Art in the World of a Newly Independent Nation
by associate producer, Shubha Bala
Artist Sayed Haider Raza at Mission Delhi. (photo: Mayank Austen Soofi/Flickr)
“What was so revolutionary was that they insisted on being ‘Indian’ and ‘modern.’”
—Maithili Parekh
The Progressive Artists Group was founded in India in 1947, the year the country gained its independence from Britain, to “look at the world from an Indian way, not a British way,” according to Sayed Haider Raza, one of the two living original members of this group. The New York Times recently interviewed the artist about the continued legacy of this collective, which was disbanded just a decade after its creation.
“Our ways of looking at models and compositions reflected our education, which was British. In the ’30s and ’40s there was this shift from the British way of looking at art to an Indian way, which was not just about knowledge but also informed by the senses.”
Liberty as Inner Work
Trent Gilliss, online editor
As I mentally prepare for the annual Fourth of July parade in Mandan, North Dakota that will last hours, I remembered Krista’s enlightening interview with Jacob Needleman, a philosopher who spoke about the spiritual and moral ideals of the American founders — and how these ideals resonate in our culture today.
Democracy, Needleman says, is inner work, not just a set of outward structures. And, as we as a society reassess our priorities during these uncertain economic times, his conversation from several years ago seem particularly prescient, and wise:
“It’s become so trivialized, freedom. It’s wonderful to be able to go where I want and do what I want and buy what I want, buy and buy, and get and get, and talk and talk, and I have no constraints. We certainly need external liberty. God knows that’s one of the most precious things this country has to offer the masses of humanity who have come here. I don’t mean to put that down in any way. Without that, without that, the rest is just academic. But without the inner meaning of freedom and liberty, we have to ask, ‘Well, what is this freedom for?’ It’s not just a freedom to get a big house and a big car and a lot of goods. So inner freedom is an idea that has gone out of our conversation. Inner freedom means inwardly to be free from these egoistic, selfish cravings, which make our life turn around into chaos. It’s an interior freedom which maybe you can say is mystical or certainly spiritual, but without that dimension to the idea of freedom, the idea of freedom becomes purely external and eventually selfish.”
