In Baroda’s modernist world, boundaries between painting, sculpture, print, and craft are meant to cross. At the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, art was never just taught—it was questioned, debated, dismantled, and remade. That restless spirit can be seen at DAG, New Delhi, in Freedom to Form: Baroda Modern, which brings together nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and mixed-media works alongside rare archival material.
Baroda-based artist and teacher, Rekha Rodwittiya, who joined the Faculty in 1976 to study painting, is among those who experienced this world from within. Her years there coincided with a particularly charged period, shaped by artists and teachers including KG Subramanyan, Jeram Patel, Jyoti Bhatt, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Nasreen Mohammedi. What distinguished Baroda, she recalls, was not simply the calibre of its teachers but the freedom of its pedagogy. Their “interpretation and intervention” encouraged students to find new approaches and voices, while rigorous critique and theoretical writing opened up questions of colonial influence, cultural identity and representation. The aim was “not to alter a past history nor ignore the need to remain engaged and involved with the West; but to re-contextualise and find new methods” of articulating an Indian aesthetic through regional and vernacular connections.
Students were encouraged to respond to a country in flux—its cities, politics, cultural identities and aspirations—while questioning the inherited frameworks through which these realities had been represented. “The faculty of Fine arts in Baroda encouraged a pluralist approach within the studios,” Rodwittiya says, “yet pushed the discourses to imagine a shift away from established modules of past representation.”Artists such as MF Husain, Gieve Patel, Akbar Padamsee, and Somnath Hore, alongside folk and tribal artists, were regular visitors. “Informal conversations in the canteen or on the steps of the archives would be open for students to witness,” Rodwittiya recalls.
From the 1960s onward, artists, young teachers, and students returning from abroad began searching for visual languages that could speak to a modern India. “There was a swagger to this new confidence where these artists were comprehending their own worlds and challenging old orders and recognising how to merge a past with a present to shape new thinking,” Rodwittiya says. Departments worked closely together, creating what Rodwittiya calls a “synergy of learning”, while students were pushed to “always explore and push our boundaries”. Though she studied painting, she also pursued photography under Jyoti Bhatt, reflecting the porous disciplinary culture of the Faculty.
But inheritance was never unquestioned. Every generation, Rodwittiya observes, develops its own “polemical positions with the establishment”. What begins as experiment becomes history, only to be challenged in turn. That friction between teacher and student, inheritance and resistance, established language, and new possibility kept Baroda in motion.
The contradictions were equally important. Despite its progressive reputation, Rodwittiya encountered patriarchal attitudes within the Faculty, experiences that became central to the evolution of her feminist practice. “The instinctive protection of my feminist territory was always in play for me,” she says. At her final degree show, she presented staged family portraits of herself, her former husband and child against dense foliage. Beneath their almost precious surfaces were “the undertones of a cloying sense of decay”. She calls these works “interior landscapes”—a metaphorical monologue that marked the beginnings of her feminist positioning.
Yet Rodwittiya resists reducing Baroda to a neat historical label. “I am sceptical to pin a label to define this period,” she says. Perhaps that is the freedom at the heart of the exhibition. Baroda modernism was never a single style. It was a space in which artists could pursue shared questions through radically different visual languages—where tradition and modernity were not opposites, but materials to be rearranged, recalibrated, and made new.