Cold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague

During the Cold War, the Central European capital city of Prague, alongside other locations in the polarized postwar world, emerged as a key site where an art world of significant importance for artists from South Asia developed. By emphasizing cultural mobility as a catalyst for exchange and network building, this book challenges and complicates assumptions about Cold War binaries of East and West, and the polarization between so- called totalitarian regimes and free cultures. It offers a narrative of decolonization that rejected rigid systemic alignments in favor of participation across political and ideological blocs. Positioning Prague as a nexus where South Asian modernisms intersected with multiple peoples, histories, and ideologies in the post-World War II era, this book proposes new ways of writing art histories that prioritize migratory aesthetics over nationalist parochialism. Including an extensive and first in-depth research into archival materials, the book makes a significant contribution to both Cold War studies and critical global modernism studies.