Despite the fact that Indian painting is among the most precious legacies inherited by mankind as a whole, literature about it is not as adequate as it should be and a comprehensive history was lacking. It was for amending this serious anomaly that Krishna Chaitanya and Abhinav took up the landmark project of a detailed history of Indian painting and, during the period 1976-1984, managed to bring out four volumes. This is the fifth and final volume. The fourth volume had closed with the exhaustion of the Rajput schools bringing the story up to the end of the eighteenth century. A stereotype of current art history is the assumption that the nineteenth century saw almost a total decline of the arts in India. The volume presents ample data to show that, at the level of folk culture, the visual arts continued to flourish with very little loss of vigour. It has many further paradoxes to reveal. The revival of classical art in the first decades of the twentieth century was in spite of its loud claims seriously flawed; but the even louder claims made by the many ‘Progressive’ groups in their manifestos at the time of independence were swiftly forgotten; art became formalist and took to imitating the fashions of the west. It is now the fashion to deride this, but the language of art had proliferated into many dialects and Indian artists would have remained illiterate if they had not learned to discourse in all of them. The volume has traced numerous fascinating ways in which genes in the gene pool of tradition have modulated and mutated to modernism. While, in order to be art, aesthetic and formal criteria have to be fulfilled, in order to be great art, some alliance to great human ends has to be forged. The evaluation of art kept this consistently in mind and it has revealed modern Indian art to be as spiritual, though in its own strange way, as the traditional.
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