A prescient artist

Surveying a century of art practice in India, one is struck anew by how artists have reacted to situations and crises in their lifetimes. Modernists in Calcutta were impacted by the Bengal famine of 1943, and their peers addressed issues of violence, war, hunger, corruption and poverty in their work. The succeeding generation, referred to as contemporaries, are no less activist, and their concerns have global resonances that draw upon disparities they have seen or experienced with regard to income, patriarchy, gender, society, shifting geographies, territorial claims and barriers, and environment. In between, there have been brief spells when space