Samikshavad

movement 1974-present India North India

Samikshavad is the first indigenous art movement in modern India, launched in North India in 1974 and named from the Sanskrit samiksha - criticism of life and society. It grew out of the Painting Department of Banaras Hindu University under Prof. Ram Chandra Shukla, who sought art rooted in Indian soil rather than imitation of Western modernism or of past styles. Samikshavad painters use symbolic and satirical imagery to expose corruption in society and politics, aiming to free art from private mystery and give it a public, social purpose. Its manifesto was published at the first Samikshavad exhibition - twenty-six oil paintings at the AIFACS Gallery in Delhi in 1979, inaugurated by the politician Chandra Shekhar. The movement changed the scene of modern Indian painting in the late 1970s and remains a live current in Indian art.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Satirical, symbolic imagery critiquing social and political corruption
  • Roots in Indian soil: consciously opposed to imitating Western modernism
  • Narrative, legible painting with a direct public and social aim
  • Rejection of both academic convention and fashionable abstraction
  • Art treated as a social instrument rather than private mystery

Key figures

  • Ram Chandra Shukla (fl. 1970s) — Professor and head of Painting at Banaras Hindu University, initiator and theorist of the movement
  • Gopal Madhukar Chaturvedi (fl. 1970s) — Aligarh painter whose work entered the first Samikshavad exhibition of 1979
  • Raghuvir Sen Dhir (fl. 1970s) — Painter from Banaras Hindu University among the movement's first exhibitors

Sources

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