A black and white poster with a hand raised

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998 – Exhibition Report

Zana Mody

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998 (5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025) is currently on display at the Barbican Centre in London. The dates in the exhibition’s title mark a turbulent period in India’s history. 1975 was the year in which Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the state of Emergency, imposed a draconian regime on the country during which almost all democratic rights were suspended. Some twenty years later, in 1998, India began its Pokhran nuclear testing program – a pivotal moment in its contemporary history which launched the country onto the geopolitical global stage. Exhibited in London, some 77 years after Britain’s violent exit from the subcontinent, this landmark exhibition pivots us back to a critical period of transformation in postcolonial Indian history. The exhibition features over thirty Indian artists whose works encapsulate the political turbulence of the subcontinent in the later twentieth century. This was a time when life in India was marked by ‘social upheaval, economic instability, and rapid urbanization’, as the introductory essay in the exhibition guide tells us.

The title of the exhibition takes its name from Indian cultural historian Sudipta Kaviraj’s critical essay, The Imaginary Institution of India, published in 1991. In it, he details the complexities of conceptualising the myth that is India as a nation. It is a myth that many Indian writers at home and abroad continue to wrestle with to this day, not least Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, among many others. From a postcolonial standpoint, Kaviraj’s essay speaks to the difficulty of enforcing and maintaining a historical sense of the nation in a modern society that is characterised by wide-ranging diversity and plurality.

Spread across the upper and lower galleries of the Barbican’s exhibition space, the show opens with a striking painting by the artist and writer Gieve Patel entitled Two Men with Hand Cart (1979). The pink composition provides a hazy backdrop to the two central figures in the painting who converse alongside the tools and objects of their trade. The quotidian scene offers a snapshot of the metropolis of city where traders and skyscrapers co-exist. This is a metropolis under construction, gesturing to the beginning of a globalised India, while the warm pink tones cast a hazy portrait, gesturing to the stylised artistic practises of nationalist myth-making within the microcosmic space of the city. In the background, the sepia-toned buildings – partially outlined and unfinished – allude to the city that is yet to be constructed. Patel’s painting offers us a scene in which he (and we) can speculate about India’s future. By placing two labourers at the centre of this scene, he alerts us to the impacts of the country’s economic developments on its inhabitants.

Gieve Patel, Two Men with Hand Cart, 1979
Gieve Patel, Two Men with Hand Cart, 1979 (Image: Barbican)

The visceral shock of the Emergency between the years of 1975–1977 is explored by artist Navjot Altaf whose ink prints transformed into political posters and framed the resistance struggle. Inspired by the visual language of Cuban political propaganda, Altaf’s artworks are powerful talismans of a period of serious social and economic upheaval. Amid glossy layers of black ink, a fist emerges in the dark as a symbol of unity and resistance.

A personal standout in the exhibition was a series of photographs taken by Sheba Chhachhi. Her 1980–91 series, Seven Lives and a Dream, is the culmination of a decade spent documenting the lives of various female activists during ‘The Woman’s Movement’ in India of the 1980s, in what she refers to as ‘staged portraits’. Chhachhi points out in a 2016 essay that these photographs mark a transition in her artistic career. As she begins to consider the photograph as ‘fiction rather than as document’, we see how these staged and collaborative portraits invite us into the inner lives of these female activists.[1] Pictured below is a striking portrait of the young historian Urvashi Butalia in Delhi in 1990, around the time she was compiling material for what would go on to become a major artefact in the 1947 Partition Archive: The Other Side of Silence. The book is the product of a decade of recording and transcribing female experience of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. During this period, thousands of women were brutalised and mutilated in the name of religious and sectarian differences. If 1947 marks the year in which the ‘fault lines of our nation state were becoming visible’, to use Butalia’s own words, then 1997, the time of publishing, reveals to us that the faultlines are now ‘full-blown and growing’.[2] Surrounded by documents, data, and testimonies, Butalia in the photograph stares directly at the camera, calling us to interrogate the other side of the 1947 Partition of India and its horrific impact on female bodies.

A black and white photograph of a woman with typewriters on a table in front of her.
Sheba Chhachhi’s portrit of Urvashi Butalia, 1990 (Photo: Zana Mody)

The artworks in the exhibition augment our sense of postcolonial Indian culture and its many facets, tracing a progression of the nation state over two decades through the imagination of artists both at home and elsewhere. For a contemporary Indian art exhibition of this scale to be exhibited in the heart of the city of London exposes, to an international audience, the rapid transformation of the Indian landscape between 1975 and 1998. It urges both British and global audiences to consider where the country stands today.


[1] Sheba Chhachhi, Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (2016).

[2] Urvashi Butalia, ‘Return’ in The Other Side of Silence, 2nd edition (Haryana: Penguin Books, 2017).


Cite this: Mody, Zana. “The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998: Exhibition Report.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/the-imaginary-institution-of-india-exhibition-report/. Accessed 19 November 2024.