A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art Available to Purchase

Saloni Mathur's A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art is an eloquent, compelling, and theoretically sophisticated study of the achievements of Geeta Kapur (b. 1943) and Vivan Sundaram (1943–2023), a critic and an artist, respectively, based in New Delhi and married to each other since 1985, who joined hands in various projects, including the Kasauli Art Centre, an experimental space for making and thinking established in 1976, a group exhibition of painting Place for People (1980) held in New Delhi and Bombay, the interdisciplinary Journal of Arts and Ideas established in 1982, and the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, a collective of secular artists and activists established in 1989 following the murder of playwright, director, and actor Safdar Hashmi (1954–1989). Despite these joint ventures and lifelong allegiances to the Left, especially the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Kapur's and Sundaram's careers are rarely, if ever, analyzed together. At the...