Paper Trails

This volume features over 100 watercolors, drawings, etchings, sketches and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, spanning the transition from colonial to post-colonial India.
Praise and Media: 
“ ...powerfully depicts the complexities of Indian modernity and the way they play out in rural and urban realities. ”
—The Week 
“ ...rare piece of scholarly writing about works on paper from post-Independence India. ”
—Avantika Bhuyan, Mint 
Media:  
Hindustan Times
Mint Business of Life
HELLO!
The Telegraph

India is a nation of conflicting realities where the old and the new, the traditional and modern regularly coexist. Visual narratives are vital resources in telling stories and facilitating communication. Here, the artists are concerned not solely with telling their own tales but also with exploring what it means to live in a nation steeped in tradition.
Within the context of modern and contemporary India, works on paper offered artists a way of cultivating transnational modernist expression while continuing to explore the potential of a medium that had deeper roots in older artistic traditions native to the subcontinent. This volume features over 100 watercolours, drawings, etchings, sketches, and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, born primarily before the 1950s and who came of age in the decades directly following Independence in 1947. These artists span the transition from colonial to postcolonial India, embracing both realism and abstraction, exploring complex metaphors, and making political statements that directly engage India’s past, present, and future.
With contributions by Tamara Sears, Rebecca M. Brown, Jeffrey Wechsler, Darielle Mason, Paula Sengupta, Michael Mackenzie, Emma Osle, Kishore Singh and Swathi Gorle, this book accompanies the exhibition at Grinnell College Museum of Art drawn from the collection of Umesh and Sunanda Gaur and curated by Tamara Sears.