Art 1975-1998 — Barbican exhibition review

In “Dream Houses”, a 1969 film by Nalini Malani, the promise of social housing in newly independent India is conjured through a stop-motion animation of an architectural model in iridescent colours. But seven years later, in Malani’s dual-channel video installation “Utopia”, its pulsing optimism is undercut by black-and-white footage of a woman in a high-rise gazing down at condemned shacks. The ironic juxtaposition reflects the crushing disillusionment triggered in 1975 by prime minister Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency.

Alongside a programme of forced sterilisation to target population growth, Malani tells me in London, the prime minister’s son, Sanjay Gandhi, moved to “aestheticise the city and remove all the slums”. One where she was filming in Mumbai was razed overnight. For artists such as Malani, this trampling of civil liberties crystallised the shocking collapse of Nehruvian democratic ideals since independence.

The emergency of 1975-77 is the starting point for The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998, a cogent and compelling group exhibition at the Barbican Gallery in London, in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. This private museum loaned more than half of the 150 works by 30 artists in a show focused on a seminal period that has disturbing echoes today. A parallel film season, Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970, runs to December 12.

Although 1947, and the generational trauma of partition, tend to be seen as paramount, says Shanay Jhaveri, the show’s curator and Barbican head of visual arts, the emergency was a watershed. As artists confronted the post-independence realities of India’s failing infrastructure, population explosion, poverty and unrest, he tells me, “utopian ideals dissipated; art history gets entwined with social history.”

Fear of repression pervades the desolate streets in Gulammohammed Sheikh’s oil painting “Speechless City” (1975), deserted but for marauding animals against a blood-orange background. Sheikh, who had studied in London, was among figurative painters who drew on Indian miniatures for their urban narratives. Others turned to satire and caricature, from Vivan Sundaram’s scabrous pastel and ink work of Gandhi and son as grotesque gangsters, “The Pair” (1976), to Rameshwar Broota’s brilliantly economical oil painting on corrupt power, “Reconstruction” (1977), in which an arrogantly enthroned general intimidates the faceless minions around him.

Observing the widening gap between vaunted progress and those left behind, artists were drawn to the forgotten. In Sudhir Patwardhan’s oil painting “Dhakka” (1977), a muscular labourer’s back fills the canvas as he bends wearily to pick up his clothes, while in the craggy landscape of beggars and dejected workers in “Overbridge” (1981), the sumptuous blue of a man’s shirt forces the viewer’s gaze to his haunted face.

Like Patwardhan, Gieve Patel earned his living as a doctor in Mumbai, before commercial galleries opened in India. “Off Lamington Road” (1982-86) fixes in pastel colours the gamut of ecstasy and desperation he witnessed. In an alley crowded with goats and scooters, a man collapses. A woman lies bleeding. Others dance joyously amid the destitute. In the show’s opening oil painting, the chatting workers in Patel’s “Two Men With Hand Cart” (1979) are overshadowed by skyscrapers. Yet the pop-art pink of a monsoon sunset bathes the work in ebullient beauty and hope.

In bleak contrast are Savindra Sawarkar’s etchings of Dalit pariahs weighed down by the pots and brooms marking their so-called untouchability, and Pablo Bartholomew’s 1984 photographs of the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. In an unforgettable close-up, a father’s disembodied hand reaches towards a child’s face protruding, with sightlessly open eyes, from the dirt.

The link between art and activism becomes explicit in staged photography. Sheba Chhachhi’s black-and-white series Seven Lives and a Dream (1980-91) combines documentary images of anti-dowry demonstrations with staged portraits of women activists. Sunil Gupta’s Exiles (1987) pictures gay men at public monuments, such as a couple embracing at India Gate. Although homosexuality was decriminalised in 2018, the artist notes in the catalogue, the law “still only allow[s] gay sex in private”. Bhupen Khakhar skewers such absurdities in his oil painting “Two Men in Benares” (1982), in which a naked gay couple, penises erect, embrace furtively in the shadows while, in a distant temple, a holy man prostrates himself before a shiva lingam — a sacred phallus.

While the fast-expanding metropolis inspired art, urban artists — many of them privileged — championed rural and Adivasi (indigenous) art. Jyoti Bhatt’s photography documented disappearing traditions, while others gave ancient arts a contemporary edge, whether Meera Mukherjee’s beguiling, small-scale lost-wax bronze sculptures, or Himmat Shah’s modernist-inflected terracotta heads. Not only do Jagdish Swaminathan’s abstract canvases meld colour-field painting with tribal motifs, but as founding director of the Bharat Bhavan arts complex in Bhopal in 1982, he showed Adivasi art alongside that of contemporary artists — a radical approach he termed “contemporaneity”.

The largely wall-based works give way to installations in the 1990s, as the dual rise of communalism and consumerism transfigured art. MF Husain’s acrylic painting “Safdar Hashmi” (1989), depicting a murdered playwright with twisted limbs, is a harbinger of violence to come. Arpita Singh’s oil painting “My Mother” (1993) captures the riots that swept the country after the Ayodhya mosque was razed by a Hindu mob in 1992; its woman in white frowns amid the shrouded bodies lined up on the ground as green-uniformed militiamen wreak havoc. In the saturated, dreamlike colour of Sheikh’s oil painting “How Can You Sleep Tonight?” (1994-95), a couple lying awake in the moonlight embody a restless call to conscience.

A host of artists responded to turbulent times by abandoning figurative painting altogether. Rummana Hussain’s shattered terracotta pots, from which red powder spills like blood, are a visceral response to the carnage she fled in Mumbai, while Sheela Gowda’s cow dung sculptures, from patties to bricks, resonate with the cow’s associations to women’s work and non-violence. The material clashes with the spiritual in NN Rimzon’s “The Tools” (1993), whose fibreglass figure with arms raised in devotion stands in a ring of rusting agricultural implements that could become cudgels. Home ceases to be a refuge in “House” (1994), an installation by the erstwhile caricaturist Sundaram, in which a fire blazes on a video at the heart of a cuboid shack, while saws and hammers are embedded in the walls outside, along with hacked-off limbs.

Malani’s video installation, “Remembering Toba Tek Singh” (1998), responds to the show’s final event: the underground nuclear tests in Pokhran, Rajasthan, that were variously met with national pride and protests. Twelve monitors in refugees’ tin trunks play archival footage of Partition, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other nuclear explosions and refugee flows, while a video triptych stages a dialogue between India and Pakistan through two women actors fearful of a dawning nuclear age.

If Malani’s feat of memory charts how far the country had strayed from its founding ideals half a century after independence, this fine show attests to the inspired range, and formal inventiveness, of the artistic response.

To January 5 2025, barbican.org.uk