Readings on Modernism: From 75 Years of Marg

Edited by Shukla Sawant

MARG Magazine

English

Softcover

The term “Modernism” began to resonate in many different ways across the world and Marg played an important role in debating and disseminating its meaning to its English-language readership. Global modernity was relayed through a network of intellectuals, who had connected in metropolises in diverse contexts—students, political exiles or refugees, torn from their place of origin due to a world in conflict. When Marg started out, the world, and India, in particular, was on the threshold of new political formations and the writers who contributed to the journal were insiders to the art world. The intention in this volume is to reflect on how the journal constructed the idea of Modernism in its early years. The essays selected from the Marg archive thus offer a synoptic view of the period of high colonialism, the early twentieth-century call to nationalism and the era of political decolonization. Broadly, the period we have covered begins just before the Permanent Settlement of Bengal was enacted by the East India Company in 1793 and ends in the early 1970s. It is a period when different worlds collided and despite the precariousness brought about by colonialism and its attendant violence, it was also a period of profound creativity and mutual transformation.