In the days of eternal India — when Time was timeless and life was lived according to caste codes — sixty years would have been deemed all too fleeting to gauge shifts in trends. But now India is in a hurry to be reborn in a new avatar. Technology has so shrunk space and telescoped time that whole epochs of change may be traced in the last six decades.

The exhibition titled Freedom: Sixty Years After Indian Independence (CIMA, Jan 18- Feb 16) looks back at what these sixty years of freedom have meant for Indian art. Has freedom finally freed local idioms of Western ‘isms’? Have Indian artists gone beyond underlining their Indian identity? Have the younger lot, born in free India, learnt to live both with their Indian roots and international parameters? And, finally, where in this mainstream scenario do the marginalized arts, like the tribal heritage, figure as genres?

Many major names are featured in this exhibition, although there are a few surprising omissions as well. However, rich compensation comes with the inclusion of rural artists. There are, in all, sixty works by sixty artists, starting with Abanindranath Tagore. The fragile, intimate ambience in his watercolour seems startlingly in tune with the times. A special treat for viewers is the calligraphic flair in Nandalal Bose, Sailoz Mookherjea and Binode Behari Mukherjee. Others included are Jamini Roy and Ramkinkar Baij. These path-breakers reaffirm their modernism in works of masterly understatement.

The next line of artists, who came into their own in the following decades, no longer needed to shoulder the nationalist agenda. Hence, abstraction made an appearance in the works of such artists as V.S. Gaitonde, S.H. Raza, J. Swaminathan and Ram Kumar. Gaitonde’s meditative oil is pervaded by a faint sense of disquiet as the somewhat burnt-earth- red of the ground throws up dark trails of subsoil around a scatter of accidental shapes, teasing in their hint of references. The remarkable simplicity of Raza’s structure induces a maze of overlapping geometric segments in an optical play that provokes enquiry. If Ram Kumar’s small work heaves with architectonic energy, Swaminathan balances fluent chaos and subtle order as he wraps space into the defined rectangles of a mandala.

But contemporaries like Tyeb Mehta, M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza were, at the same time, reinventing the figurative in exciting new ways. The three, along with Somenath Hore, must surely be labelled — if the oxymoron is excused — classical modernists. Here, the living creature, denied divine grace, becomes a brutalized victim of violence.

In Ganesh Pyne, Jogen Chowdhury, Arpita Singh, Bikash Bhattacharjee and those of their generation, you meet the layered contraries of public conscience and private mythology. Here are artists who so dominated the Seventies and the Eighties that batches of students were tempted to paint in their mentors’ idioms. And, not surprisingly, they often failed to find their own.

But the artists of the post-modern generation seem to enjoy greater freedom as they search for both new material and modes. Their bold, in-your-face assertions and deviations stem as much from their confidence in themselves as from the openness of the art market. Neither do they shrink from magnum dimensions and high decibel-levels, as Subodh Gupta, Sumitro Basak and Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar show. Nor will the likes of Jinsook Shinde and R.M. Palaniappan dress up prettily their spare and spartan abstractions. While Shreyasi Chatterjee discovers in the traditional feminine craft of cloth and needlework her own creative vocabulary, Gupta’s oil of giant steel utensils is a particularly striking hyperbole for the larger-than-life experience of India.

But the India experience would be fragmentary without a taste of the folk or tribal tradition. Four rural artists — all working on canvas — reveal how exposure to urban centres and an awareness of regional differences may have eroded the rigid practices of what were once closed communities. But it is such promiscuous interfaces that extend the language of art, as in the epic narrative of Midnapur’s Swarna Chitrakar. Space is 2-D and the flow of time — usually depicted in a sequence of frames in vertical pats — is suggested by simultaneous scenes that merge as one. But her squat figures speak of the stylization of both Midnapur and Kalighat, while the subject, Matangini Hazra, comes from recent history.

Equally riveting is Mayank Kumar Shyam’s Gondi painting from Madhya Pradesh. But here is a cityscape in ink where fantasy, in the form of a mythic bird, is as real as a flying machine. While Ram Singh Urveti’s beasts are captivating (picture, detail), Bhuribai brings alive, in acrylic on canvas, the quaint creatures of Bheeli painting from the mud walls of MP.