Abstract
Symbolism has been one of the most persistent and transformative threads running through modern Indian art, connecting the anti-colonial imagination of the early twentieth- century Bengal School to the globalised installation practices of the twenty first century. This paper examines how modern Indian artists have used symbolic imagery — drawn from mythology, folk tradition, the human body, and everyday objects — to negotiate questions of nationhood, cultural identity, gender, memory, and social change. Beginning with Abanindranath Tagore's allegorical Bharat Mata (1905) and Jamini Roy's return to Kalighat and patachitra idioms, the study traces the symbolic vocabularies of Amrita Sher-Gil, the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group (M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, and Tyeb Mehta), K. G. Subramanyan, and Bhupen Khakhar, before turning to the reinvention of the symbolic object in the installation art of Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher. Drawing on art-historical scholarship, exhibition literature, and semiotic theory, the paper argues that symbolism in modern Indian art functions less as a static inventory of motifs than as an evolving, dialogic visual language through which artists have continuously renegotiated the relationship between tradition and modernity, the sacred and the everyday, and the individual and the collective. The paper concludes that symbolism remains a vital strategy for modern and contemporary Indian artists seeking to speak simultaneously to local cultural memory and global artistic discourse.