This course traces a chronology of South Asian art from its genealogies in late colonial image-making traditions from the 1850s to the present, situating modernist 'high' art in terms of its conversation with the broader field of cultural practice in modern India: cinema, vernacular bazaar prints, rural and tribal craft traditions, practices of popular devotion, and 'classical' artistic traditions. It investigates the theoretical and political concerns animating South Asian cultural practices and their criticism (nationalism, Marxism, secularism, anti-fundamentalism, Islam, feminism, postcolonialism, issues of diaspora and globalization), and addresses the key question of how to approach practices of modernism and postmodernism in the postcolony.