Every lover of Indian art knows this story: in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence from British rule, six firebrands united in Bombay to forge a modern art for the newly free nation. They were the Progressive Artists’ Group (also known as ‘the PAG’). What does the PAG’s commitment to a heterogenous nation; a multi-cultural past have to offer us today? Art historians Karin Zitzewitz (KZ), Sonal Khullar (SK) and Zehra Jumabhoy (ZJ) unpack the loaded and inter-connected complexities of the modern and the secular given the trajectories of nation-building and cosmopolitanism in the art of those associated with the PAG.

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