Description

We remember Raja Ravi Varma. We remember M.F. Husain. We remember, perhaps, Amrita Sher-Gil. And then the public memory of Indian art tends, mysteriously, to thin.

In this landmark, beautifully illustrated cultural history, art historian Arunaa Vatsayan recovers a century of Indian painters whose work shaped how we see ourselves — and whose names have been quietly dropped from the syllabus, the auction catalogue, and the national imagination. The forgotten Bengal School women who were sidelined as the men of Santiniketan rose to fame. The Bombay Progressives’ uncredited collaborators. The Madras Group of the 1960s. The miniaturists of post-Partition Lahore whose archives travelled to Patiala and were never opened. The contemporary tribal painters of Jhabua and Bastar whose work hangs in European museums but not in Indian textbooks.

Drawing on twenty years of archival research and interviews with surviving painters and their descendants across India, Pakistan, and the diaspora, Vatsayan asks the harder cultural question beneath the missing names: *what does a country lose when it forgets how to look?*

Lavishly produced with over 140 colour reproductions — many published here for the first time — *The Last Brushstroke* is both a corrective and a love letter. To the painters India sidelined. To the women who held their brushes. And to a way of seeing that the nation is, even now, still in the slow process of forgetting.

Essential reading for anyone who cares about Indian art.