Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980Following Indias independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an Indianness representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted Indias precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernisms pursuit of the new, and they challenged the Wests dismissal of non Western places