Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia

This book explores the aesthetic forms of the political left across the borders of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film, literature, poetry and cultural discourse to illuminate the ways in which political commitment has been given aesthetic form and artistic value by artists and by cultural and political activists in postcolonial South Asia. With a focused conceptualization this volume asks: Does the political left in South Asia have a recognizable aesthetic form? And if so, what political effects do left-wing artistic movements and aesthetic artefacts have in shaping movements against inequality and injustice? Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, the contributors detail the trajectories and transformations of left-wing cultural formations and affiliations and focus on connections and continuities across post-1947/8 India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Sanjukta Sunderason is Senior Lecturer (UD1), in History of Art at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. A historian of aesthetic and intellectual formations of 20th-century decolonisation, she researches interfaces of visual art, left-wing thought, and transnational histories of postcolonial modernities. She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art & India's Long Decolonisation (2020). Lotte Hoek is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her ethnographic research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies and explores the public and political life of the moving image in South Asia. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (2014).

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason Chapter 1 A Melancholic Archive: Chittaprosad and Socialist Art in Postcolonial India Sanjukta Sunderason Chapter 2 Kagmari Festival, 1957: Political Aesthetics and Subaltern Internationalism in Pakistan Layli Uddin Chapter 3 Between Neorealism and Humanism: Jago Hua Savera Iftikhar Dadi Chapter 4 Lotus Roots: Transposing a Political-Aesthetic Agenda from South Asia to Afro-Asia Maia Ramnath Chapter 5 What got "left" behind: The limits of Leftist Engagements with Art and Culture in Post-colonial Sri Lanka Harshana Rambukwella Chapter 6 The Conscience Whipper: Alamgir Kabir's Film Criticism and the Political Velocity of the Cinema in 1960s East Pakistan Lotte Hoek Chapter 7 Look Back in Angst: Akaler Sandhaney, the Indian New Wave, and the Afterlife of the IPTA Movement Manishita Dass Afterword, Kamran Asdar Ali Bibliography Index