In many ways this essay aims to provide a snapshot or a taste of ‘South Asian’ art in Britain which is conceptually at odds with some of the debates that it will introduce to you; namely, the tension between recognizing the contributions and achievements of South Asian artists whilst simultaneously critiquing the marginalization and exclusion of such artists from what we might call ‘the mainstream’. It is a tension between that which is described as ‘the particular’ being recognized for its ‘particularity’ whilst suggesting, at the same time, that ‘the particular’ is no less part of the ‘universal’ than that which is already considered ‘universal’. So, in drawing attention to the contributions and work of South Asian artists, are we, at the same time, continuing to mark them as different and separate?

Despite this, however, it is possible to tell a story of South Asian art in Britain. The story we tell here is necessarily incomplete due to limited space. As such, there are omissions, gaps and absences that reflect, of course, the perspectives of the authors. These absences and silences are regrettable but we would hope that this brief overview would encourage the reader to find out more and consequently flesh out the story further.

This story has a long history and cannot be removed from the context of colonialism and the Empire in the nineteenth century and migration and settlement from South Asia to Britain in the twentieth century. This story can also be told, not simply through a historical framework documenting social, demographic, economic and political changes and inserting peoples, places, movements and works accordingly, but also through an understanding of how and why peoples, places, movements and works have been documented (or not) The story of South Asian art and artists is one of shifting boundaries, blurred beginnings and uncertain futures. It is also a story that has many characters, plots, sub-plots and denouements that are dependent on time and place, it is also a story intersected by questions of ethnicity and gender (among others). Any story we relate here is reliant on a certain set of essentialisms and assumptions that construct a sense of South Asian-ness regardless of whether the artists and movements included want(ed) or intent(ed) this. This story struggles to locate itself both within and without of the euro-centric history of art which has periodically excluded, marginalized, exoticised and denigrated artists and art works of the ‘other’ whilst constructing a mythical trajectory that links together the histories and achievements of the so-called ‘West’ unproblematic ally.

This is not simply a story, however, of South Asian Peoples, it is also a study of how the artistic motifs and symbols of ‘South Asian’ have been incorporated into the works of ‘Western’ artists and a consideration of how this incorporation is understood and theorized. The story of South Asian art and artists does not stand in isolation; there is a long and continuing history of exchange and crossover. This exchange and crossover has not necessarily been on equal terms, as the status and achievements of the ‘Western’ artist have been elevated above those of South Asian origin in numerous ways; for example, through reference to the ‘authentic’, the ‘spiritual’, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘tribal’. Nonetheless, artists have struggled to find voices and spaces from which to work, and it is these voices and spaces that we will consider here.

The issues affecting South Asian art and artists have changed over time as debates have moved on and artists and writers have challenged the euro-centricity of the art world. Certainly the Britain encountered by artists and writers such as Francis Newton Souza and Avinash Chandra in the 1950s is different to the Britain encountered in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000 onwards by new generations of artists such as, for example, the internationally renowned Anish Kapoor and others such as Chila Kumari Burman Amrit and Rabindra KD Kaur Singh or Said Adrus.

Beginnings

As we have already mentioned, the story of the South Asian art in Britain cannot be disconnected from its colonial roots. The relationship between the concept of ‘art’ and ‘artists’ was transformed (both in the UK and in South Asia) by its encounter with ‘the other’. In the UK, the motifs and symbols of the exotic ‘East’ entered the creative repertoire of artists and designers and in South Asia (post 1850), the British attempted to elevate the status of artists from that of a humble and traditionally defined position to that of an educated elite, particularly in India. This meant the end of the traditional artists as a class. The Westernization of India was enthusiastically supported by the literate elite whose command of the English language gave them power over those who did not have the language of their colonial masters. This linguistic hierarchy was extended to the realms of visual language where it was seen that the aesthetic of traditional India was lacking in the benefits of the European Renaissance. The concepts of chiaroscuro, and linear perspective moved the conceptual intentions of the visual arts to the need to create a facsimile, a likeness of the subject.

The British set up art schools in three major Indian cities based upon the model of British art schools, teaching drawing in the Western style exemplified in the aesthetics of South Kensington, and by the mid- nineteenth-century much traditional art began to disappear. In Britain the only major Asian artworks, which were to be seen, were in the major museums, particularly the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum. The art schools in India were set up in the 1850s in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras along the lines of the new English art schools which, in turn, were modeled on the School of Industrial Arts in South Kensington. The Government acknowledged that Indian artisans had little to learn from their European counterparts in matters of taste but that the artists needed instruction in scientific drawing. When traditional artisans were made to draw from the antique they couldn’t see the point in drawing what they saw as immodest statues of European ladies and gentlemen. The moral of the story is instructive: these students who did benefit from the art schools were not the artisans but those who hailed from English educated groups. The teachers in the new art schools were it seems from South Kensington and they brought with them exemplary drawings by English art students as though to provide evidence of a superior reality (Mitter, 2001). So, in the encounter between the arts of the Britain and South Asia there was a cross-fertilization of style, content, technique and subject matter. In South Asia, influences from Britain had some impact on the development of the arts either through rejection or incorporation. In Britain, of course, the same applied however what is interesting for the purpose of this essay is a consideration of how incorporation, rejection and positioning has been inserted into a discourse of art and artists that has placed South Asia at the periphery.

Moving Forward… After the War

The story of South Asian art and artists in Britain begins to gain some momentum in the post-war period as artists from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh begin to settle in Britain. The work and development in South Asian art are not confined to Britain, as there was much movement between the UK and the sub-continent as artists settled in Britain, returned to South Asia and then returned to settle once more in Britain. For example, in 1946 Evan Peries (Sri Lanka) settled in London, returned to Sri Lanka in 1954/53 and subsequently came to live permanently in England. As Araeen points out, this arrival of artists in London from the ex-colonies in the post-war period fits an established pattern of how artists, across countries and history, have traveled from one place to another in search of patronage (Araeen, 1989) see, for example, the concentration of artists in Paris in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries. Although many artists struggled (Peries, for example, has been described as lonely, isolated and faced with hostility by Araeen (1989: 21) when they arrived in Britain, there were some artists such as Francis Newton Souza (India) and Avinash Chandra (India) who became very successful despite initial periods of poverty and unhappiness. These two artists in particular began to exhibit their work in the 1950s and were phenomenally successful throughout the 1960s. Souza and Chandra, despite their successes however, were nonetheless ‘othered’ or ‘particularized’ as ‘Indian’ or ‘Oriental’ painters, their work often described through recourse to the clichéd symbols of the Orient: sensual, erotic, symbolic and spiritual. Although successful in Britain during this period, like many other artists, they moved to New York in the 1960s (Chandra in 1965 and Souza in 1967) as the British fascination with the ‘other’ began to wane. For example, in 1964 the Indian High Commission mounted an exhibition entitled ‘Six Indian Painters’, which included Khanria. Jenny Lee, Britain’s first ever arts minister attended the opening which nonetheless was ignored by the press as was an exhibition at the Upper Grosvenor Gallery in 1966 which included leading Indian artists such as Bhuppen Khakkar.

The establishment of artists such as Souza and Chandra was fraught with difficulties. Chandra, when entering a gallery in London to show his work, was asked by the gallery owner if he could paint tigers and elephants and recalled that:

I was so hurt. There is nothing wrong with painting elephants and tigers, which I perhaps do now or perhaps I should do, to express all that anger which is inside me, but to be asked to do these things because you were an Indian is insulting. (Araeen 1989: 28, quotes from Araeen (1988) ‘Conversation with Avinash Chandra’. Third Text, Nos ¾)

This issue, the essentialisation of the ‘Indian’ artist continued to be challenged throughout the 1980s and 1990s as South Asian artists struggled to express themselves and their identity but without being reducible to cliché, surface and stereotype. These struggles also developed in a country where racism and discrimination against black and minority ethnic peoples increased and extreme right groups organized and become more active. South Asian artists began to work in an increasingly explicitly racialised and racist environment which found its most vivid encapsulation in Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers’ of blood’ speech in 1968. In this environment, artists have used their work to make statements about gender, ethnicity, racism and spirituality, amongst other things. For example, Chila Kumari Burman, one of the first British South Asian women to study at art school, asserts the right to speak from ‘beyond two cultures’, challenging the stereotype of the passive, silent Asian female victim by creating self portraits of herself practicing Shotokhan (a Japanese martial art) in a sari (see the installation video piece, Body Weapons: Wild Woman Beyond Two cultures, 1993). Burman says of her work:

My work is about a continual exploration of my dual cultural identity through the manipulation of the photographic image, painting, laser printmaking, and scratch video installation works. I’m reclaiming images of us Asian Women moving away from the object of the defining gaze towards a position where we become the subject of display clearly under our control. (Chila Kumari Burman, “With Your Own Face On It”, (Watermans Art Center, London) Exhibition Catalogue, 1994: 22).

Other artists, such as Amrit and Rabindra KD Kaur Singh (The Singh Twins), have also worked to find a space in which their creativity can be valued and accepted, though they have found this, at times, a struggle. They have achieved this, not, as Burman has done, by subverting the stereotype, but by reasserting what we could describe as ‘the traditional’ by using miniatures, forms to express an often subversive and playful perspective on life in contemporary multi-cultural Britain. Their experience of studying art at degree level in the UK elicited the following reflection:

Self expression was presented to us at the ultimate purpose of Art but was permitted, it seemed, only if it fitted in with contemporary Western ideals of ‘acceptable art, namely, an art which tended towards non-figurative, non-decorative representations; an art which was essentially Euro-centric in focus…(We) felt it was equally valid to draw upon non-European and Ancient artistic traditions for inspiration and to present a modern art within that framework. (Swallow, Deborah ‘ … To a Modern Revival’ in Singh, A.K. and Singh, A.K., Twin Perspectives: Paintings by Amrit and Rabindra KD Kaur Singh, Birmingham: Twin Studios, 1999: 16).

Moving ‘back’, however, the establishment of a black and/or South Asian art scene continued in Britain from the 1950s. Developments of note include the founding of the New Vision Group by Denis Bowen in 1951 and the opening of the New Vision Center Gallery in 1956. Bowen was the first person to give Asian artists shows in Britain and provided a venue for young international and unknown abstract artists. Here artists such as Ahmed Parvez (Pakistan), Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan) and Balraj Khanna (India) found a space for their work until the gallery’s closure in 1966.

Khanna’s work, often described through implications as somewhat derivative, is also symbolic of the relationship between center and periphery in terms of the world of art. His work is compared to Joan Miro or Paul Klee, yet nonetheless described as displaying an intrinsic ‘Indianess’ which Araeen describes as ‘a quality invented by Western critics who find it hard to come to terms with Khanna’s own modernity’ (Araeen, 1989: 43). As such, he is positioned as both derivative and ‘other’ in a way that white, Western, male artists would rarely be. Rothko, Picasso, Hodgkin, Kandinsky and Pollock, to name a few, have all been described as taking inspiration from the ‘other’, the ‘primitive’ and/or the ‘Orient’, positioned in the ‘center’, however, they embody the universal rather than the particular.

The opportunities for artists from South Asia were broadened in 1957 when the Imperial Institute was renamed the Commonwealth Institute. This and the Africa Center in Covent Garden were the only galleries in London to have a written policy about showing artists from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean (Araeen, 1989: 130). The two Commonwealth Biennales of Abstract Art held at the Institute proved important in terms of the establishment of South Asian artists in Britain and in 1965 Rama Rao (Indian) was awarded the £ 50 prize.

Shemza’s relationship with the British art world is poignantly symbolic of the relationship between euro-centric history and its ‘others’. A young Anwar Shemza had come to Britain in 1956 as a successful writer and artist in Pakistan. His story of what happened whilst at the Slade is indicative of the general discriminatory ethos evident in Britain at that time.

“One evening when I was attending a Slade weekly lecture on the history of art, Professor Gombrich came to the chapter on Islamic art – an art that was merely functional – from his book ‘The story of Art’, I remember leaving the room for a few minutes before the lecture finished, and sitting on the bench outside. As the students came…they seemed so contented and self satisfied…all evening I destroyed paintings, drawings everything that could be called art…” (Anwar Shemza, quoted in Holt, 1998: 105)

The ‘suicide’ of his work bears testimony to the crisis of identity he experienced at the time, precipitated by a culturally paranoid British art institution, in which a perceived dissociation was projected onto the ‘other’, the ‘other’ in turn internalized and vented anger upon itself. His intention in coming to Britain was to benefit from the environment of Western culture and British art education systems so that he might return to Pakistan as a better painter and, importantly, as a teacher. It is ironic that both the educational system and the British arts institutions in the main spurned him, and he remained in relative obscurity for most of his life here. Shemza was, as were other Asian artists, not without supporters in Britain. Slade tutor Andrew Forge and later Denis Bowen, co-founder of the New Vision Center in Marble Arch who had shown many artists from South Asia, showed faith in the quality of his thinking and work. Shemza was a resistive character and his inner need to make-work provided a greater impetus than the doubts foisted upon him by an insensitive and partisan system. This issue of ‘description’ and categorization continues to reverberate today when we think, for example, of descriptive terms such as ‘ethnic’ or ‘primitive’. This has often meant that the art of the non-white artist is posited behind the West on some abstract chronology of artistic development or evolution. This is forcefully underlined by artist Alnoor Mitha (1997) who argues that the ‘history of art’ follows an established pattern that observes the achievement of other cultures in the twentieth century on the assumption that they belong to historically receding cultures. This is a history that narrates only the history of the West and excludes those cultures that are seen as external to the idea of the West. In terms of the incorporation of objects and art forms from ‘beyond’ the West, Araeen writes that:

It is commonly believed that African peoples themselves were not aware of the aesthetics qualities of what they were producing and that it was the West, which ‘discovered’ these qualities and gave the African ‘objects’ the status of art. It is true that Africans did not write books on aesthetics, plasticity, or formalism (or whatever relates to art), but to deduce from this that African artists were not aware of what they were doing is to indulge in the kind of stupidity which can only result from a mental blockage or an intellectual dishonesty. (Araeen, 1991:165).

In this way, the West bestows artistic status upon those who, it is believed, have no concept of art to begin with. Further, the work of artists such as Anish Kapoor or Permindar Kaur is often evaluated or critiqued from the perspective of a specific cultural heritage. They are denied the aesthetic and artistic universality of the Western artist. Further, although artists such as Kaur believe that the situation (in terms of inclusion) for minority artists and the encouragement of black and Asian children to pursue art has been improved, that they are still the victims of tokenism.

The interconnections between the social and political milieu and the art world cannot be understated. This context, both in Britain and internationally, provided a focus for a number of artists and thinkers who have sought and continue to seek to challenge racism, discrimination and euro-centrism in the art world and beyond. For example, in 1984, four anti-racist murals were commissioned by the GLC as part of their anti-racism year in Brixton, Notting Hill, Southall and East London. Chila Kumari Burman was among the eight artists to participate. In the same year, the Commission for Racial Equality published a report The Arts of Ethnic Minorities, which called for greater attention to and funding for minority ethnic arts whilst the GLC Race Equality Unit organized a conference on ‘Black Artists White Institutions’ at the Riverside Studios.

In terms of the hegemony of euro-centrism in the art world (and, of course, beyond), an article by Amrit Wilson (1992) summarized the problems faced by South Asian artists living and working in Britain. Wilson writes:

The Orient of course was a construct of the European colonialist imagination. It grew out of the various colonial relationships, planter and forced laborer, state power and peasantry, imperial power and insurgent nationalist and so on […]. But Orientalism is not something we can relegate to history. Its theme still permeates European popular imagery from Thomas Cook brochures to pictures on tea packets…the experiences of Asians in Britain reflects the same contradictions [..]. Like Orientalism it seeks to define our culture for us. It tells us that it is about saris and samosas, melas and traditions, and that it is a complete and of the past, passive and unchanging, and finally that it is something which needs now only to be recapitulated. (Wilson, 1992: 16).

It seems that damage done by the domination of the euro-centric view has extended to the Eastern sense of its own spirituality. Indian artist Amil Ghosh born in India and who later attended the Central School of Art in London acknowledged the influence on British artists such as Howard Hodgkin and Stephen Cox of Indian spirituality as an inspiration in what Ghosh sees as ‘the transition from ignorance to understanding’, but Ghosh also observes that what he saw as the materiality of Western thinking had conspired against Indian traditional thought.

In the West ‘the spiritual’ has remained a problem in our contemporary materialist society. This became increasingly true during the 1950s and 1960s, when the majority of first generation South Asians and South Asian artists were arriving in Britain. There are now at least three generations of artists of South Asian origins practicing in Britain and Europe, each having a different relationship with the cultures of South Asia, but with minimal references to the spiritual content of their cultural tradition. (Ghosh, 2001:79).

Artists such as Gurminder Sikand and Balrak Khaima have retained the spiritual ethos of their work it seems without recourse to the exotic. The problem of not being trapped in an expectation derived from political polemic is one that is yet another trap to conspire against British South Asian identity being constructed in its own terms.

Other key events in the development of a ‘South Asian’ arts scene occurred in 1987 when the Indian Artists in the UK (IAUK) association opened the Horizon Gallery in London in order to provide a platform to artists from the Asian sub-continent working in Britain. It showed works by Sutapa Biswas, Avinash Chandra and Amal Ghosh. In 1988 Rasheed Aareen organized ‘The Essential Black Art’ at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, which subsequently went on tour and in 1989 Anish Kapoor was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Kapoor is described as one of the most internationally influential sculptors of his generation. He was born in Bombay but has lived and worked in London since the early seventies where he was educated at Chelsea School of Art. His work has been exhibited all over the world and is held in a number of public and private collections. Kapoor’s creativity is concerned with an engagement with deep-rooted metaphysical polarities. These polarities are manifest in his work, for example, absence/ presence – to be/ not to be – the intangible/ the tangible.

Kapoor’s sculptures reveal a fascination with light and darkness as he confronts us with notions of space/not space. For example, Kapoor’s work was exhibited in 1989 at the Lisson Gallery, the exhibition – Void Fields – and contained some of Kapoor’s most famous pieces in which apparently solid sandstone forms with interiors that were filled with ultramarine blue pigment, were testament to silence and contemplation.

Pier Luigi Tazzi writes that Kapoor achieves this effect (a manifest of ‘the void’) through:

…His knowledge, use of materials – the pigments and their dispensability, stone and its hardness, surfaces that are reflective and others opaque, chasms and protrusions – with the ‘spiritual’ import of his own research and the illusions of sight and the mind. Kapoor’s work is always metonymic, never metaphorical, even when it draws from the vast repertoire of universal symbolism. (Tazzi, 1998: 104).

In 1991 Kapoor’s often astonishingly overwhelming work was recognized again when he won the Turner Prize. Kapoor is an enormously inventive and versatile artist whose works not only take over the physical space of a gallery but also the psychological space, as his work is transformed by the physical, psychological (and for some) spiritual experiences of the viewer.

Kapoor, without doubt, stands as one of the world’s most important contemporary artists; his 2002 installation at the Tate Modern in London was staggeringly grand in concept, design and experience. Drawing on Greek mythology, Marsyas occupied the whole length of the Tate Modem’s Turbine Hall, which was composed of three steel rings joined by a single span of red PVC membrane.

1989 also saw a major exhibition held at the Hayward gallery London – The Other Story: Afro Asian Artists in Post-War Britain. This exhibition is certainly a landmark in terms of the recognition of the work of both black and South Asian artists. Other important developments in the 1990s included the creation of the Institute of the International Visual Arts (inIVA). IniVA was established in 1993 as an independent non-profit making organization with support from the Arts Council and London Arts Board. InIVA’s remit has been to encourage knowledge and understanding of contemporary visual art in the UK and abroad by giving priority to visual art practice and scholarship that has not been adequately represented or disseminated. As the hegemony of the art and artists of the West has been steadily challenged by both organizations and individuals alike, so, too, has the public profile of South Asian art in Britain been steadily rising throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. For example, in 1995, Cartwright Hall hosted an exhibition curated by Salima Hashmi and Nima Poovaya-Smith – Intelligent Rebellion: Women Artists of Pakistan; this exhibition gave space and a voice to those who had never before been heard in Britain. The exhibition was described by its curators as:

‘…Overturning ‘a number of stereotypes that the West may have, about contemporary art practiced in a Muslim country. Belying their usual image of seclusion and subjugation, women have actually dominated the arts in Pakistan.’ (Poovaya-Smith and Hashmi, 1995, An intelligent Rebellion: Women Artists of Pakistan catalogue, City of Bradford Metropolitan Council Arts, Museums and Libraries Division).

Much of the most innovative work in raising the profile of South Asian art has occurred in the North West, for example, in addition to the work of Cartwright Hall (where, incidentally, you can find UK’s only permanent collection of contemporary South Asian art) in 1995/1996, Tampered Surface: Six Artists from Pakistan (curated by Alnoor Mitha and Richard Hilton) was held at Huddersfield and Oldham art galleries. Recently, the work in the North West has been consolidated by the establishment of Shisha in 2001. In 1997, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan there were several major exhibitions that took place across the country, many of which were in the north of England. Building on the work of Alnoor Mitha and others in the North, it was identified that there was need for an organization to facilitate and centralize this work and Shisha was finally formed as an independent ‘diversifying agency’ in 2001 to promote work of South Asian origin, acting as a link between artists, galleries and theorists in Britain and South Asia fostering awareness amongst people in Britain as well as the British South Asian people who can take pride in the contemporary visual arts of South Asia.

July 2002 saw the project ArtSouthAsia initiated by Shisha, the first international program of visual culture from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Exhibitions and events in the North West, Oldham, Preston, Liverpool and Manchester saw significant exhibitions, curated by individual curators from each of the contributing countries. These developments of South Asian artists in Britain and across the Diaspora as they assert the right to tell their own stories and to create in their own ways without being constrained by the expectations of the mainstream – the story, of course, continues and now, at least, South Asians in Britain (and elsewhere) are no longer expected to paint elephants and tigers.

Excerpts from Post Colonial People – forthcoming book by John Holt and Laura Turney.

Title image: Anish Kapoor’s “Marsyas” at Tate Modern (Turbine Hall), London, 2002

NUKTA acknowledges the support of the editors and publishers of ‘The Postcolonial People: South Asians of Britain’. Edited by N Ali, VS Halra and S Sayyid. Published by Hurst and Co. Nov 2005.

NUKTA would also like to thank Shisha for permission to reproduce images from their catalog of ArtSouthAsia.

ArtSouthAsia was initiated by Shisha, the international South Asian crafts and visual arts agency based in Manchester. Shisha aims to support artist and curatorial development, build audiences and strengthen the infrastructure for disseminating this work. Shisha organizes exhibitions, events and residencies, and produces publications as well as networking and consultancy services.

References

Araeen, R., The other story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, London: South Bank Center, 1989.

Araeen, R., ‘From primitivism to ethnic arts’, in Hiller, S. (ed) The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, London: Routledge, 1991.

Burman, Chila Kumari With Your Own Face On It, and London: exhibition Catalogue, Watermans Art Center, 1994.

DeSouza, A. and Shaheen, M. (eds) Crossing Black Waters. London Working Press, 1992.

Ghosh, A., ‘The Transcending Vision: Another Vision’ in Ghosh, A., and Lamba, J. (eds) Beyond Frontiers: Contemporary British Art by Artists of South Asian Descent, London: Saffron, 2001.

Bhabba, H.K. and Tazzi, P.L., Anish Kapoor, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press and the Hayward Gallery, 1998.

Holt, John, ‘Anwar Jalal Shemza: A Search for the “ Significant”, Third Text (42). Spring 1998: 104-108.

Mitha, A., ‘Artscene’, Yorkshire and Humbershire Arts, June 3 (1997).

Mitter, P., ‘Indian Artists and the Raj: Westernisation and Nationalism 1850-1947”, in Beyond Frontiers: Contemporary British Art by Artists of South Asian Descent, in Ghosh, A. and Lamba, J. (eds), London: Saffron, (2001).

Nead, L., Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures, London, Kala Press, 1995.

Poovaya Smith, N, and Hopper, C., (eds), Cartwright Hall Art Gallery and its Collections, Bradford: City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, Arts Museums and Libraries Division, 1997.

Swallow, Deborah ‘…To a Modern Revival’ in Singh, A.K. and Singh, A.K., Twin Perspectives: Painting by Amrit and Rabindra KD Kaur Singh, Birmingham: Twin Studios, 1999: 14-19.

Wilson, A., ‘ Beyond as assertion of identity’, in deSouza, A. and Merali, S, (eds), Crossing Black Waters, London: Working Press, 1992.