India–Africa: Shared Post-Colonial Narratives In Art

Policy Update
Manya Marwah

The post-colonial quandary, while being a highly subjective experience for the countries obligated to encounter it, has specific connotations on identity formation and consequently on the art that is produced as a result of it. While it is important to contextualise the colonial circumstance with regard to religion, culture, and geography, it is also interesting to analyse shared predicaments arising from a common historical superstructure, which, in the case of India and Africa, is the British colonial one.

Colonial background

Africa’s colonial experience is similar to India’s in the sense that the onset of both was a result of the mercantilist endeavours of the British Empire. Colonialist endeavours arising in the post-industrial revolution period meant that colonisers were not only interested in political power, but also in gaining economic advantage.

As a result of the colonial rule as well as the various movements and uprisings in response to it, both former colonies were left with redrawn state boundaries, leading to religious tension and conflict in the case of India, and ethnic tension in the case of Africa.

Colonial regimes not only imposed social and political hierarchies in these countries, but also visual and artistic ones. Eurocentrism stripped indigenous forms of ritual significance and regional context, with traditional African masks and sculptures exoticised in foreign museums and Mughal artefacts from India becoming merely tools for ethnographic documentation. A reinforcement, or perhaps a parallel, to increasingly Eurocentric narratives in colonised nations, is perhaps Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’, where the very representations of the East and the Global South by Western entities serve to fortify the colonial arrangement.

Western influence on literary intentions is evident specifically in Sarojini Naidu’s early efforts to voice the British Romantic expression, becoming later truly a ‘genuine Indian poet of the Deccan’ with an evolution of thought and with that of the anti-colonial movement itself.

It is evident from the present point of view that such an intervention and eventual reworking of large-scale cultural enterprises led to the fragmentation of existence, identity, and resistance subject to the colonial legacy—a narrative observed in the art and literature borne from the two states for years to come.

The Post-Colonial Art of Reclamation

Essentially, postcolonial art and literature in both India and Africa were a homage to Homi Bhabha’s understanding of cross-cultural relations through a ‘third transnational space’, allowing for the cultivation of the separate individualistic and autonomous entity of ‘hybrid’ culture. A scholar of postcolonial theory, Homi Bhabha challenged the essentialist nature of cultural identities, allowing for a national space that grows and integrates its experiences into novel artistic identifications.

This context is perhaps the explanation for the majority of art created in the postcolonial period. Ekkanath (2020) also noticed the emergence of literary theories such as ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, etc., which became ingrained, to a large extent, into the fabric of social commentary in postcolonial art and literature.

Baloch (2024), in reference to Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian novelist, said that writing in the English language meant that one was both engaging with the language of the coloniser while reclaiming it for indigenous storytelling at the same time. Whether it be Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ (1958), which is a complex exploration of the conflict-driven relationship between the Britishers and the traditional Igbo community, or Jean-Michel Basquiat’s visual interpretations of graffiti-inspired and neo-expressionist art, it is evident that the celebration of African culture and a simultaneous rejection of the colonialist ideology were underway.

Similarly, Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight Children” (1981) considers complexities and cultural hybridisation with regard to traditional identities, combining magical realism with historical revisionism to depict India at the brink of independence. British interpretations of local art forms such as Madhubani and Kalighat became tools of empowerment for local artists and a form of social commentary.

Imperial and colonial missions have long been associated with political violence, not only within the state, but also within indigenous cosmology and the environment, in accordance with Alfred Crosby’s “Ecological Imperialism” (1986), which relates European conquest to ecological consequences that coincide with imperialism.

Post-colonial art saw Indian Gond artists like Bhajju Shyam depicting co-dependent ecosystems between animals, humans, and spirits, as well as Sammy Baloji, who critiqued neo-colonial resource exploitation in Africa, responding to this political and environmental sadism. It is essential to recognise that this is not merely a reclaiming of all the territory deemed lost to colonial rule, but one that encompasses centuries-old memories, historical destinies, and mythical significance.

Reclamation also implied a renaissance of indigenous art forms, with institutions such as Santiniketan in India reimagining and integrating a traditional pedagogy with modernist ones, and artists such as Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose using rural inspirations and representation as opposed to Eurocentric ones.

In Africa, too, a similar synthesis was fostered. The “Natural Synthesis” movement, led by Uche Okeke, blended Igbo motifs with the modern techniques of abstraction. A defining consequence of such movements is a certain cultural sovereignty and autonomy over one’s own heritage and values, free from the imposition to which it was previously subject.

Afro-Asian Solidarity: External and Within

“Our nations and countries are colonies no more. Now we are free, sovereign, and independent. We are again masters in our own house,” President Sukarno of Indonesia said whilst delivering the opening address at the 1955 Bandung Conference, referring to ownership and autonomy that was fought for, a certain colonisation of the colonial movements.

While it can be argued that the Conference was merely a politically transnational one, there is much discourse about its visual, cultural, and somewhat theatrical efforts in Afro-Asian solidarity. Naoko Shimazu has claimed the conference itself to be a “theatrical performance,” using the city of Bandung as a symbol of both resistance and celebration for perhaps the first time on such a large scale. A genuine contemporary Afro-Asian partnership can thus be possible only with an understanding of each other’s respective histories and recognising subjective colonial experiences, and accepting similarities simultaneously.

After decades of cultural and artistic erasure by an imposition of colonial powers, it is a long journey towards the reclamation of not just national autonomy, but also that of the mind. There is inevitably a shared experience and formation of narratives between two countries having the same dominant political framework for the number of decades that India and Africa have been subject to. It is thus interesting to analyse how cultures and identities tend to exist as discrete entities within the nation or state, and their resilience in the face of a power that opposes them. The act is truly a gesture, or rather the tendency, of solidarity within.

References:

Boehmer, E. (2005). Stories of women: Gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation. Manchester University Press. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/31408/1/628400.pdf
Pathak, S. (2024). Colonial legacies: A comparative study of post-colonial narratives in select African and Indian novels. International Journal of Research Publication and Reviews, 5(7), 2119–2124.
https://ijrpr.com/uploads/V5ISSUE7/IJRPR31486.pdf
Baloch, J. (2024). Echoes of identity: Exploring cultural narratives in art and literature. Journal of Religious, Literature and Cultural Studies Volume: 01 Issue: 02.
Sundhani, Z. (2025, May 12). Colonial influence on folk arts and their revival post-independence. MeMeraki Blog. https://www.memeraki.com/blogs/posts/colonial-influence-on-folk-arts-and-their-revival-post-independence
Ekkanath, S. (2020). Understanding currents and theories in Indian and African postcolonial literature: Themes, tropes and discourse in the wider context of postcolonialism. INTERLITTERARIA 2020, 25/2: 379–393
Vaghela, S. A. (2023). Colonial shadows on natural landscapes: Postcolonial eco-critique in African literature. International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, 11(3).
https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2309487.pdf
Wang, L. (2022, June 12). Masters in our own house: Architecture in the visual culture of the Bandung Conference, 1955. MoMA Post.

About the Contributor: Manya Marwah is a Research Intern at IMPRI and is currently in her second year of undergraduate Economics honours at Miranda House.

Acknowledgment: The author sincerely thanks the IMPRI team for their valuable support.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization.