The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) is delighted to host artist Pushpamala N and scholar Deeptha Achar on January 7, 2026 as part of our Public Lectures series.

About the Lecture

‘Looking at Karnataka’s First Modern Artist K. Venkatappa’ by Pushpamala N

In an illustrated lecture, Pushpamala will introduce the art and dilemmas of  K. Venkatappa ( 1886- 1965), one of the earliest students of Abanindranath Tagore and the first modern artist of Karnataka, a seminal figure who has been strangely neglected by dominant art history. Much of his work is housed in the state art gallery — the Venkatappa Art Gallery in Bangalore — named after him, recently renovated after a long public protest by the art community. She will take the audience through his body of work, situating it in the artistic, social and political milieu of his times and his relevance today.

National Art, Regional Modernity, and the Litigious Life of K. Venkatappa by Deeptha Achar

K. Venkatappa, painter, sculptor, musician (1886-1965) has been, in twentieth century accounts of early modern Indian art, often considered a maverick, a minor footnote, a regional figure carrying back to princely Mysore nationalist impulses learned at Calcutta. Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa (Achar and Pushpamala, eds.) has not intended to restore him to an imagined ‘rightful place’, rather it tries to examine what kind of entry points a figure like Venkatappa can offer to an understanding of Indian modernity. The trajectory of Venkatappa’s life allows us to engage the question of modernity in relation to the cultural politics that shaped colonialism in princely states as well as in those areas of direct British control, and then again as colonial authority ceded power to a newly independent nation. His journey from Mysore to Calcutta back to Mysore and finally Bangalore could be read as a crossing through the heterogeneous terrain of colonial India at a moment when a nationalist imagination was in the making.  This presentation will focus on Venkatappa’s frequent appeals to law in the context of his artistic life, and will try to unpack the implications of this intersection between law and art. What are the lessons it holds for an understanding of citizenship?

About the Speakers

Pushpamala N

Pushpamala N has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”. In her sharp and witty work as a photo- and video-performance artist, sculptor, writer, and curator, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant discourse. She is known for her strong feminist work, informed by cultural theory, feminist studies and social science. Her work is shown worldwide and is in the collections of major museums like the Museum of Modern Art New York, Tate Modern London, Centre Charles Pompidou Paris, Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney, NGMA and KNMA Delhi and MAP Bangalore. She created a fictional platform for discourse, ‘Somberikatte’ (Idler’s Platform) in 1996 through which she organises talks and conferences. To celebrate 20 years of Somberikatte, she organised an international conference of the early modern artist K Venkatappa in Bangalore in 2016. Based on the papers presented at this conference, her co-edited volume: Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa has been published by Routledge ( 2025). She was the Artistic Director of the Chennai Photo Biennale , ‘Fauna Of Mirrors’ , for which she also organised an international conference on photography, Light Writing (2019). Recently she curated the print retrospective exhibition of Gulammohammed Sheikh: ‘Hand Prints/ Mind Prints’ and is now working on the book. She lives and works in Bangalore.

Deeptha Achar

Deeptha Achar has just retired as Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat. Among the books she has co-edited are Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (2003), and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012) apart from catalogue essays. Her most recent co-edited volume is Nation, Region, Modernity: The Art of K. Venkatappa (2025). She is the series editor of the Different Tales, a multilanguage series of illustrated children’s books that thematise marginalised childhoods. She has co-curated an archival show entitled Enlightenment from an Unlikely Envelope: Archives of Adil Jussawalla currently running at the Kerala Museum, Kochi. Her research interests include visual culture studies and childhood studies.