A cross-cultural dialogue: the modernisms of India and Indonesia

Modernism, as an aesthetic movement, has been a consistently contested subject in recent art historical discourses, especially with regards to the Asian region. Historically, the writing on the development of modernism has been embedded in the social, cultural and political contexts of Europe and America. However, recent scholarship has presented the possibility of multiple interpretations of modernism. Further pursuing this awareness of plurality and alterity, this paper explores a cross- cultural dialogue between the modernisms of India and Indonesia in order to locate a common ground for the comparative study of Asian alternate modernisms.
This thesis primarily focuses on the intersection of ideas that occurred in the early twentieth century with regards to parallel political, cultural and social developments in India and Indonesia, and in doing so establishes an intrinsic relationship between Asian alternate modernisms and nationalism. The paper explores an inter-Asian cultural dialogue2 between two regional educational movements in India and Indonesia – Santiniketan and the Taman Siswa schools – facilitated by Rabindranath Tagore and Ki Hadjar Dewantara respectively. These two educational movements became the sites of significant artistic developments in the two countries prompted by the infiltration of modern ideas into the regional and the consequential nationalistic sentiments.