Each of the earlier shows was built around a broad art genre: figurative painting in one case, abstraction in the other. And each was made up of work done roughly between 1947, when India became independent from colonial rule, and the 1990s, when contemporary South Asian art began to merge into the global flow. “Radical Terrain” focuses on a third genre, landscape painting, and complicates the time frame by adding new work by youngish artists: some Indian, some not.
The West tends to be proprietorial about Modernism, treating it as a Euro-American invention copied, in inferior versions, by the rest of the world. But more and more this view has come to look parochial and wrong. In recent years historians have been studying the reality of multiple (sometimes referred to as alternative) modernisms that developed in Africa, Asia and South America parallel with,
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/arts/design/radical-terrain-at-the-rubin-museum-of-art.html?pagewanted=all