The Art of Secularism probes the enormously complex dialectic between religious iconography and the secular image within the trajectories of modernism in India, and engages with some of its most volatile effects - censorship, blasphemy, intolerance, violence - in careful and intelligent ways. It opens up many powerful questions and lines of investigation, and will no doubt help galvanise future discussion in this under-explored scholarly terrain.
Saloni Mathur, Associate Professor The Art of Secularism is an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on Indian art and visual culture: a timely, clear-headed, and sensitive investigation of Indian modernism at the flashpoint between the 'normative secularity' of art and politicised religiosity in the public sphere. Zitzewitz compellingly shows us how secularism is itself an art, a set of practices unfolding here as a richly textured range of responses to variously felt aesthetic and ethical imperatives to engage religious image-traditions. Her art historical account of artists and works is interwoven with a vivid ethnographic sense of the Indian art world and its performative contexts: not only its spaces of production, display and critique, from the studio, art school and gallery to the internet, law court, and cityscape, but also the deep ethical bonds of friendship at its heart. With remarkable economy, theoretical verve, solid groundwork and lovingly detailed observation she renders this complex terrain legible to those unfamiliar with it; for those inhabiting it her analysis will provide fresh resources to face the deepening threat to their freedom.
Kajri Jain, Associate Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art