Since there is a continuing interest in Indian contemporary art, not only in India, but also all over the world, one must look into why this is so. Of course, the most obvious thing that comes to mind, and in my view, the least intelligent, is that there is a large NRI population all over the world and they are the buyers.

This, in fact, is only part of the truth. NRIs are good buyers of contemporary Indian art and no one doubts that. But had it not been for significant collectors like Rudy von Leyden from Europe, Chester and Davida Herwitz from the US and Masanori Fukuoka from Japan, Indian contemporary art would never have got the exposure it has today. Fokuoka has made a museum of contemporary Indian art at Himeji while the Herwitz collection is on show in New York. Britain, which has some of the best works of Indian art, has also made a beginning at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. All these collections were there before the NRI wave really got going. So we must look elsewhere for what lies behind a taste in Indian contemporary art.

The most important thing, of course, is the technical excellence, the range and the richness of media worked in, which we have inherited from our craft traditions going back to ancient times. But the essential thing is not how we have preserved these traditions, but rather how we have conserved them innovatively and made them relevant to our times.

The range, of course, is a geo-cultural given. Few countries in the world are as well-endowed as India with cultural, aesthetic and technical diversity which our contemporary artists have been able to use to their advantage. We must realise, however, that there is nothing automatic about this. This geo-cultural variation could never have survived without the pluralist conception of our secular, democratic and all-inclusive struggle against British colonial rule, which demanded that all obscurantist, divisive and authoritarian tendencies were kept in check.

Only in such a climate could a hundred flowers bloom. And they did. It is this flowering and our success in keeping India united and secular despite every attempt by the colonial power to divide the sub-continent on communal lines that is the first basis of the special quality of our contemporary art.

Nandalal Bose: Untitled Water colour on paper

Indeed, it is the participation of our contemporary artists in a secular national movement that not only drew all regions and communities together against colonial rule but also allowed them, like Nandalal Bose, Ram Kinkar Baij, MF Husain, FN Souza, SH Raza and Salim Ali, to go beyond the limits of caste and religion and express themselves in the language of a complex composite society without whose influence our contemporary artistic expression is unthinkable.

This in itself, however, was the necessary condition for the development of our contemporary artistic expression, but not sufficient for it to evolve as it did. It required modernism and the courage to look at the past and its prejudices irreverently. Irreverence means neither criticism nor denigration. It meant being confident enough of one?s tradition to be able to laugh at oneself and be able to confront the new without being hamstrung by the old. This capacity to cull the new out of the old is what gives our art its contemporaneity.

Then there was its global appeal. Here too, while the contemporary artists of the West had to look to the colonial world, like Gauguin to Polynesia, Picasso and Matisse to Africa and Persia, to seek influences and visual languages untainted by the theatrical academic art of the dying empires as their own peasants and crafts persons had been destroyed and resurrected as cogs in the wheels of mass production, in India a powerful and successful peasant movement was the backbone of the national movement and its culture also survived.

The republic that came into being as a result of its upsurge naturally preserved and nurtured our folk culture in a post-colonial context that proved a boon for our contemporary artists who freely fed on this inspiration and reached new heights organically, without the break it required for western artists to evolve their contemporary expression.

This lack of necessity to make a break is the peculiar quality of the post-colonial art of ancient cultures, and India has its share of it. Symbolic abstraction, the art of found objects and an iconic art are part and parcel of the traditional repertoire of our artistic expressions. It was never destroyed by imperial single-mindedness and standardisation of mass-produced culture.