A retrospective explores identity as expressed by the Madras Art Movement

The Madras modernists of the '50s may have been the most important art school to have been largely neglected

When freedom was still a new circumstance for India, a group of artists in the southern swathes of the country busied themselves with the identity question: what did it mean to be Indian and how to explore that in one’s work? 

Ashrafi Bhagat, Art historian

Among them was S G Vasudev from Karnataka who felt the need to create visual art that was at once indigenous and modern. In his home state, men of letters, including his friend Girish Karnad, were writing in their own language, Kannada. For