Papers by Sanjukta Sunderason
How Secular Is Art?, Mar 31, 2023
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, Jun 20, 2022
Often subsumed within narratives of political “transfer of power” from colonial empires to postco... more Often subsumed within narratives of political “transfer of power” from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization was a longue durée sociocultural process that traversed the long 20th century. Its trails were global and intertwined with parallel metapolitical processes like the Cold War, and it cast long shadows that revealed the afterlives of political decolonization beyond the events that marked the arrivals of independence. South Asia is a particularly fertile ground for studying such expanded temporalities, sociocultural structures, and shadows of decolonization. While the late 1940s saw the retreat of the British Empire from India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka after 1972), as well as the climactic partition of India and creation of Pakistan, decolonization itself remained an unfolding process. It manifested in continuing struggles around cultural sovereignty and the liberation war of 1971 that birthed Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan, and continued in unresolved ethnic conflicts and regional struggles for autonomy and social democracy. The cultural field offers a unique lens for reading the more quotidian and less spectacular sites where such longue durée trails of decolonization were experienced, negotiated, and imagined via artistic forms. Aesthetics of decolonization can be read as the sensorial, imaginational, and ethical negotiations of postcolonial freedom, as well as the micropolitical and contradictory dynamics that lay therein. It can loosen the metaframe of the nation-state and the nation-form to reveal both locational and subnational differences, as well as the multiple ways in which the global itself was filtered, invoked, or negotiated from below. Aesthetics of decolonization, in other words, is the imagination of a new historiographical modality for thinking through how freedom was visualized in the postcolonies, how such visions produced new cultural modernities unique to such transitional polities, and how such modernities can be read in their transnational trails in the long 20th century.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History
Often subsumed within narratives of political “transfer of power” from colonial empires to postco... more Often subsumed within narratives of political “transfer of power” from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization was a longue durée sociocultural process that traversed the long 20th century. Its trails were global and intertwined with parallel metapolitical processes like the Cold War, and it cast long shadows that revealed the afterlives of political decolonization beyond the events that marked the arrivals of independence. South Asia is a particularly fertile ground for studying such expanded temporalities, sociocultural structures, and shadows of decolonization. While the late 1940s saw the retreat of the British Empire from India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka after 1972), as well as the climactic partition of India and creation of Pakistan, decolonization itself remained an unfolding process. It manifested in continuing struggles around cultural sovereignty and the liberation war of 1971 that birthed Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan, and continued in unreso...
Visual Anthropology Review, 2015
In the wake of the January 7, 2015, attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo (in wh... more In the wake of the January 7, 2015, attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo (in which the magazine's editor, Stephane Charbonnier, along with cartoonists Cabu, Tignous, Honoré, and Wolinski, were killed), Ritu Gairola Khanduri's intimate history and ethnography of Indian cartooning has been given fresh global salience in addition to being an impressive piece of scholarship in its own right. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and ethnographic methods, the book explores the past and present meanings and uses of newspaper cartoons in India. At once original, carefully researched, and refreshingly candid, Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World makes a strong contribution to the fields of Indian studies, visual anthropology, political anthropology, and, given the in-between status of political cartooning, the ethnography of both art and journalism. Taking newspaper cartoons as a medium of political knowledge, communication, and engagement, the book works through a multifaceted analysis of key aspects of Indian modernity, liberalism, and democracyincluding the politics of gender, class, caste, and community-from the second half of the 19th century to the present. To connect the different sites and historical locations treated throughout the work, Khanduri designates "cartoon talk" (rather than cartoons themselves) as the central unit of analysis. This smart choice of method opens the way to a multisited ethnographic archive made from the life stories of senior cartoonists, interactions and interviews with junior cartoonists and amateurs, materials from personal and institutional archives, and excerpts from exhibition guest books, newspaper reviews, blogs, and more.
Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 2019
Third Text, 2017
We analyze the loss landscape and expressiveness of practical deep convolutional neural networks ... more We analyze the loss landscape and expressiveness of practical deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with shared weights and max pooling layers. We show that such CNNs produce linearly independent features at a "wide" layer which has more neurons than the number of training samples. This condition holds e.g. for the VGG network. Furthermore, we provide for such wide CNNs necessary and sufficient conditions for global minima with zero training error. For the case where the wide layer is followed by a fully connected layer we show that almost every critical point of the empirical loss is a global minimum with zero training error. Our analysis suggests that both depth and width are very important in deep learning. While depth brings more representational power and allows the network to learn high level features, width smoothes the optimization landscape of the loss function in the sense that a sufficiently wide network has a well-behaved loss surface with almost no bad local minima.
The American Historical Review, 2020
History of Humanities, 2018
La corrélative et le « quotatif » dans les langues indiennes : deux systèmes ... Linx, 11 | 2012 ... more La corrélative et le « quotatif » dans les langues indiennes : deux systèmes ... Linx, 11 | 2012 La corrélative et le « quotatif » dans les langues indiennes : deux systèmes ...
South Asian Studies, 2016
Histories of colonial caricatures and modern art in India converge in the brief yet dense oeuvre ... more Histories of colonial caricatures and modern art in India converge in the brief yet dense oeuvre of Gaganendranath Tagore, the modernist painter from early-twentieth-century Calcutta. Reading Gaganendranath's cartoons between 1917 and 1921 in dialogue with their lineages, peers, and potential, this article explores caricature as a critical aesthetic in the colony. Capturing tensions of participation and denial, desire and derision, caricature provided polemical tools for visualizing resistance in the colony. Under Gaganendranath Tagore, the genre was transformed into an aesthetic of rupture, bringing to visual art hitherto unexplored vocabularies of critique and expressionism. His cartoons reveal corporeal mechanisms at work that fused figuration with rhetoric, a satirical eye with modernist form, and politics with play. On one hand, this disturbed the idealistic 'Indian-style' paintings of the Bengal School, of which Gaganendranath himself was a key patron, and prompted on the other, critical possibilities within artistic realism as a late-colonial critical idiom, beyond its current academic naturalist structures. This play of and with contradictions, while being intrinsic to caricature, is Gaganendranath's modernist intervention into contemporary consensus and conventionssocial, political, or cultural.
Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories, 2022
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History., 2022
O!en subsumed within narratives of political "transfer of power" from colonial empires to postcol... more O!en subsumed within narratives of political "transfer of power" from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization was a longue durée sociocultural process that traversed the long 20th century. Its trails were global and intertwined with parallel metapolitical processes like the Cold War, and it cast long shadows that revealed the a!erlives of political decolonization beyond the events that marked the arrivals of independence. South Asia is a particularly fertile ground for studying such expanded temporalities, sociocultural structures, and shadows of decolonization. While the late 1940s saw the retreat of the British Empire from India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka a!er 1972), as well as the climactic partition of India and creation of Pakistan, decolonization itself remained an unfolding process. It manifested in continuing struggles around cultural sovereignty and the liberation war of 1971 that birthed Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan, and continued in unresolved ethnic conflicts and regional struggles for autonomy and social democracy. The cultural field o"ers a unique lens for reading the more quotidian and less spectacular sites where such longue durée trails of decolonization were experienced, negotiated, and imagined via artistic forms. Aesthetics of decolonization can be read as the sensorial, imaginational, and ethical negotiations of postcolonial freedom, as well as the micropolitical and contradictory dynamics that lay therein. It can loosen the metaframe of the nation-state and the nation-form to reveal both locational and subnational di"erences, as well as the multiple ways in which the global itself was filtered, invoked, or negotiated from below. Aesthetics of decolonization, in other words, is the imagination of a new historiographical modality for thinking through how freedom was visualized in the postcolonies, how such visions produced new cultural modernities unique to such transitional polities, and how such modernities can be read in their transnational trails in the long 20th century.
British Art Studies
This article explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan-Zainul... more This article explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan-Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan-to and through post-imperial London in the early 1950s. Sultan's cosmopolitan journeying, from Calcutta through Karachi and Lahore, to the USA and through London, to eventually settle in the countryside of Eastern Bengal, left traces in his practice, philosophy, and the narratives that have come to surround his work. Abedin's London stay was both as an artist from the former colonies and as an East Pakistani cultural bureaucrat representing the post-colonial nationstate of Pakistan. These two very different journeys are approached by the co-authors from two different disciplinary traditions (anthropology and history), to bring into focus the concept of "journeys of post-colonial modernisms." We show how the case of East Pakistan, with its incomplete decolonisation, shaped the travels and trajectories of these two artists and the ways in which their work was received and exhibited. We also show that this cannot be understood without the context of the Cold War, which facilitated particular routes for travel to and through art institutions globally, and which was to become crucial in shaping practice as well as conferring canonicity.
Navigating the Planetary, 2020
Initial thoughts in progress from my larger research/interest in art and internationalisms in the... more Initial thoughts in progress from my larger research/interest in art and internationalisms in the 20th century....This brief article introduces some conceptual parameters for understanding illustrations used in Lotus - the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers...a front organisation of the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organisation...and the visual mechanisms of imaging and imagining solidarities during the transitional decades of decolonization and Cold War...
Aziatische Kunst, journal of the Royal Society of Friends of Asian Art ( KVVAK) , the Netherlands, 2020
Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-García and Victoria H. F. Scott eds., Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 2019
This article discusses how Mao Zedong and Maoism have appeared time and again in the cultural ima... more This article discusses how Mao Zedong and Maoism have appeared time and again in the cultural imaginaries in India through the mid-twentieth century, continuing into the fraught domains of Maoist resistance in contemporary India. Rather than following reflections of Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism as a consistent and/or defined idiom in visual art, it will pursue the plural and often contradictory historical currents within which such resonances appear, and how they activate an aesthetics of margins and marginality. [...]
British Art Studies, 2019
This article explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan—Zainul... more This article explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan—Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan—to and through post-imperial London in the early 1950s. Sultan’s cosmopolitan journeying, from Calcutta through Karachi and Lahore, to the USA and through London, to eventually settle in the countryside of Eastern Bengal, left traces in his practice, philosophy, and the narratives that have come to surround his work. Abedin’s London stay was both as an artist from the former colonies and as an East Pakistani cultural bureaucrat representing the post-colonial nation-state of Pakistan. These two very different journeys are approached by the co-authors from two different disciplinary traditions (anthropology and history), to bring into focus the concept of “journeys of post-colonial modernisms.” We show how the case of East Pakistan, with its incomplete decolonisation, shaped the travels and trajectories of these two artists and the ways in which their work was received and exhibited. We also show that this cannot be understood without the context of the Cold War, which facilitated particular routes for travel to and through art institutions globally, and which was to become crucial in shaping practice as well as conferring canonicity.
Third Text Vol. 31 , Iss. 2-3, 2017
Histories of colonial caricatures and modern art in India converge in the brief yet dense oeuvre ... more Histories of colonial caricatures and modern art in India converge in the brief yet dense oeuvre of Gaganendranath Tagore, the modernist painter from early-twentieth-century Calcutta. Reading Gaganendranath's cartoons between 1917 and 1921 in dialogue with their lineages, peers, and potential, this article explores caricature as a critical aesthetic in the colony. Capturing tensions of participation and denial, desire and derision, caricature provided polemical tools for visualizing resistance in the colony. Under Gaganendranath Tagore, the genre was transformed into an aesthetic of rupture, bringing to visual art hitherto unexplored vocabularies of critique and expressionism. His cartoons reveal corporeal mechanisms at work that fused figuration with rhetoric, a satirical eye with modernist form, and politics with play. On one hand, this disturbed the idealistic 'Indian-style' paintings of the Bengal School, of which Gaganendranath himself was a key patron, and prompted on the other, critical possibilities within artistic realism as a late-colonial critical idiom, beyond its current academic naturalist structures. This play of and with contradictions, while being intrinsic to caricature, is Gaganendranath's modernist intervention into contemporary consensus and conventionssocial, political, or cultural.
Uploads
Papers by Sanjukta Sunderason
Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020; SERIES: SOUTH ASIA IN MOTION)
For abstract and excerpts from Introduction, see
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29337