A decade back, a prominent art gallery in Delhi presented an unusual show. It focussed on one of India’s most famous political artists, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, known for brutally documenting the ’30s and ’40s. The show was a runaway success.
Here was an artist, famous during his time, but down the years, lost to time. Art aficionados and academics rediscovered him anew. Kishore Singh, Senior VP, DAG, says, “India has had one of the longest, continuous traditions of art practice. Newer practices came in and sometimes nudged out the older ones. This happened across the world.”
According to him, what India lacked, however, was a sense of documentation. “Calcutta was replaced as a capital by Delhi. So the focus shifted. Bombay took over as the art capital. Artists who were earlier performing wonderfully in Calcutta, were soon replaced. Also, there was no art infrastructure to preserve their legacy.
Later when the economy opened up in 1991, contemporary art became desirable for the globalised world, relegating the old names to the pages of time,” he says. Last year, things, however, changed. As KG Subramanyam, FN Souza, Ram Kumar and VS Gaitonde turned 100, the limelight also shone on their peers, who till now had been almost forgotten.
The art fraternity commemorated lesser-known figures alongside the masters—a cultural shift that can be attributed to a broader and more concerted exhumation by leading Indian galleries, museums and collectors to rediscover historically forgotten artists and bring their contributions back to the mainstream.
Samant who joined the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1952 was always something of an outlier, argues Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the KNMA. “There is a lyrical quality to how he treated his pictorial surfaces,” she explains. Samant was an accomplished sarangi player.
His music inspired his art and vice versa. Karode adds that much like an archaeologist, Samant “excavated fossilised layers, symbols and buried objects. He was drawn to civilisational myths and delved into realms of memory and magic in his multi-dimensional works”. The artist chose to settle down in New York as early as 1968.
So far away from home, why would anybody in America be interested in protecting his legacy? Also something happened to his near contemporary Avinash Chandra whose Indian identity proved to be both an advantage and a hindrance as he tried to establish himself in 1960s London.
Last year in December, DAG in Mumbai presented a show on Chandra pairing him alongside Souza—with whom he had a lot in common. This has been a trend with many art institutions and galleries—bringing a forgotten gem to the audience.
To coincide with Magic in the Square, KNMA also unveiled a sprawling exhibition of another unsung master, Amitava. If We Knew the Point catapulted him into the limelight, bringing him to public attention like never before.
For Roobina Karode, what made the paired exhibitions of Mohan Samant and Amitava particularly compelling was that it created an unexpected, cross-generational dialogue between two artists who never directly crossed paths, giving them a well-deserved afterlife. Even though last year marked a renaissance of sorts for the 78-year-old artist with back-to-back solo exhibitions in both Mumbai and Delhi, If We Knew the Point was by far the biggest.
Likewise, this year the art world is going through its long-lost archives and coming up with names who may not be as famous, but who nonetheless left an indelible imprint on the art scene in India.
Last year, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) hosted a blockbuster exhibition of one of India’s greatest modern artists you’ve probably never heard of. Running for over two months at their museum space in Saket, Magic in the Square celebrated the extraordinary life and times of Mohan Samant (1924-2004).
Though a member of the influential Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), Samant’s name appears to have slipped into obscurity while his contemporaries such as Souza, MF Husain and SH Raza became celebrities synonymous with modern art in post-Independent India. Magic in the Square sought to rehabilitate Samant in the public eye and as such emphasised his pioneering spirit, transcultural personality and his experimental approach to materiality which imbued his work with a palpable sense of drama and excitement.
It showcased at least 20 of his striking dreamscapes that beautifully summed up his modernist vision and a journey of his eventful life that gave birth to his artistic wonders. Influenced by everything from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Basohli miniature to Pre-Columbian ceramics, African sculpture and European modern art, he created evocative imagery that lent itself to different and fascinating interpretations.
As the show demonstrated, here was a man who experimented with unconventional materials like sand, cement, plastic and bent wires, pushing the boundaries of his craft—nothing special until you realise that was a time when age-old distinctions between traditional oil painting and mixed media bound the art world.
Amitava’s art draws a connection between nature and human existence even as the show’s poetic title symbolises the mystery of life and the futile attempts in decoding its meaning. The exhibition displayed over 150 works from his vast output, exploring a rich tapestry of forms, colours, textures and surfaces that evoked a spectrum of emotions.
For many years, Amitava avoided the spotlight while remaining an integral part of the capital’s art circle. “Unlike others, he did not put himself out there and did not even have gallery representation until we came along,” says Shefali Somani of the Delhi-based Shrine Empire, who had hosted his solo exhibition at Bikaner House in collaboration with Art Exposure gallery in 2024.
Renowned for its extensive collection of modern and premodern art, DAG is another institution that believes in honouring “the historical value of Indian art” and preserving “our artists, their continuity and legacy,” says CEO and managing director Ashish Anand. Through its three gallery spaces in Delhi, Mumbai and New York, it has shone a spotlight on a tapestry of hidden gems—GR Santosh, Shanti Dave, Gogi Saroj Pal, Avinash Chandra, Altaf, Sohan Qadri, Natvar Bhavsar and Gopal Ghose.
Besides, it has also held triumphal exhibitions celebrating the underexplored world of Company painters, such as Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) and his nephew William Daniell (1769-1837), who travelled extensively across India and left behind works that DAG has called “national treasures”.
A show titled Vision & Landscape in 2022 chronicled the journey of the Daniells, offering us a rare glimpse into colonial Indian architecture and landscape during the rule of the British East India Company. “We have held two retrospective exhibitions each on the artists Rabin Mondal and Gogi Saroj Pal, who have very divergent styles and held vastly different beliefs,” says Anand, who joined DAG—formerly known as Delhi Art Gallery—in 1996, barely three years after his mother Rama Anand founded the gallery.
Turn East and you’ll discover Emami Art, an exciting platform in Kolkata where overlooked Bengali visionaries like Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954) and Kartick Chandra Pyne (1931-2017) have found much-needed patronage long after their passing.
LM Sen’s name may not ring a bell but according to Ushmita Sahu, director and head curator at Emami Art, he was an inspiring educator and a versatile artist from the Gandhian era who trained at the Royal College of Art in London and whose work infused traditional Indian forms with Western academic realism.
Reportedly, he was the only Indian artist in the early 1920s whose woodcuts were displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London as permanent exhibits. Sen was born in Shantipur, West Bengal, before moving to Lucknow where he would spend most of his life. In his extremely short but prolific career, he experimented across a diverse range of mediums, including oil painting, portraits, watercolour, drawing, sculpture, posters and illustrations.
What’s more, he was also a photographer—a lesser known facet of Sen which Emami Art has recently highlighted at the Chennai Photo Biennale 2025. Despite his accomplishments, Sen’s art remains little known due to his distance from major art movements like the Bengal School or the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group.
His distinctive works are held in private collections and archives, including the Lalit Mohan Sen Archive, which is reclaiming his legacy now. Sahu reveals that after Sen’s untimely death in 1954 there was nobody to take care of his collection.
“Besides the family collection of his physical works with us, the CSSSC and Victoria & Albert Museum have digitised his art and many of them are available online today. The difficulty of getting access to his original works and his archives is one among many reasons behind his little-known popularity,” explains Sahu.
Kartick Chandra Pyne, on the other hand, was a surrealist par excellence, a fact driven home by Emami Art’s celebratory show on the artist in 2021. The (In)Visible & The (Un)Revealed: Inside the Secret Worlds of Kartick Chandra Pyne was a revelatory experience that finally helped put one of Indian modernism’s most enigmatic figures on the map.
This comprehensive survey told the story of a talent who conjured his own magical universe, populated with dreamlike, folklorish figures and primitive landscapes that defied conventional categorisation. The show served as both a celebration and a gentle indictment of the art world that has no time for veterans like Pyne who were forced to languish on the edges of the mainstream.
Sahu points out that a major turning point in the artist’s trajectory was the 1979 Fukuoka Art Museum’s exhibition of modern Indian art, where his masterpiece Moon Bath was presented. Despite fashioning a body of work that rivaled contemporaries like that of Jagdish Swaminathan and Sakti Burman in its modernist spirit and subconscious imagery, Pyne remained curiously absent from the mainstream narrative.
“A key factor in this relative obscurity is Pyne’s preference for a more introverted lifestyle, which kept him away from the commercial art scene and international limelight. Unlike his peers, Pyne focused on a small circle of artists, students, and connoisseurs, particularly within Bengal,” says Sahu, whose gallery is all set to take Pyne’s works to the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata this month.
A similar obscurity surrounded ace sculptor Sushen Ghosh (1940-2023). Ghosh, who was mentored at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan by none other than Ramkinkar Baij, famously described the art of sculpture as “frozen music”. It is easy to see why. He was a passionate flautist and many of his works were paragons of abstraction, expressing themselves through an inner sense of rhythm, notation and cadences associated with music.
It was Supriya Banerjee, founder of the Kolkata-based Galerie 88, who unearthed this hidden gem from 20th century Bengali art. After his death at age 83, Banerjee decided to collaborate with the artist’s Santiniketan-based daughter, Mohua Ghosh to fulfil their collective dream of hosting a retrospective in both Mumbai and Kolkata.
The resulting show, Lyric, Still, was an ode to Ghosh’s life and times. Decoding why Ghosh has remained under-recognised, Project 88’s founder Sree Banerjee Goswami says, “He was more immersed in creating his works rather than making exhibitions. He was constantly working without paying attention to the demands of a commercial marketplace.
In that sense he freed himself of the market.” Last year, Goswami and her mother also illuminated the legacy of Sudhir Ranjan Khastgir (1907–1974), another reclusive master from Santiniketan whose short-lived yet leading voice needed to be heard outside Bengal.
The most thrilling aspect of the ongoing process of historical revisionism is how it has led to the rediscovery of female artists and a renewed interest in their hitherto under-appreciated legacy. Historically speaking, in spite of their prodigious artistic gifts, female voices have often found themselves unheard and largely ignored—either because of their gender, due to socio-political reasons or maybe they were simply ahead of their time.
Amrita Sher-Gil was the outlier; because of her lifestyle and pedigree she knew how to be in the limelight and get the admiration she so rightly deserved. But others were not as lucky. It is only now that these women artists are coming into focus. Take the show Mythic Femininities at DAG, which was a love letter to Gogi Saroj Pal, who passed away just months before its opening.
Pal is now recognised as one of the greats of modern Indian art standing shoulder to shoulder with other women artists of her time, such as Zarina, Arpita Singh, and Shobha Broota. Her distinctly feminist voice sought to challenge the prevailing male gaze. The KNMA hosted a major survey of the Delhi-based Anupam Sud’s works in 2022. It boasted a sprawling collection of 215 paintings by Sud, titled Between Vows and Word.
Contends Roobina Karode, “Most people were pleasantly surprised with Anupam’s intense and compelling practice.” Karode has long been drawn to the practices of female artists in India and has “tried to through my interventions uncover their stories and journeys”. Sud was also a printmaker, an already underrated art form that becomes much more underappreciated when practiced by a woman.
"It is difficult to find adequate attention or mention of Anupam’s practice in the conventional art historical or critical discourses, perhaps because printmaking does not hold the same stature in the larger art consciousness as paintings or, now, sculptural installations do,” admits Karode, who had co-curated an exhibition of Nasreen Mohamedi in 2016 along with Sheena Wagstaff, putting Mohamedi’s art of sublime minimalism, repositioning her as one of India’s greatest abstractionists.
Things have changed as far as printmaking and women artists are concerned. Big names like Jayasri Burman and Seema Kohli occasionally resort to the medium, and their prints—though the numbers may not be large—have garnered a loyal following in the contemporary art world.
Artists who have lived outside the big city bubble often found themselves on the margins. Despite Santiniketan being one of the major centres of art in India, Benode Behari Mukherjee remained relatively little known in spite of commanding a loyal following within the artistic circle.
And then there’s the curious case of Leela Mukherjee, a pioneering figure who got buried under the weight of not just the masters of the Santiniketan school of modernism like Nandalal Bose, Abanindranath Tagore and Ramkinkar Baij but also of her husband, Benode Behari Mukherjee.
Women artists have always had to contend with historical forces and navigate their own path far more than their male counterparts and this holds “through different histories and continents across the world,” says Roshini Vadehra, director of Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi. In the summer of last year, the gallery devoted its space to Leela Mukherjee’s sculptures, showing us why her art still resonates today.
The gallery also spotlighted Leela’s daughter Mrinalini Mukherjee, who was an acclaimed sculptor in her own right with the show Leela Mukherjee: A Guileless Modernist, accompanied by a major book that painted the portrait of an artist who deserved to find her way “back into the discursive space of modern Indian art to which she rightfully belongs,” as art historian R Siva Kumar insisted in his exhibition essay.
The big question is whether there’s a market for unsung masters and if so, what does this trend entail for the Indian art world. Girish Shahane, a Mumbai-based art critic and curator, argues that there’s a growing appetite among collectors for under-rated gems.
“Not everybody can afford a Rembrandt, so they’ll go for other Dutch painters from the golden age. I think it’s a very healthy trend and that’s how these artists gain a second life in the public consciousness,” says Shahane, who curated Solitary Companions for Gallerie Splash in Gurugram last year, primarily aimed at cementing artist Naina Dalal’s place within the wider Baroda school.
Sunny Chandiramani, senior vice president, client relations, at AstaGuru Auction House, confirms that lesser-known masters like Rajendra Dhawan, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Sobha Singh and Pilloo Pochkhanawala have performed well at their auction in the recent past.
For example, in 2022, an untitled abstract work by the Paris-based Rajendra Dhawan sold for Rs 5,87,583 while in 2024 another work by Dhawan was acquired for Rs 10,38,400. Galleries and museums are already stepping up to the challenge of shining light on stories of individual expression while investing in scholarly research and timely exhibitions around human diversity that help broaden the scope of art history.
“What we may push for are certain systemic changes in the art world, whether in evaluation, consideration, education or overall ‘broadening’ which will limit the number of artists who fall through the temporal cracks,” says Karode.
The cracks are widening and resplendent ghosts are rising up from forgotten and colourful pasts to being new values and sensibilities to the Indian savant.