When considering the art of Muslim South Asia, one thinks of miniature paintings rich with details of Mughal emperors and their courts. For those who assume that innovation ceased in Indo-Muslim painting in the eighteenth century, Iftikhar Dadi's important book invites them to think again. Dadi introduces a group of Pakistan-based artists who have embraced transnational modernism, and argues that subjectivity and abstraction, two salient characteristics of modernism, have deep roots in Muslim pictorial art. In this, Dadi demonstrates once again that tradition and modernity are not mutually exclusive categories in South Asian cultural history. He also addresses the complex interaction of modernist Muslim painting with Urdu poetry, and the relationship of their combined cultural expression with the politics of the nationalist movement and the social upheavals of partition. This is thus a work, not only of art history, but also of cultural studies in the broadest sense. Dadi's analysis...

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