, that we keep the utopian possibilities of history open through art.