This pioneering work traces the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to transnational modernism and in light of the region's intellectual, cultural, and political developments. Art historian Iftikhar Dadi here explores the art and writings of major artists, men and women, ranging from the late colonial period to the era of independence and beyond. He looks at the stunningly diverse artistic production of key artists associated with Pakistan, including Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Zainul Abedin, Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha, Sadequain, Rasheed Araeen, and Naiza Khan. Dadi shows how, beginning in the 1920s, these artists addressed the challenges of modernity by translating historical and contemporary intellectual conceptions into their work, reworking traditional approaches to the classical Islamic arts, and engaging the modernist approach towards subjective individuality in artistic expression. In the process, they dramatically reconfigured the visual arts of the region. By the 1930s, these artists had embarked on a sustained engagement with international modernism in a context of dizzying social and political change that included decolonization, the rise of mass media, and developments following the national independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Bringing new insights to such concepts as nationalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and tradition, Dadi underscores the powerful impact of transnationalism during this period and highlights the artists' growing embrace of modernist and contemporary artistic practice in order to address the challenges of the present era.

This book is a detailed analysis of Sadequain's mural titled Treasures of Time, which pays tribute to mankind's intellectual advancement over time by depicting forty six eminent personalities in the history of mankind. At one end of the mural is a young worker of the Stone Age using a primitive tool with his bare hands. The imagery in the mural then moves to the right tracing the passage of time and captures the glorious days of the Greek civilization, followed by the European renaissance followed by the golden age of Arabs, then at the other end are shown 20th century luminaries, presenting a visual narration of history.

Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia is an engaging history of the enlightened liberality of modern Muslim poets, philosophers, educationists, novelists, historians, artists and public intellectuals who drew on a long Muslim intellectual tradition beyond the “Western” liberalism of empire. Interpreting the pathbreaking contributions of an array of creative Muslim figures, the book challenges the view portraying them as exemplars of an insular and defensive “apologetic modernity”. It highlights a strand of Muslim thought and liberality of mind that has been ignored by scholars obsessed with dire and dour theologians. This book questions both the presumptions of historians of liberalism that exclude Muslims from the domain of modern liberal thought and the predilections of those scholars of Islam who lean solely on discovering theological rigidity among ulama. It analyzes the forces that have contributed to the narrowing of intellectual space since the late twentieth century and the resilience of expansive and enlightened ideas that have kept candles flickering in the enveloping darkness. Foregrounding the enlightened conceptions of Ghalib, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Iqbal and Sadequain on faith, selfhood, history and time – and bringing other Muslim thinkers out of the shadows, the book offers a nuanced reformulation of the meaning of religion for our challenging times. It will be of interest to a wide readership interested in the history of Islam and South Asia.

The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture is the most comprehensive reference work in this complex and diverse area of art history. Built on the acclaimed scholarship of the Grove Dictionary of Art, this work offers over 1,600 up-to-date entries on Islamic art and architecture ranging from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, Africa, and Europe and spans over a thousand years of history. Recent changes in Islamic art in areas such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq are elucidated here by distinguished scholars. Entries provide in-depth art historical and cultural information about dynasties, art forms, artists, architecture, rulers, monuments, archaeological sites and stylistic developments. In addition, over 500 illustrations of sculpture, mosaic, painting, ceramics, architecture, metalwork and calligraphy illuminate the rich artistic tradition of the Islamic world. With the fundamental understanding that Islamic art is not limited to a particular region, or to a defined period of time, The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture offers pathways into Islamic culture through its art.

"The book looks at the great Pakistani painter from a new angle. The author writes on his personality, calligraphy, poetry, drawing and painting in the context of twentieth century modernism. Sadequain was a great modern artist who created a new art in which he interpreted change as the need of time. He was an innovative calligrapher, poet, master of drawing, mural and easel painting who combined his skill in all of these crafts/arts to create works which are unique in the world: honouring the modern viability of his culture of enlightenment which flourished from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries."--Publisher's website.

As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?

Shaila Bhatti's immersive study of the Lahore Museum in Pakistan is one of the first books to offer an in-depth historical and ethnographic analysis of a South Asian museum. Bhatti thus presents an alternative example of visitor experience and museum practice to that of the West, which has been the dominant museological model to date. This examination of the Lahore Museum's objects, staff, and visitors (past and present) provides an informative case study that reveals local perceptions and uses of museums in non-Western societies to be fraught with social, political, and cultural implications and appropriations. Through Lahore, Bhatti examines the history of exchange between Britian and South Asia and advances our current understanding of what constitutes postcolonial museum interpretation and its public.

Winner of the 2021 Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting, up-close portrait of a fractured country. Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times’s most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis—a chieftain readying for war at his desert fort, a retired spy skulking through the borderlands, and a crusading lawyer risking death for her beliefs, among others. Through these “nine lives” he describes a country on the brink—a place of creeping extremism and political chaos, but also personal bravery and dogged idealism that defy easy stereotypes. Unbeknownst to Walsh, however, an intelligence agent was tracking him. Written in the aftermath of Walsh’s abrupt deportation, The Nine Lives of Pakistan concludes with an astonishing encounter with that agent, and his revelations about Pakistan’s powerful security state. Intimate and complex, attuned to the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith, The Nine Lives of Pakistan offers an unflinching account of life in a precarious, vital country.