In her now-seminal collection When Was Modernism? published at the turn of the millennium, India’s foremost art critic Geeta Kapur examined modernist art from decolonising contexts, bringing it into critical relation with the form and ideology of the nation-state. Picking up that thread and unspooling it over two decades, her latest book Speech Acts gathers essays, lectures, and interviews from 2004 to 2023.The title refers to a concept in philosophy of language: utterances that perform actions. In Kapur’s work, it is this rhetorical charge – rooted in her self-described ‘partisan’ orientation – that powers the book, bringing words to bear upon the world by measuring the contemporary, in India and the wider Global South, against the longer temporality of twentieth-century modernity.It is a timescale Kapur has engaged for decades as critic and curator. In the early 1960s, she studied in the United States under Irving Sandler, and read high modernists such as Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Yet where Greenberg, by his Late Writings, softened his stances, Kapur keeps steadfast vigil. Her terminology continues to draw on the Marxist lexicon and postcolonial commitments that shaped her Royal College of Art MA thesis In Quest of Identity (1968–69).Speech Acts, Geeta Kapur, Tulika Books, 2025.The proposition that our present is haunted, vexed, and perhaps redeemed by the discontents of the recent past is an urgent leitmotif: “I am impelled to see modernity at stake,” Kapur writes, “but with some of its passion and impunity smouldering still.” She interprets contemporaneity as a process of conjuncture and disjuncture, proposing modes of creating, curating, and critiquing that resist Euro-American claims over modernity. The essays reflect on the artist as citizen, the nature of a postcolonial avant-garde (“the very frisson between politics and poetics”), and the place of subjectivity in criticism.The lectures, inaugurated by the matter of practice as praxis, deploy metaphors of movement: the tilt, the loop, the zigzag of art-historical canon formation. Setting up a polarity between ends as ‘critical positionings’ and means as ways of doing, Kapur observes, “practice tilts towards means and forces a destabilization of the more universalised discourse of ends.” Or consider her characterisation of the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–1965 as a ‘recursive narration’ of modernism in a non-Western accent: “The genres configured…acknowledge the condensation of idea-image-form in modernist art…but encircle and loop through modernist formalism…Such misalignment breaks…the now-notorious metanarrative of western modernism…”The final lecture, ‘De-Modern: Why?’, is the most crucial, for how it surfaces the conceptual nerve running through her work and makes explicit the ethical and political stakes of her criticism. Attuned to India’s descent into Hindutva and neoliberalism since the 1980s (especially as co-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, 1982–1999), Kapur situates cultural production in an era of saffron capitalism. Why salvage the modern, she asks, against Western attempts to collapse it into the colonial? “It is not for the [colonial] West to withdraw the modern,” she insists. “It is modern India…with its alerted citizenry, that is protesting, challenging, fighting an authoritarian state.”Also read: What Tests the Ruse of Representation?The wager between art and life animates the rich sequence of interviews that follow. In one, she says: “I want to…arrive at an existential condition of meaning-making—where one’s very life hangs in the balance.” In another, asked what haunts her: “what haunts all of us…everyone in India who inhabits the privileged sphere of an empowered identity, and who now witnesses the grotesque forms of abuse that have been secured on both the civilisational and national planes.” The adjacency of the aesthetic and the existential mirrors the relationship between making art and writing about it, in her words: “I tried to develop a practice…that would stand side-by-side with the artist’s practice.”In a sense, one could read Speech Acts backwards – from the interviews in her own voice, beginning with the recent podcast transcript ‘Afterlives of Modernism’, tracing her ideas through the zigzag détournements she favours. Not only because the form of the interview allows her to explicates her positions in a direct, dynamic and agonistic way, but also because it reveals the biographical and professional course charted by a fiercely independent thinker “alongside” art for six decades. Such a compendium makes available the critic’s intellectual itinerary, through footnotes, but also her discussions of figures like John Berger, Susan Sontag, Svetlana Boym and Okwui Enwezor with whom she was in dialogue, either as a reader or as a collaborator.In the other, older Speech Acts, the American philosopher John Searle writes, “The speech…acts… are in general a function of the meaning of the sentence…a speaker may mean more than what he actually says, but it is always in principle possible for him to say exactly what he means.” Geeta Kapur does. Her exquisitely exact speech acts offer meaning for difficult times, asserting – against contemporary despair – a fragile continuum between art and life, between which the modern subject is still perilously suspended.Kamayani Sharma is a writer and podcaster who produces Sharjah Art Foundation’s audio programme and hosts ARTalaap, South Asia’s first independent visual culture podcast.Note: An earlier version of this article had stated that Kapur studied under Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. This has been corrected.