Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia

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 IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South AsiaLotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason Chapter 1A Melancholic Archive: Chittaprosad and Socialist Art in Postcolonial IndiaSanjukta SunderasonChapter 2Kagmari Festival, 1957: Political Aesthetics and Subaltern Internationalism in PakistanLayli UddinChapter 3Between Neorealism and Humanism: Jago Hua SaveraIftikhar DadiChapter 4Lotus Roots: Transposing a Political-Aesthetic Agenda from South Asia to Afro-AsiaMaia RamnathChapter 5What got “left” behind: The limits of Leftist Engagements with Art and Culture in Post-colonial Sri LankaHarshana RambukwellaChapter 6The Conscience Whipper: Alamgir Kabir’s Film Criticism and the Political Velocity of the Cinema in 1960s East PakistanLotte HoekChapter 7 Look Back in Angst: Akaler Sandhaney, the Indian New Wave, and the Afterlife of the IPTA Movement Manishita DassAfterword, Kamran Asdar AliBibliographyIndex

A first of its kind, this volume liberates the history of the left in South Asia. Focussing on 'form', the left is reconvened as an aesthetic force seeking to reshape our sensory and material being. In the face of aggressive nationalist aesthetics, Forms of the Left offers a critical alternative.