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1. C H A P T E R 7
Allegorizing Modernism:
J. Swaminathan and the Question of
Uneven Development in Art
SANDIP K. LUIS
“Time is denuded of its progressional ballast: it goes haywire.”
—J. SWAMINATHAN
“Even the ahistorical must be historically explained”
—FREDRIC JAMESON
There is little wonder as to why Comparative Studies could
be seen as an exemplary modern discipline, as the discursive
category of the ‘modern’ itself is profoundly comparative. But
if the discipline’s very conditions of possibility are provided
by modernity, then on what ground can we inhabit it when
modernity’s foundational premises—above all, the narratives
of ‘progress’ and ‘development’—are challenged? It is this
principal problem that serves to be the background of this essay
in which I will try to demonstrate how fruitful a comparative
approach could be when it does not shy away from using the
Marxist category of ‘uneven development’ and taking the
question of social hierarchy on board. Focusing on the writings
of J. Swaminathan (1928-1994), a leading modernist artist-critic
and institution builder from India, through the theoretical
and historical perspectives offered in the discipline of Marxist
From 'Rethinking Comparative Aesthetics in a Contemporary Frame', edited by R.N. Misra and
Parul Dave-Mukherji, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2019

2. 140 Sandip K. Luis
historiography in general and Fredric Jameson’s writings
on modernism in particular, I will also briefly reevaluate the
existing historicization of Indian modernism.
AclarificationformyselectionofSwaminathanandJamesonis
necessarysincetheirintellectualcontributionsaregenerallyheld
under suspicion for certain legitimate reasons. Swaminathan’s
writings, like his paintings, are burdened with esoteric allusions,
flamboyant polemic and blatant ahistoricism. But one should
see these features in his writings as manifestation of a “clever”
post-colonial intellect (Kapur, 1978: 196) confronted by a unique
historical challenge. And keeping in mind the unique cultural
capital secured by Swaminathan through his upper class and
caste identities and privileged social connections, any serious
study of modernism in India will not be complete without
examining the intellectual and institutional interventions made
by him. It is with these realizations that I resort to a comparative
approach whereby Swaminathan’s idiosyncratic writings could
be made legible not by comparing with similar obscurantist
ideologues from other cultural contexts, but by placing the
artist-critic within the peculiar historical context of India’s
‘belated modernism’ which, from its inception, was frequently
caught in a ‘comparativist’ discourse both inside and outside the
country (what I have in mind is modernism’s obsessive and often
problematic preoccupation with the discursive binaries like ‘the
East’ and ‘the West’, ‘the primitive’ and ‘the civilized’ and more
importantly, ‘the underdeveloped’ and ‘the developed’).
A reading of Swaminathan’s self-conscious anti-historicism
throughJameson’sstringenthistoricismisclearlyacontradictory
endeavor. Jameson is already infamous in the postcolonial
camp not only for his controversial statement that ‘all third-
world texts are necessarily national allegories’ (Jameson, 1986;
cf. Ahmad, 1987), but also for his argument that there is no
serious ‘alternative modernity’ other than socialism (2002:12). A
distinguished figure in the discipline of Comparative Literature
for his uncompromising criticality and socialist commitments,

3. Allegorizing Modernism 141
Jameson’s historicist arguments demand a more thorough
analysis. For this reason, I find the polemical and anti-historicist
picturing of cultural binaries in the writings of Swaminathan—
who himself was a disillusioned communist, later turned into
a ‘communitarian anarchist’—as an appropriate ground for
discussing Jameson’s historicism and its relevance in explaining
what modernism means in India.
Between Two Modernisms
In When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice
in India, art critic Geeta Kapur (2001) delineates a narrative plot
of Indian modernism of the decades 1960-80 in order to show
that, in her words, “how the Parisian aesthetic was surmounted
by the hegemonic American notions of freedom in the matter
of world culture, how this was questioned by the liberationist
rhetoric of the Latin world, and how all this contributed to
form a distinct (rather than derivative) entity called modern
Indian art” (Kapur, 2001:307). Remaining within Kapur’s plot
of multiple modernisms but by offering a counter-narrative
against her version (which will be discussed below), I find
that there is a need to delineate a different picture of Indian
modernism based on the ‘centre-periphery model’ which she
rejects (for its unabashed ‘economism’ and inability to give a
separate identity to the second-world other than within an
overarchingly capitalist economy). Given that even the most
sophisticated Marxist cultural analyses do not wish to do away
with ‘the final determinant’ status of ‘the economic’ and there
have already been many reassessments within Marxism about
the ‘socialist claims’ of the second-world, there is a need to
rethink Kapur’s methodological ‘partisanship’ which in the final
reading appears to be not so much Marxist as it is Postcolonialist
or even Postmodernist (cf. San Juan, 2002). But what should be
an alternative methodology in such an approach? Or should
there be one?

4. 142 Sandip K. Luis
Despite the increased fluidity and interpenetration of the old
metaphors of geopolitical unevenness, the spatial markers such
as “core” and “periphery” (cf. Wallerstein, 1976) have once again
been found to be useful by the literary critics and historians
like Franco Moretti (1995) and Fredric Jameson (1986), for the
keen attention that such an approach would give to the pressing
questions of underdevelopment and rising inequality in a slowly
changing global economy. Based on their works, and among
them Jameson’s writings on modernism in particular, I will look
into the hierarchized multiplicity of modernism—a hierarchy
that is both historical and geopolitical—for it is this issue that
serves to be the central problematic in the writings of any post-
colonial intellectual, be it J. Swaminathan or Geeta Kapur, in
spite of his or her unwillingness to take this issue on board.1
Jagdish Swaminathan, a Tamil brahmin born and brought
up in Shimla, came to the Indian art-scene as a critic in the late
1950s, following a long political career as a member of different
leftist organizations like the Congress Socialist Party—until
the national independence and the Communist Party of India
(with the latter he cooperated until 1962, though by 1953 he
had relinquished his Party membership). In 1963, Swaminathan
exhibited his paintings in the ‘Group 1890’ exhibition, in which
he also performed as its key ideologue. The Group 1890 could be
seen as the first artist collective in India which, in Swaminathan’s
words, “to be formed not on any regional or other considerations
but on the basis of ideological affinity.” What made the collective
distinctive in its time was not only its unmatched success in
securingasignificantculturalcapital—theshowwasinaugurated
by the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the catalogue essay
was written by the renowned poet, Octavio Paz, then Mexican
Ambassador to India. Equally noteworthy was their vociferous
negation of all existing ideologies in art—unlike the earlier ones
which ideologically parted with one or another artistic styles
then available—for an obscurantist and subjectivist aesthetic
experience. According to the manifesto of the Group 1890,
charted mainly by Swaminathan,

5. Allegorizing Modernism 143
“From its early beginnings in the vulgar naturalism of Raja Ravi Varma
and the pastoral idealism of the Bengal school, down through the hybrid
mannerisms resulting from the imposition of concepts evolved by
successive movements in modern European art on classical, miniature and
folk styles to the flight into ‘abstraction’ in the name of cosmopolitanism,
tortured alternately by memories of a glorious past born out of a sense
of futility in the face of a dynamic present and the urge to catch up with
the times so as to merit recognition, modern Indian art by and large has
been inhibited by the self-defeating purposiveness of its attempts at
establishing an identity. [...] To us creative expression is not the search for,
but the unfolding of personality. A work of art is [...] unique and sufficient
to itself, palpable in its reality and generating its own life.”
Going by the assumption that had this manifesto repudiated
its idiosyncratic idea of “creative expression” as well as the
lingering sense of a national identity, its negativity would have
been matched only by that of the ‘historical avant-gardes’
in Europe, among them Dada in particular—for it cannot be
simply accidental that both Paz and Swaminathan, while placing
themselves outside the canon of western art history, had a high
opinion about Marcel Duchamp.2
Holding over a discussion of
this intriguing post-colonial position located on the verges of
nationalism and avant-gardism, let me first address the
larger discursive conjuncture within which Swaminathan’s
polemic negativity could be made sense of.
Taking cue from Serge Guilbaut’s classic study, How New
York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), Fredric Jameson notes
that modernism as it is often discussed today with reference
to the American art critic Clement Greenberg, is an “ideology
of modernism” or an institutionalized modernism than
“modernism proper” (Jameson, 2002: 150). That this ‘New York
School’ centered modernism “was not contemporaneous with
the modern movement itself”, for it was “a belated product, and
essentially an invention and an innovation of the years following
World War II” (Jameson, 2002: 164). Based on this observation,
Jameson periodizes western modernism into two: the pre-Cold-
War ‘high’ or ‘classical modernism’ (appellations which he

6. 144 Sandip K. Luis
admits to be problematic), and the post-Second World War ‘late
modernism’ or certain “ideology of modernism” to be concluded
by “the [19]60s” (with the arrival of postmodernism).3
According
to Jameson, there are two major features that differentiate
these modernisms from each other. Firstly, it is regarding
their mutually opposed relationship with the bourgeois public
sphere. Whereas the high or the classical modernists “know no
identifiablepublic”andsought“supportfromwhereverpossible,
rather than in the market”, and remained “in the absence of any
determinate social status or function” (Jameson, 2002: 199); the
late modernists were essentially a “middle-brow type” (Jameson,
2002: 209-210) not only for the reason that they looked upon
the now canonized models of high modernism, but also for the
reason that by the time of reaching “the 60s”, ‘the great divide’
between high art and mass culture had already started to erode
(Huyssen, 1986)—comparing the “degenerated” abstractions of
Kandinksy with the much publicized sentimentality in Mark
Rothko, remember the stories of viewers crying in front of his
paintings, will explain these points at once.4
Secondly, both the modernisms are different from each other
on the basis of the respective ‘social formations’ within which
they develop. Whereas the late modernism, being an ideological
product of Cold War, was “a retreat from political alternatives to
the rule of capital” (Prendergast, 2003: 104) and complicit with
“the end of a whole era of social transformations and indeed
of Utopian desires and anticipations” (Jameson, 2002:165), the
classical or the high modernism belonged to “‘a transitional era’
poised between ‘two distinct worlds’, those of the traditional,
agricultural and peasant order, and the new machine based
industrialism”, where the latter “erupts without warning into
the old pastoral and feudal landscape” (Jameson, 2002: 143).
Perry Anderson (1998), in his detailed commentary on Jameson,
has laid out this umbilical cord between the classical modernism
and the Marxist dictum of “combined and uneven development”
more emphatically.5
In Anderson’s words, “the origins of
modernism” in Europe could be best understood,

7. Allegorizing Modernism 145
“as the outcome of a field of force triangulated by three coordinates: an
economy and society still only semi-industrial, in which the ruling order
remained to a significant extent agrarian or aristocratic; a technology
of dramatic interventions, whose impact was still fresh or incipient; and
an open political horizon, in which revolutionary upheavals of one kind
or another against the prevailing order were widely expected or feared.
In the space so bounded, a wide variety of artistic innovations could
explode—[...] some quarrying classical memory or patrician styles, others
drawn to a poetics of the new machinery, yet others fired by visions of
social upheaval; but none at peace with the market as the organizing
principle of a modern culture—in that sense, virtually without exception
anti-bourgeois” (Anderson, 1998:81)
What interests us here is that working as a leftist journalist
focusing on international relations before coming to art,6
Swaminathan was exceptionally sensitive to the above discussed
phenomenon of ‘uneven development’ in the context of Indian
art and culture. As early as 1967, in a short essay titled ‘Art,
Modern or Contemporary?’, he argues that:
“The bane of having been born in a technologically backward society would
seem to be the necessity of living through second-hand experiences. [...]
The fact that Malevich was a Russian and Picasso was a Spaniard, from two
industrially backward countries of Europe at that time, did not prelude
them from making significant contributions to the European movement.
It was the revolt against the slavish aping of the Anglophiles and the
Francophiles that made the great effervescence in literature and art in
pre-Revolutionary Russia possible. It is the realisation that freedom is not
conformity to so-called historic inevitability that has given the artist his
individuality [...].” ([1967a] 1995:15)
Swaminathan here resonates with the arguments made by
Jameson and Anderson that the modern European culture has
not to be seen as a monolithic entity, but as internally split
into the “semi-peripheral” and “core” countries of a “modern
world-system” (Wallerstein’s phrases). Indeed, one could
even argue that the credit for the revolutionary breaks in the
western modernism goes mainly to the artists from the semi-
peripheral countries; in art Picasso, in literature Joyce, and in
film Eisenstein. Such reinterpretations of modernism as the

8. 146 Sandip K. Luis
expression of an unevenly developed society than that of a fully
developed one explicitly challenges the cultural monopoly of the
core-countries, among them the US in particular—for the latter’s
nationalist agenda to fabricate a new narrative of modernity
wherein the Zeitgeist of western civilization will finally migrate
to America from its old European landscapes (a geopolitical
possibility already predicted by Hegel). Manufactured from a
one-dimensional society overtly benefited from the two world-
wars, the late modernism now appears to be simply incongruent
with the semi-peripheral reality of high modernism.
When it comes to Swamintathan’s thinking, such an
understanding of the bifurcated nature of western modernism
complemented by his intellectual ally Octavio Paz’s famous
claim “we are contemporaries of all mankind” ([1961]1994:194)
had crucial implications. For it suggested that however
belated might be modernism in a post-colonial or ‘third-world’
context, it is not as ‘late’ as the Cold War late modernism since
there is an ‘ideological privilege’ for the former to assume
an ‘imagined contemporaneity’ with the historical high
modernism—as Swaminathan used to polemicize, “[Paul] Klee,
the contemporary”7
—on the ground of a shared experience
of combined and uneven development.8
Moreover, the real
chronological belatedness of the post-colonial intellectual offers
him a possibility to leapfrog the pitfalls of high modernism so
that, unlike the New York-modernists, a more complex and
effective modernist aesthetic could be put forward. In the
final analysis, it is this unique historical opportunity opened
up by the post-colonial India’s semi-peripheral location that
fundamentally differentiates Swaminathan from the first-world
late-modernists,inspiteoftheirchronologicalcontemporaneity.9
But one should not be overwhelmed by this soothing
interpretation of India’s belated modernism at any case. It
should also be noted that the de facto position available for the
‘third-world’ modernists like Swaminathan was that of different
‘ideologies of modernism’ produced from the core-countries.

9. Allegorizing Modernism 147
This is for the reason that globally overridden by the Cold
War politics, the end of ‘the Sixties’ had already signalled the
demise of old modernist revolutionary ideals along with the
political optimism around the ‘Third-World,’ and thereby, the
exceptional difficulty for exploiting the fortuitous post-colonial
belatedness discussed above.10
Faced by these profound historical contradictions, perhaps
embarrassed by them, we find Swaminathan desperately
resorting to obscure ideas and stupefying polemics with a “self-
mystification.”11
His article ‘The New Promise’, written in 1967
soon after Clement Greenberg’s visit to India as part of the
infamous ‘New American Painting’ exhibition, will explain this
point.
Modernism in India
Three aspects make Swaminathan’s ‘The New Promise’ ([1967b]
1995) interesting for a historian of Indian modernism. Foremost
among them is his resentment towards the US-sponsored
propagation of abstract art in India.12
Swaminathan argues
that the Greenbergian teleology of art history—a narrative of
aesthetic critique of representation developing into a non-
representational aesthetic—is fundamentally flawed for the
critic’s “unjustified emphasis on techniques” of pictorial
“construction” and disregard for the element of “creation” in
art (Swaminathan, 1995: 19).
Secondly, the above polemic opposition between “construc-
tion” and “creation” is further elaborated in Swaminathan’s
conviction that the traditional purpose of Indian art is “not to
represent reality or even analyze it, but to create that para-
natural image which inspires man to contend with reality”
(20). Here Swaminathan introduces, for the first time, his infa-
mous signature-idea the “Numenous” image (a term borrowed
from Philip Rawson, then Keeper of the Gulbenkian Museum of
Oriental Art, London) by which he obscurely suggests something

10. 148 Sandip K. Luis
akin to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura.” Playing on the
‘numen/noumenon’ pun in another essay written in the same
year, Swaminathan says that the numinous image “will re-
trieve [sic] painting from the rule of analytic blind alley,
and its palpable “presence” will remove painting from the
realm of drawing room decoration to its fundamental cult-
function” (Swaminathan, [1967c] 1995: 21).
Last but not the least, an important feature in Swaminathan’s
aesthetics during penning down ‘The New Promise’ was its
problematic racialism:13
“There is something in the vast complex
of our racial psyche, from the austere, crystalline poetry of
our Vedic forbears to the awesome pantheon of gods and
demons, from the abstract metaphysics of Hindu thought to
the threatening forms of folk ritual, that bears its head against
the wall of the pseudoscience that our so-called intelligentsia
has inherited from modern Western culture” ([1967b]1995:20).
Elsewhere Swaminathan dares to specify this racial type: “[The]
new art cannot be a departure. It has to be a beginning. [...] It
requires, above all, that the artist stands in front of the canvas as
the early Aryan stood facing the morning sun.” (Swaminathan,
[1967c] 1995:23)
A fetishism of auratic art and a regressive racialism; on
what ground can these problematic ideas be understood, if not
justified, as the manifestation of a unique historical
conjuncture that Swaminathan was addressing? In order to
answer this, what we first need is an adequate historicization
of modernism in India.
In 1991, giving a brief review of Peter Bürger’s Theory of Avant-
Garde (1987), artist Vivan Sundaram argued as follows:
“I would like to come to this problem of the lack of any concept of art
as an institution. Peter Burger [...] talking about this historical concept
thrown up by capitalism, of art as an institution with the productive and
distributive processes that go into it, suggests this to be an inevitable
concomitant of the rationality promised by bourgeois development. [...]
Why has this not happened in India? Everything takes place at informal

11. Allegorizing Modernism 149
and ad hoc levels, and the complete absence of a cultural policy leads us
to the question of what the state’s notion of cultural production [...]. If
the modes of instant usage, of mass consumption, have come to stand
in for this cultural policy—modern art is anyway not easily susceptible
to such consumption—then what we are witnessing is a so-called
incomplete bourgeois system [...]” (Sundaram, 1991:35)
Though Sundaram might be right in his description, if not
analysis, of the pre-liberalisation Indian art scene, he is wrong in
understanding Bürger’s concept of ‘the institution of art,’ for it
hasless to do with state patronage or a full blown art market as
with a specific mode of artistic production and distribution
centered on the idea of ‘art’s autonomy’ which is often
exemplified in the claim ‘art for art’s sake.’14
A clarification of
this point is of utmost importance since there is a need to undo
certain ‘fetishization of the West’ (Lazarus 2002) prevalent still
in the Indian academia that the European modernism was
essentially a ‘revolutionary’ affair, matching only the
historical industrial revolution,15
and modernism in India has
basically been “reformist”, that is to say, in Geeta Kapur’s
phrases, “a modernism without avant-garde” (Kapur,
2001:202,288). Not only is this occidentalist myth proven to be
wrong in our discussion of Fredric Jameson and Perry
Anderson, but also that as early as 1960s, an institution of art
premised on art’s ‘autonomy’ has to be seen as already developed
in India. What I have in mind is the manifesto of Group 1890,
quoted above, where all the ingredients for satisfying Bürger’s
theory—an ‘organicist’ conception of artwork, artist as ‘genius’,
the need for a ‘contemplative immersion’ in the ‘auratic’, read
“luminous”, artwork and so on16
—are met but with one subtle
anomaly—an ambiguously lingering identification with ‘the
nation.’ (To get a quick sense of its irony, an anecdote: “In a New
Year card from 1969, artist Gulammohammed Sheikh created
a photomontage of Swaminathan with his right arm extended,
holding the Indian flag, and queries ‘‘What else did you do in Sao
Paulo?’’” The artist was invited to be part of the international
jury for the 10th
Sao Paulo Biennial.17
) Elsewhere, we also see that

12. 150 Sandip K. Luis
(Swaminathan, [1968] 1980: 11), in spite of all his modernism,
seems to be unpersuaded by its individualism, and mourns a
“timeless capacity for communion” which was lost with the
arrival of modernity. Faced by this question, he even moves
away from the ‘organicist’ model of art discussed by Bürger, by
entertaining the possibility of considering artwork as a mere
“catalyst”, “agent” or “prop” (his terms) for realising communal
and spiritual ideals.
However subtle it is, there is a need to seriously consider
this lingering sense of being national, or at least communal, as a
deviation from the ideal of a completely free and autonomous
art. Yet, recognition of this fact does not validate either
Sundaram’s argument of a non-existent institution of art in pre-
liberalization India or Kapur’s observation that modernism in
its full sense (a modernism with avant-garde) has always been
deferred for “a national cause” by the Indian artists until 1990s.
Given the right-wing nationalism of the high modernists like
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—a feature which is visible
even in the ‘historical avant-gardes’ like the Italian Futurists—
the arguments of Sundaram and Kapur can be seen as based
on a counterfactual assumption.18
Instead, we should consider
this deviation as referring to certain disjuncture within the
modernist slogan ‘art for art’s sake’; a disjuncture which admits,
contradicting Greenberg’s expectations, that art can never be
truly self-reflective since it has to be mediated by something
‘extra-aesthetic’. Swaminathan himself explains this point in a
writing published in 1990: “I seem to have put forward a theory
of art for art’s sake or art as a thing in itself. Without retreating
from my stand I shall try to recoup my credibility. [...] Art of
course is not for art’s sake, in the sense that it is addressed to
man, but it is addressed to him as a gift from the unknown, as a
thing of wonder.” (Swaminathan, [1990]1995:54)
Now,anyonefamiliarwithSwaminathan’sobsessionforIndian
spirituality will immediately recognize that this ‘unknowable
outside’ refers to none other than the metaphysical ‘Absolute’

13. Allegorizing Modernism 151
of the Vedantic traditions. But the same was the case with the
earlier orientalist-nationalists like Sri Aurobindo or Ananda
Coomaraswamy from whom Swaminathan had always kept a
critical distance based on his conviction that “only a searching
and militant criticism of the values held sacrosanct, can make
the Indian artist come out of his shell and expose him to the
winds of uncertainty and challenge” (Swaminathan, 1966b:9).
What differentiates Swaminathan from the earlier orientalist-
nationalists is this high-modernist negativity, which is basically
a post-1947 phenomenon by when the Indian artists have
finally been freed from the constraints of the nationalist project
so that they can now leave behind the burden of different
invented traditions. (But we should not miss what complicates
Swaminathan’s position here: it is his high modernist negativity
that simultaneously allows him with a 180 degree turn to
affirm the most popularised tradition of the Indian culture, the
Vedantic philosophy, for its negative theology exemplified in
the celebrated dictum “neti neti”; meaning “not this, nor this.”)
Anyway, for the purposes of our discussion, it is sufficient to
condense Swaminathan’s obscurantist conception of art as
follows: there is no complete ‘autonomy’ in art since art, under the
spell of ‘the Absolute’, can only be ‘semi-autonomous’ at best. This
reformulation would help us to place Swaminathan in a wider
context since the terms “autonomy”, “semi-autonomy” and “the
Absolute”haveapeculiarroletoplayinJameson’sdifferentiation
between high and late modernisms (periodic differences of
which have problematically been overlooked by Bürger).19
“The Absolute”, Jameson (2002:163) explains with reference
to Jena Romanticism in particular and high modernism in
general, “stands for whatever extra-aesthetic justifications
are finally evoked in order to ground and to remotivate what
we have been calling the semi-autonomy of the aesthetic: such
justifications—whether they lie in human psychology, in history
or in society, or even in religion itself—must necessarily be
refused and repudiated by the ideologues of the [late] modern.”

14. 152 Sandip K. Luis
ReferringtoEzraPoundandT.S.Eliot,Jamesonmakesitclearthat
by “extra-aesthetic” he means none other than a preoccupation
with “politics” itself, which, in Jameson’s words, “was the sign
that they [Pound and Eliot] were genuine modernists, that is to
say, that they held to the Absolute and to Utopianism, in ways
no longer so appropriate for the postwar era.”20
(Swaminathan,
1986:168) And Jameson suggests that the transition from high
modernism to late modernism could be understood as the
complete withdrawal of art into itself, a depoliticising shift
from a ‘semi-autonomous’ art to a properly ‘autonomous’ art,
as it is finally made visible in Greenberg’s quasi-Kantian purist
aesthetics (169-178).21
If there is hardly anything common between Greenberg and
Swaminathan despite their chronological contemporaneity, can
the latter be called a ‘genuine modernist’ in the sense outlined
by Jameson above? If yes, what was Swaminathan’s ‘politics’? I
realize that these questions are extremely provocative in a time
when any evocation of ‘genuineness’ is suspected and everything
is already said to be ‘political’ in its own way. Leaving a response
to these criticisms aside (for their preoccupation with rhetoric
instead of conceptual demarcations), what I prefer to address
here is another problem through which the above questions
could be answered.
In his much misread essay, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era
of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986), Jameson argues that “after
thepoisonedgiftofIndependence”,thepost-colonialintellectual
faces a unique “aesthetic dilemma, a crisis of representation: It
was not difficult to identify an adversary who spoke another
language and wore the visible trappings of colonial occupation.
When those are replaced by your own people, the connections
to external controlling forces are much more difficult to
represent.” (Jameson, 1986:81) In such a context, provoked by
the post-independence disillusionment with the nationalist
project, or in more accurate Marxist terms, confronting the
‘comprador’ instinct of a hitherto progressive “nationalist

15. Allegorizing Modernism 153
bourgeois” (Purohit, 1988), the third-world post-colonial writers
introspect the limits and possibilities of the available means of
representation in a typical high modernist manner—unless and
until they ‘de-nationalise’ themselves for taking part in the
internationalism of the Second World or throw themselves into
the postmodern delirium of the first-world.
But two crucial features differentiate the third-world high
modernism from that of the first-world. Firstly, whereas the
first-world high modernists considered the realm of politics
as an ‘extra-aesthetic’ affair (mainly due to the strict divisions
in the West between ‘the political’ and ‘the aesthetical’ or ‘the
public’ and ‘the private’), the third-world intellectual, Jameson
(1986:74) says, is “always in one way or another a political
intellectual” for an intriguing reason. As a result of the long
history of colonial governmentality and different nationalist
movements, the personal—or whatever stands in for it like religion
or art—is already politicised in the third-world (cf. Chatterjee,
1993). The third-world private-sphere is already the site of
different counter-public-spheres and as a result, even assuming
an exclusive place for the personal has to be mediated by a
political battle waged in the public.
Secondly, in reflecting upon the conditions of representation
available in one’s specific national situation, the third-world
artist produces what Jameson has inaptly called “national
allegory”, a term which runs the risk of confusing itself with
other explicitly allegorical works produced during the heydays
of nationalism (Ravi Varma’s Galaxy of Musicians [1889] and
Deviprasod Roy Chowdhury’s Triumph of Labour [1940] for
example).22
As later commentators have noted in response to
Aijaz Ahmad’s (1987) well-known criticism of Jameson,23
it is
simplistic to consider ‘national allegory’ as a neo-orientalist
attribution on the third-world artistic production since the term
made its first appearance, that too as a central heuristic device,
in Jameson’s study of the British artist-writer Wyndham Lewis.
There Jameson (1979:94) argued that ‘the allegoric’ in Lewis’

16. 154 Sandip K. Luis
high modernism—among many other exceptional features like
his proto-fascism—is the “provisional solution” that the author
envisages “to bridge an increasing gap between the existential
data of everyday life within a given nation-state and the
structural tendency of monopoly capital to develop on a world-
wide, essentially transnational scale.” (Given that Lewis’ resort
to national allegory was largely shaped by his fascist leaning,
I believe that one cannot rule out the same possibility—if not
fascism per se but a flirting with authoritarian or communalist
ideas—inthecaseofthethird-worldartistsaswell.WhatIhavein
mind is M. F. Husain’s open support for the National Emergency
in 1975 and V. S. Naipaul’s celebration of Hindu militancy.)
But why allegory here, especially when it is said to be an
aesthetic form which is only found before and after modernism?
In his recent writing, Jameson suggests the opposite when he
argues that “[high] modernist works can so often be seen,
implicitly or explicitly, to be allegories of their own production”
(2002:159)—a reading also buttressed by Bürger’s (1992:Ch.8)
interpretation of Lewis as an allegorist of artistic production and
self-stylisation. Jameson continues:
“The point is not only that the emergent artists of modernism have no
social status or institutional social role except as ill-defined positions
within the boheme [...], it is also that [...] they invent various mythic
and ideological claims for some unique formal status which has no
social recognition or acknowledgement. In this void, they are obliged to
recognize and acknowledge themselves; and auto-referentiality is the
very dynamic of this process, in which the work of art designates itself
and supplies the criteria whereby it is supposed to be used and evaluated.
It is not necessary to see this level of the work’s meaning as an exclusive
one; rather it constitutes an allegorical level—for the artists themselves,
no doubt, the anagogical one—among many others.” (ibid.)
Swaminathan’s self-reflective writings on art unambiguously
demonstrate all the features discussed by Jameson above, but
leave our central questions unanswered: what was so allegorical
in Swaminathan’s aesthetics which had otherwise been
recognizably symbolist or even anti-narrative? What was his

17. Allegorizing Modernism 155
politics when it had never been identifiably national, let alone
international or cosmopolitan?
Allegorizing Modernism
I already mentioned Swaminathan’s indigenist regression to the
racialmythofIndia’sAryanpast.Thoughitallowedhimtoescape
from the shackles of nationalism and cosmopolitanism at once,
by the 1980s, we find Swaminathan negating this position as well.
In early Swaminathan, the relation between the Vedic and the
primitive communities was never problematized, whereas in his
later career we find him obsessively returning to this question
based on his conviction that the origins of caste hierarchy in
India should be sought in their primordial encounter, whether
real or imagined, and their historical aftermaths. (It is worthy to
note that this also made him to thoroughly reject any reformist
interpretation of Hinduism which purported to include the
outside-castes into its social fabric [Swaminathan, 1987:22].)
What allowed such a transformation in Swaminathan’s
intellectual career was his close engagement with the tribal
populations of Madhya Pradesh during the establishment of the
Roopankar Museum for Fine Arts in 1982.24
Being a part of the
autonomous, multi-art complex Bharat Bhavan at Bhopal, the
Roopankar appears to conventionally maintain the curatorial
partitioning of folk and tribal arts as removed from the urban or
modern art works. However, Swaminathan’s ideological vision
behind cooperating with this state-funded project compels a
different reading.
In the Bharat Bhavan publication The Perceiving Fingers (1987),
an extensive documentation of Adivasi art, Swaminathan
put forward his vision of a new egalitarian aesthetic wherein
every work of art, whether tribal or modern, would be treated
with the same degree of aesthetic autonomy and authorial
distinctiveness. Though this cannot be seen as a radical leap
in a context when artworks are thoroughly homogenized and
commoditized by robbing them of their social and historical

18. 156 Sandip K. Luis
differences, one should also keep in mind that this is a post-
colonial subject’s reenactment of an imperialist discourse—
here, primitivist anthropology—with a great self-reflectivity to
avoid its imminent risks of exoticizing or objectifying the Other.
In Swaminathan’s words:
“Apart from the pejorative echoes which the term ‘tribal’ evokes [...], it also
seems to contaminate [...] with notions of being ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’.
[...] While this attitude has not been applied to the artistic achievements
of the great civilizations of the past or to art as it developed around the
Church (the Temple) or the court in feudal times, art at the level of the
communities which did not belong to or integrated with the ‘mainstream’
[or] did not develop into imperial powers and which more or less remained
circumscribed even in terms of ‘horizontal’ growth, [...] did not by and
large merit any serious consideration and were at best treated as curio
objects, or as elements of some interest to archeologists, historians
and anthropologists for studying the nature, developmental level and
degrees of social organization achieved, of the concerned communities”
(Swaminathan, 1987:13).
It is for the pejorative association of the state-sanctioned
term “tribal” with “‘arrested’ technological development” and
“backwardness,” that, Swaminathan detested it, along with the
art historical category of ‘primitive’ (ibid.). Instead, in tandem
with the indigenist ideals he always defended, Swaminathan
recommended the appellation ‘Adivasi’ for its literal meaning of
‘autochthon’ (Swaminathan, 1987:11).
It should be noted that Swaminathan, an avid reader of the
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, had extremely
been careful for distancing all sorts of “purist prejudices” in
his engagement with the indegenist communities. Rejecting
the conventional methodologies of anthropology—due to their
general defect of what Johannes Fabian (2002) would later call
“allochronism” or “the denial of coevelness”—Swaminathan
envisaged a radically different approach whereby a “symbiotic”
experience of “contemporaneity” would be most valued and
no community would be treated as a closed or static system.25

19. Allegorizing Modernism 157
One of the most striking results of this theoretical agenda could
be seen in the life history of the Gond artist Jangarah Singh
Shyam (1964-2001), whose individual talents were said to be
“discovered” by Swaminathan (1987:40) as the Gond community
did not have a ‘tradition of painting’ until Jangarh made his name
in the contemporary artworld.26
Here, it is intriguing to note that as much as Swaminathan is
attentive to the historical problem of uneven development, he is
unwillingtofinditusefulinunderstandingdifferentartpractices
due to his unshaken belief in some Absolutist conception of ‘Art’.
Thus, if there is anything uninterrupted between the later and
the early Swaminathan, it is his conviction that history is a not
a narrative of progress, but a narrative of violence and itself is a
form of violence—“it is the word as death that hangs heavy on
the shoulders of man as history”, says the early Swaminathan
([1968]1980:6). But just like he would insist on a homeopathic use
of reason (1987:18), we find him using his knowledge of history
for redemptive purposes akin to Walter Benjamin’s famous
interpretation of Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’, which Geeta Kapur
(1995) once had appropriately quoted as her concluding words
on Swaminathan. But given that it is from such anti-historicist
conclusions that we have taken our departure, the challenge at
hand is to bring them back to the domain of historical reasoning.
It is in this context that I find Jameson’s thesis of ‘national
allegory’ helpful since Swaminathan’s aesthetics should be
first and foremost seen as an allegory of its own conditions of
production against the background of a semi-peripheral and
post-colonial economy. Let me explain.
The secret umbilical cord between modernism and
imperialism has widely been examined in the theoretical
camps of Marxism and Postcolonialism alike (Jameson, 2007:
Ch.7; Said, 1993: Ch.2). Keeping such discussions in mind, can’t
we read Swaminathan’s Perceiving Figures—a proudly narrated
account of a geographical and anthropological adventure made
with more than thirty state-commissioned art enthusiasts

20. 158 Sandip K. Luis
across the dark heartland of central India—as an inverted
allegory of imperialism? For in Swaminathan’s version, it is
the indigenous elite who masquerade the role of the colonial
intruder as the direction of spatial exploration is set inward,
within the limits of the sovereign nation-state. Though the term
‘internal colonialism’ does not appear anywhere in the book,
one can reasonably assume that it functions to be the central
problematic in Swaminathan’s thinking. Given the allegorical
importance of the Roopankar project, he seems to be aware of
the possibility that any objectification or exoticization of ‘the
primitive’ from his side will enact the same violence perpetrated
by the imperial West, with an effect of nullifying everything
for which Swaminathan had stood so far. Hence already in
the introductory chapter of The Perceiving Fingers, we find him
preemptively asserting that “in their [Adivasis’] freedom lies
our freedom, [...] in their self-respect lies our self-respect, [...]
in their self-identity lies our self-identity, that perhaps we have
to learn much from them than they have to learn from us [...]
A symbiotic approach which could possibly be the catalyst for
both the so-called tribal communities and us to emerge into a
new world of freedom [...].” (Swaminathan, 1987:9)
In the fashionable phrases of Jacques Rancière, one may here
argue that it is in this “egalitarian presumption” and its Utopian
imaginary of an emancipated “aesthetic community” that the
‘politics’ of Swaminathan’s modernism has finally to be located.
Here, Swaminathan’s seemingly ‘anti-modernist’ position—
his quasi-primitivist negation of history and individuality—
becomes profoundly modernist. In order to make his egalitarian
vision thinkable, Swaminathan conjures up the modernist
dictum of a free, autonomous and timeless ‘Art’, by which the
historical time that separates the Adivasi from the modern
could be undone (Swaminathan, 1987:30). But Swaminathan’s
resort to the modern category of ‘Art’ is beset with an inevitable
contradiction, something that he himself acknowledges and
disavows simultaneously: “it is immaterial whether the Adivasi

21. Allegorizing Modernism 159
artist is aware of terminological nomenclatures and considers
himself to be creating art or not; inasmuch as we find or discover
it as such, we are partaking of the same well of experience.”
(Swaminathan, 1987:40) From this unconvincingly one-sided
explanation, it is evident that Swaminathan cannot put forward
hisegalitarianpresumptionwithoutasimultaneouspresumption
about the universality and autonomy of aesthetic experience.
As a disillusioned Marxist, Swaminathan’s politics, like that
of Rancière, is both communitarian and anarchic. But how does
such a ‘communitarian anarchist’ position relate itself with
the overarching politics of the nation-state and its imagined
community (cf. Clark, 2013:Ch.9) is an important question to
raise. After all, in spite of all his radicalism, Swaminathan has
had rarely worked outside the ideological and institutional
limits provided by the nation-state (whenever he had done it,
as in leading the artists’ protest against the National Academy of
Arts in 1970, it was within the civic confines of a dutiful citizen).
Keeping the contemporary Cold War conjuncture in
mind, an immediate answer could be sought in the larger
political advantages provided by Swaminathan’s ideological
position. For whatever reason that he had consistently
negated the imperialist ideologies represented by the U.S.A
and the U.S.S.R, it immediately resonated with the ‘non-
alignment’ politics of the Indian state. But this explanation can
be as misleading as it is obvious, not only because of the
question that how ‘non-aligned’ India was (especially after the
demise of Nehru), but also for the reason that ‘the national
deviation’ in Swaminathan’s aesthetics refers to something
more basic and banal to be initially noticed. Let me explain.
A Difference in Degree (Than in Kind)
If the early Swaminathan’s modernism could be seen as
allegorically represented in the later Swaminathan’s ‘anti-
modernism’, what was the former an allegory of? At any rate it

22. 160 Sandip K. Luis
will be a torturous interpretation, that, the artist-critic preferred
the constructedness of allegory over the intuitiveness of symbol,
eitherin hiswritingsorart.27
In fact,onemay citemanyinstances
from Swaminathan to argue the opposite.28
However, given the contentions of Jameson that the high
modernistself-referentialityis“anallegoryofitsownproduction”
and the privileged element in its production, the psychological
self, cannot exist in the third-world other than being thoroughly
self-conscious and politicized; can’t we put forward the following
argument by which the difference between the European and
post-colonial modernisms could be seen as a difference in degree
than in kind (so that the latter type of difference can be reserved
for conceptualising real historical shifts)?29
In other words,
comparing with the western modernisms of the time, can’t we
consider the post-colonial artistic production as a more rigorous
form of self-referentiality—and more explicitly allegorical
thereby—wherein the decisive and mediatory role of the post-
independent state in the productive activities of the citizen-
artist cannot be left unaddressed?30
The intriguingly looming
presence of the nation-state in Swaminathan’s writings, along
with their frequent appeals to a communal imaginary, testifies
to the argument of a corrupt idealism, but without resisting the
possibility of being glossed over as a mere question of political
and aesthetical pragmatics. ‘Knowing no identifiable public’ and
seeking ‘support from wherever possible’ (Jameson’s words),
it is no wonder as to why a post-colonial modernist invents a
deeply ambiguous philosophy wherein both pragmatic concerns
and utopian politics would ingeniously be conjoined. In the
case of Swaminathan, using the ambiguous notion of ‘aesthetic
autonomy’, he was not only satisfying the newly imagined
community’s desire for an indigenous bourgeois institution of
art, but also was putting forward an anti-bourgeois aesthetics
from an anarcho-communitarian perspective. And while
allying with the forms of state power, he has always been at the
forefront to emphasis its anachronism and ultimate irrelevance.
In his words:

23. Allegorizing Modernism 161
“Marx writes in his preface to the first edition of Das Kapital that “the
country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less
developed the image of its own future”. Marx was being proven correct
with a vengeance. While India had yet to go through the process of
industrialisation of scale and quality of the West, the intelligentsia had
started aping its behaviour in anticipation. The essential reason for this,
I feel, is because of India’s emergence as a nation state too late in the day.
We had perforce to organise ourselves in the image of the modern nation
state, at a time when the very concept of the nation state had become
obsolete” (Swaminathan n.d [2012]: 28)
Given the country’s deep-rooted underdevelopment, one may
explain these self-contradictions in Swaminathan—being both
‘modernist’ and ‘indigenist’, ‘anarchist’ and ‘statist’ etc.—as a
sign of necessary compromise and reformism that the native
bourgeoisie has to go through during the modernization
project (cf. Kapur, 2001: 202, 332). But in historicising third-
world modernisms, this contradiction should not be seen as
a unique postcolonial malady, since it is rather modernism’s
general condition itself. And differences within such a generic
modernism need to be assessed in terms of how modernisms
in the third-world become more modernist by the very virtue
of their historical belatedness and geographical distance (just
like how Greenbergian modernism becomes less modernist for
Jameson, as it evolves from an overdeveloped society). In such
an approach, it is necessary to see the ultimate meaning of
modernism not in any pursuit of originality or sheer ruptures,
as its myth-makers often propagate (which would only relegate
modernisms in the non-West as “derivative” or “repetitive”),
but in the forms of self-reflectivity by which the historical
subject grapples with her new historical position (what we call
modernity). In our third-world context, allegory is such a form,
perhaps the form, through which ‘the subject articulates herself
into history’.31
And this resort to allegory is not because ours was
less modernist, but more modernist; more self-conscious and all-
embracing that our artistic imaginations had to be.
Allegory is not simply a pre-modern form of expression, but

24. 162 Sandip K. Luis
modernism’s very threshold to which it must return, during the
moments of crisis. As we learn from Walter Benjamin (Cowen,
1981: 121-122; Bürger, 1984: 68-72), it is a collective name for
the ruins of convention or tradition that modernism arrogantly
leaves behind in its youthfulness, in its newly found fascination
for the intuitiveness of the symbol.It is of no wonder thereby that
in its moments of maturity, often paralleled by the experiences
of historical crisis, modernism desperately searches for what it
had once relegated to the past. In the West, this self-conscious
reversion to allegory which begins with the ‘historical avant-
gardes’—as contemporaneously testified by Benjamin (ibid.)—
is often identified as postmodernism’s inaugural moment
(Owens, 1980). But thanks to our unique historical hardships
and accumulating crises of belatedness, modernism here hardly
had the leisure of adolescence and its youthful mistakes which
once characterised its western counterparts. We have always
conceived, for better or worse, deliberately or undeliberately,
our modernism at its threshold, at the level of the allegorical, as
a construct in continuous formation—this is how I understand
Jameson’s controversial thesis, and Indian modernists’ stubborn
insistence on the ‘imagined communities’ of various kinds32
even at the heights of pictorial abstraction and aesthetic purism
(as we see in Madras school and Neo-Tantric paintings, not to
mention Swaminathan, for example). It is this forced difference
of historical maturity, shaped by the real questions of life, and
also tormented by the immaturities of a radically different order,
that underlies my contention that compared to the western
modernisms, ours was more self-conscious, and thereby, why
not, more modernist.33
In Lieu of Conclusion
A careful reader might have noticed a possible historiographical
distinction that I continuously overlook despite my references to
Bürger (for whom we credit its theorization). It is the difference
between ‘modernism’ and ‘avant-garde’, terms which are often

25. Allegorizing Modernism 163
treated as synonyms in the major theorizations of modernism
from Adorno to Jameson (in fact, the centrality of Jameson in our
discussions made this historiographical confusion inevitable). In
the context of historicising Swaminathan’s interventions let me
make it clear that, even though I see them as ‘high modernist’,
I don’t consider for a moment that they are ‘avant-garde’—let
alone ‘historical avant-garde’—as in Bürger’s radical sense. A full
elaboration of this crucial but understudied historiographical
distinction—a unique third-world problem first recognised by
Kapur (2001:288)—is a topic for future discussions.
When it comes to writing intellectual history, it might be the
autonomy of ideas filtered through the constraints of material
reality that often appears to be the most exciting, which in
Swaminathan’s case would be his aestheticism, anarchism and
anti-historicism. But due to their self-mystifying obscurantism
and blatant ahistoricism, the historian’s task to explain these
claims of autonomy through the heteronomous forces of history
solemnly remains relevant. And keeping in mind that it is such
a ‘historical materialist’ position that Swaminathan had always
contested, it will be appropriate to end my arguments with a
passage from him so that polemics and disputations which the
artist-critic held so dear will continue.
“It is argued in Marxist officialese that [...] the freedom of man is
contingent upon a certain stage of historical development: that man
has never been free but can be so depending upon the inevitability
of history. Here we come across the strange paradox of materialists
becoming fatalists with the only difference that the term demiourgos is
replaced by the term history. Thus idealism and materialism appear to
be the two sides of the same coin.” (Swaminathan, 1987:30)
Notes
1. It should be noted that the school of ‘world-system’ analysis
pioneered by the Wallerstein-Frank-Amin trio, which serves to be
the methodological basis for Jameson and Moretti, is extremely
controversial for the preference it accords for exchange relations

26. 164 Sandip K. Luis
over relations of production, and the consequent downplaying of
different indigenous or national situations in the history of capital.
(In Indian context, even someone like Amiya Kumar Bagchi who
had worked closely with this school, has been highly critical of
some of its theoretical tendencies.) For the purposes of the present
essay, let me make it clear that my own use of certain concepts
from this school is strictly limited to mapping, not explaining,
the geopolitical conjuncture of the Cold War cultural politics.
2. In the words of Swaminathan ([1968]1980: 10): “The Dadaist revolt
was significant in as much as it anticipated the death of art as
representation in the West; and Marcel [sic] Duchamp, in one
great attempt to restore the idea to painting, stands as the last
great representative of the entire movement (Octavio Paz). All
that happened in the Anglo-Saxon world after Duchamp is only a
pale mimicry of that which had gone before.”
3. Here, it should be noted that the appellation ‘late modernism’
omits much of the defining features of the American Abstract
Expressionism like primitivism and the ideologues’ obsession with
the esoteric psychology of C. G. Jung. This drawback becomes even
more serious when we note how central such ideological features
had been in Swaminathan’s aesthetics as well. I am aware that
focusing exclusively on the differences between Swaminathan and
Greenberg (or ‘the third-world high modernism’ and ‘the first-
world late modernism’ as I will phrase below) will run the risk of
confusing the former with the ideological agenda of the Abstract
Expressionists like Gottlieb, Pollock and Newman. The key to
differentiate both, which I will limit to the last section of the paper
due to space constraints, is the centrality that Swaminathan,
unlike the American artists, had accorded to the experience of
‘contemporaneity’ in his engagement with the tribal societies.
4. For an art historical attempt to explain the unique emotional
impact of Rothko paintings, see James Elkins’ Pictures and Tears: A
History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, Routledge, 2004.
5. The common resource for both Jameson and Anderson in
advancing this argument is Arno Mayer’s classic work, The
Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), especially
its fourth chapter, ‘Official Cultures and the Avant-Garde’. For an
alternative periodization of ‘late modernism’, see Tyrus Miller’s

27. Allegorizing Modernism 165
Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars,
University of California Press, 1999.
6. Before being a full-time artist, Swaminathan was a journalist
specialising on the South and South-East Asia, and briefly worked
as the Editor of the magazine Link founded by Aruna Asif Ali and
Edathatta Narayanan.
7. See Swaminathan’s article “Form, Contemporaneity, Me” (1966a).
In her catalogue essay written for the Place for People exhibition
(1981), Geeta Kapur questions this exceptional status attributed
to Klee by Swaminathan while not mentioning the latter’s name:
“Identifying himself with the modernist preoccupations, via Klee,
an Indian artist will also claim an identity apart and beyond, for
while his Western counterpart is seen to be struggling away from
the post-Renaissance conventions of a literary realism, the Indian
artist can treat himself like the privileged heir of an intrinsically
more advanced art and to practice, in all innocence, an age-old
modernism. [...] The alternatives sought by the Western artists
derive from quite specific historical needs and develop often
enough into a rebellion—the primitivist element in expressionism
may be seen to perform this function. We cannot be too certain
that the rebellion can be reapplied to the very culture which is its
source.”
8. According to Achin Vanaik (1991: 31): “India is a backward
capitalist country having a number of economic and sociologic
features characteristic of the poorer third-world countries. But in
terms of its fundamental economic structure and its dynamic of
growth, it is much closer to the weaker of the advanced capitalist
countries” An understanding of India’s status as a semi-peripheral
country within the peripheral reality of the ‘third-world’ is a
point recognized by Immanuel Wallerstein (1976) as well. But
surprisingly, in spite of his references to Wallerstein, Jameson
seems to miss this point (about the semi-peripherality of modern
India) in his controversial essay ‘Third World Literature in the Era
of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986: 68-9, 78).
9. If we stick to the chronological understanding of Indian
modernism as a belated development and consider it as an
instance of another ideology of modernism, a ‘post-colonial late
modernism’ indeed, Jameson’s (2002: 180) following words need

28. 166 Sandip K. Luis
to be taken seriously: “It [ideology of modernism] must be seen
as a project that re-emerges over and over again with the various
national situations as a specific and unique national-literary task
or imperative, whose cross-cultural kinship with its neighbours
is not always evident (either at home or abroad). And when we
reckon in that unevenness of development of which we have
already spoken above, the nonsynchronous dynamic of various
belated or premature modernisms, their ‘catching-up’ (in
Habermassian terminology) or indeed their untimely exhaustion,
a multitemporal and multilinear picture of the construction of
the ideology of modernism emerges which cannot be flattened
out into any simple model of influence or of cultural and poetic
imperialism, of cross-cultural diffusion or of teleological virtuality
(even though all these options offer locally satisfying narratives).”
10. InthecaseoftheIndian“Sixties”,ifonecouldusethisperiodization
at all, the last gasp of modernist and socialist political ideals could
be found in the Naxalite and J.P movements (the latter led by
Jayprakash Narayan). (It should be kept in mind that the decade
of “sixties” is considered to be concluded only by the mid-1970s.)
The impact of postmodernist aesthetics in Indian art-scene can be
seen in the figurative-narrative trend taking off from the Baroda-
artworld by late-1970s, culminating in the 1981-exhibition ‘Place
for People’.
11. Geeta Kapur (1978:196) succinctly captures this intriguing feature
in Swaminathan’s interventions as follows. “Swaminathan,
let us confess, is prone to a certain intellectual attitudinizing.
[He] is often rhetoric and sometimes when he indulges in sheer
contrariness he appears only clever. [...] His thinking is polemical.
This gives it agility and effervescence, but also a rather haphazard
structure. Polemics, moreover, encourage paradox, and paradox is
not dialectics.”
12. In an article published a year before ‘The New Promise’,
Swaminathan already makes his point clear: “Is the phenomenal
growth of abstract painting in the recent past an indication of
India’s arrival at last into contemporaneity? [...] A factor of no little
importance [in this development] is the patronage which is almost
entirely foreign, mostly American. It is but natural that the artist
of an underdevelopment country, starved for sustenance and

29. Allegorizing Modernism 167
recognition, should give up the struggle rather than risk isolation.
[...] In the ultimate analysis patronage only serves to perpetuate
the inhibitions of already extant in a mind still in the grip of feudal
conformity.” (Swaminathan 1966b:12)
13. Already in the manifesto of Group-1890, one can see many indirect
references to racial or biological differences as in the following
statement:“Thegenesisoftheformproperisgeneticallyanticipated
and not conceptually determined” (emphasis mine).
14. For a detailed discussion of what Peter Bürger means by the
concept of ‘institution of art’, see his ‘The Institution of “Art” as
a Category in the Sociology of Literature’, Cultural Critique, No. 2
(Winter, 1985-1986), pp. 5-33. Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of
the institution of art as a ‘bourgeois economic logic in reverse’ is
highly insightful in this context.
15. Already by 1970s, this conception has been widely accepted
in Indian art-writing. See the contributions in the Virshchik
magazine’s special edition ‘The Social Context of Indian Art’ (1973),
Vol.4, No.3, edited by Geeta Kapur (especially the writings by K. G.
Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Pranabranjan Ray).
16. In addition, one can also note here as to how a Weberian
differentiation of art, morality and science—a prerequisite for the
autonomization of each sphere—is provocatively emphasised
by Swaminathan as early as 1960s. In an interview published
in 1967, responding to a question about a ‘virile and vital art’,
Swaminathan says that “[art] must be impersonal [because]
whether a woman is raped or sleeps willingly with a man, the child
is either case is untainted. He is part of the process of nature.”
(Patel [1967] 1995:24) In the article ‘Ideology and Art’, he conceives
the autonomy of art on the model of science’s autonomy. He says,
“The scientist probing the mysteries of Nature did not arrive at
atomic physics because of ill-will or good-will towards humanity,
and the artist likewise in the unfolding of his personality through
art is nowise motivated by social purpose.” (Swaminathan [1962]
1995:45)
17. For more details and the reproduction of the postcard, see
Katherine Hacker (2014:201). For a brief outlining of this dilemma
of national identity in Swaminathan, see Kalidas (2012:13-14)
18 Maintaining a “counterfactual” and “hyperreal” understanding

30. 168 Sandip K. Luis
of European history is one of the central allegations that Vivek
Chibber (2013) levels against the Postcolonial theory.
19. In an alterative reading of Bürger, thereby, one may replace the
term ‘autonomy’ with ‘semi-autonomy’ and reserve the former for
describing only the late modernist art.
20. DotheliterarycareersofEliotandPoundcontradicttheconnection
we noted between modernism and semi-peripheral nationalities?
Perry Anderson (1984:102) says: “within the European or Western
world generally, there are major areas that scarcely generated
any modernist momentum at all. My own country England, the
pioneer of capitalist industrialization and master of the world
market for a century, is a major case in point: beachhead for Eliot
or Pound, offshore to Joyce, it produced no virtually significant
native movement of a modernist type in the first decades of this
century—unlike Germany or Italy, France or Russia, Holland or
America.”
21. The differentiation between the concepts of aesthetic autonomy
and an aesthetic of the Absolute is based on a fundamental
opposition between the philosophies of Kant and Jena Romantics,
whose interventions were largely determined by the semi-
peripherality of Germanic culture within an otherwise ascending
Europe. Whereas Kant’s theory was ‘common-sensically’ (sensus
communis) premised on the universality and autonomy of aesthetic
experience, Jena Romantics, and later Hegel, offered a more
philosophically rigorous argument where any form of autonomy
(including the autonomy of art) cannot be separated from the
dependence it has on its logical opposite (‘the autonomy of art’
with respect to ‘the heteronomy of culture’ in this case). Thereby,
nothing is truly free or autonomous, or everything is only ‘semi-
autonomous’, unless and until the contradictions between them
are resolved in a final sublation to the level of ‘the Absolute’—the
Ideal or Utopian state which will not have anything to contradict.
22. One may consider the narrative paintings from the 1980s Baroda
as an Indian example of what Jameson means to be ‘the national
allegories in the era of multinational capitalism.’ But any such
interpretation should be qualified by taking into account the
fact that in privileging the ‘little-narratives’ of ‘the place’ over
the grand imaginaries of the nation, they seem to better satisfy

31. Allegorizing Modernism 169
what Craig Owens (1980) theorized as “the allegorical impulse” of
postmodern art than Jameson’s version.
23. Buchanan (2006), Szeman (2006) and Lazarus (2004); also see
McGonegal (2005), Prasad (1992) and Kapur (2001).
24. This change in Swaminathan’s outlook should not be conceived
as a sudden upheaval since as early as late-sixties, following his
research as a Nehru Fellow on the tribal cultures in northern
and western India, we can find his indictment towards casteism
and the exploitation of the tribals. In a manuscript of 1969, titled
‘Cost of Progress’, Swaminathan accuses the Indian state for the
plight of tribal and pastoral populations and even warns about an
impending civil-war, referring to the violent uprisings in Naxalbari
and Srikakulam (Swaminathan 2012: 110-111).
25. “Let us not bring our social disunity and spiritual separateness
to the possibility of our response to Adivasi art or art as such.
What I am trying to formulate is a symbiotic approach to art as
related to anthropology. [...] It does not involve the static notion
of understanding as much as the active notion of participation.”
(Swaminathan 1987:37) “I had conceived of the [Bharat Bhawan]
museum as a composite museum of urban, folk and tribal art.
While the notion of modernism may exclude the folk and the
tribal, contemporaneity seen as the simultaneous validity of
coexisting cultures may be all inclusive [...].”([1993] 1995: 12) On
the “denial of coevelness” as a “denial of contemporaneity” and
the non-participatory aesthetic of allochronism, see Pedro Erber’s
‘Contemporaneity and its Discontents’ in Diacritics, Vol. 41, No. 1,
pp. 28-48 (2013).
26. Jangarh Singh Shyam allegedly committed suicide in 2001 at the
Mithila Museum, Japan. The intriguing relationship between
Shyam and Swaminathan is a topic of my current research.
27. In modernist aesthetics, the major advocates of symbol against
allegory are S. T. Coleridge and B. Croce. In the Indian context, the
same preference can be found in the mystical romanticists like
Aurobindo (2004: 90): “Lord, what an incorrigible mentaliser and
allegorist you are! If the bird were either consciousness or the
psyche [sic] or light, it would be an allegory and all the mystical
beauty would be gone. [...] Mystic symbols are living things, not
abstractions.” Elsewhere Aurobindo (278) proclaims: “I don’t want

32. 170 Sandip K. Luis
to be allegorical, only mystic and allusive.” We have already seen
that Swaminathan, in spite of all his penchant for mysticism,
hardly identified with Aurobindo’s philosophy.
28. For instance, consider what Swaminathan ([1961]1995: 39) writes
about M. F. Husain’s Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956), a
painting generally appreciated for its allegorical qualities. He
admires the artwork for very opposite reasons, with idiosyncratic
observations: “A spider, dropping like a clot from the extended
finger of a figure in the foreground enters into a mysterious
relationship with a lamp standing on the head of another in the
back; and at once the quanta of vibrating energy between the two
poles become pregnant with meaning. The hieroglyphical symbols
do not convey any literary “message”. They acquire significance
by their very hoariness.”
29. Jameson (1986: 80) himself alludes to this point as follows: “[...] in
distinction to the unconscious allegories of our own [first-world]
cultural texts, third-world national allegories are conscious and
overt.”
30. As Jameson’s (1986: 68-70) branding of contemporary Indian (and
Chinese) cultural productions under the much contested category
of ‘Asiatic mode of production’ demands explanation, it is helpful
to recall what Pranab Bardhan (1984:36) says in the context of
India’s political economy: “the idea of a centralised powerful
state, combining its monopoly of repression with a substantial
ownership in the means of production, propelling as well as
regulating economy, which is implicit in the writings of Marx
and Engels on Asiatic societies, has widespread contemporary
relevance beyond the exotic, little-understood, precapitalist social
formations to which many western Marxists would like to keep it
confined.”
31. The philosophical basis of this counterintuitive assertion is
Jameson’s reference to Hegel’s ‘master-slave dialectics’ in his
concluding discussion of the third-world literature (Jameson 1986:
85). Due to space constraints, let me encapsulate this complex
argument as follows: the ‘subjection-to-reification’ (here the
status of the third-world subject) calls for a more rigorous form
of subjectivity in comparison to the ‘subject-of-reification’ (that
is the imperial subject). It is this difference-in-degree in being a

33. Allegorizing Modernism 171
reflective subject that leads to the argument that the third-world
modernisms, however belated or derivative they might be, remain
to be more modernist than the western counterparts.
32. All imagined communities need not be ‘national’ at all; but
when it comes to post-colonial or third-world contexts in
particular, the ‘nation’ is the unsurpassable horizon against
which all communitarian imaginaries have to define themselves,
either against or in favour. It is this nuanced meaning of ‘being
national’, being responsive (and thereby responsible) to one’s
particular ‘national situation’ with no option, that Jameson leaves
insufficiently addressed, thus creating great controversy.
33. The biological metaphors of ‘maturity’, ‘youthfulness’ and
‘adolescence’ have been the conventional tropes of reactionary
comparativism, as it is pointed out by Susan S. Bean (2013) in her
essay on Indian and North American modernisms. In sending these
references back to where they belonged, I am not only exploiting
their heuristic value by giving a clear upper-hand to the periphery
in my developmental model, but also adding a crucial condition
for their usage: equate ‘maturity’ with ‘crisis’, so that the model of
will deconstruct itself at the height of its development.
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