Paper Trails

"India is a nation of conflicting realities, where the old and the new, the traditional and modern regularly coexist. Visual narratives are bital resources in telling stories and facilitating communication. Here, the artists are concerned not solely with telling their own tales but also with exploring what it means to live in a nation steeped in tradition. Within the context of modern and contemporary India, works on paper offered artists a way of cultivating transnational modernist expression while continuing to explore the potential of a medium that had deeper roots in older artistic traditions native to the subcontinent. This volume features over 100 watercolors, drawings, etchings, sketches and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, born primarily before the 1950s and who came of age in the decades directly following Independence in 1947. These artists span the transition from colonial to post-colonial India, embracing both realis