A murmur rises in the auditorium. ‘How can he say we haven’t thought . . .’

‘. . . scent of what?’

‘He's right. Modern paintings are . . .’

‘The colours of rangolis . . . ayyoyyo . . .’

Suresh Pancholi puts up a hand to silence the buzz and invites Ashutosh Sen to speak.

‘I’m going to make just a couple of brief points. In my opinion, there are some similarities between the time my generation picked up their brushes in the eighties and the generation that has turned its back on painting today. There was no demand in this country for our art in those days. Similarly there appears to be no demand in our country for the installation and video art that young people are producing today. Our feet were firmly rooted here, but our eyes were fixed on the West as we tried to relate to world art. I see that happening today too. About the charges made against the Progressive Group by the last speaker, I have only this to say. The years in which the Progressive Group was trying to find its language were a time of momentous transition. New paths were being sought in every field. The Bhakra Nangal dam was under construction. Le Corbusier had been invited to design Chandigarh. Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen had turned up the exploitative underbelly of our society. A little before that, Uday Shankar had made Kalpana, the film that gave dance a new language and status. The Progressives faced the challenges of the times and in many ways cleared the path for us who came later. In Bengal where I belong, Abanindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy had represented the two sides of the “genuine” Indian coin. But it was not a currency that was available to us. We couldn’t find ourselves in their work. I would like to assert that none of us rejected tradition. We merely moved it out of sight for a while to see ahead a little more clearly. We needed to destroy in order to make. This is true of all creative work. The artist stretches himself to almost breaking point to go beyond what is known and done. It is only when he does so that he is in a position to look back and examine what he has left behind, the traditions of art that took birth, grew and declined in this soil and the new traditions that are about to be born. He is in a position then to search for and determine his own creative space between then and now.