Now on view at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Ernakulam, RADICAL, curated by K.M. Madhusudhanan, has sparked controversy over how the history of the Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association is being framed. Running from April 18 to May 4, the exhibition has brought into focus a larger question of curatorial authority: who gets to shape the inheritance of radicalism in Indian contemporary art and at what cost.The public material for the exhibition is revealing in its brevity: a blunt title, a Marx epigraph, four dead artists, a few declarative sentences about “reactionary visual consciousness,” and a promise to revive the “hopes” of the Radical group. That economy of language is itself symptomatic. It offers inheritance without argument. It assumes that “radical” is a self-evident category, that the names gathered under it are stable, and that history can be summoned by poster design and retrospective piety alone.The poster of the exhibition.That assumption lies at the centre of the present dispute. But the controversy will be misunderstood if it is treated as a local spat between a curator and a few aggrieved interlocutors. What is being fought over is larger: the passage from the Baroda formation of narrative figuration in the early 1980s, through the insurgent counter-gesture of Questions and Dialogue, to the post-1992 reordering of Indian contemporary art under liberalisation, communal rupture, and the metropolitanisation of the art world. The argument around RADICAL matters because it shows that this passage was never settled. It was narrated, canonised, narrowed and contested. Now, once again, it is being fought over through the dead.To see that, one has to go back to 1981, to Place for People. Positioned as a landmark exhibition, six artists with Geeta Kapur, staged in Bombay and New Delhi, it made “urban narratives/representational fantasies” into an ideological choice. The exhibition brought together Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jogen Chowdhury, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan and Vivan Sundaram, and its very title proposed a shift in emphasis: back to figure, narration, the social body, the lived world, the urban subject.This was more than an exhibition. It was a proposition about modernism in India. The Kasauli Art Centre, where so much of the period’s cross-disciplinary discussion fermented, later described Place for People as reflecting the move toward “figural modernism” as an essential aspect of modern art in the country. That is the point. The show did not just display works; it named a tendency and, in naming it, helped install a new axis of legitimacy. Baroda was not the only site in Indian art, but by the early 1980s it had become one of the places where the modern was being reworked against abstraction, mysticism and older high-modernist certainties.Anita Dube’s later recollection is especially useful because it describes Baroda from inside the weather system rather than from the altitude of retrospective consensus. In her account of K.P. Krishnakumar and the Radical group, she recalls the Faculty of Fine Arts in the early 1980s as “an informal laboratory for a new interrogation of the ‘Modern’,” where, within a postcolonial search for location and roots, “a place for narration and people was theorised.” She is equally clear that an argument was being mounted there on behalf of another strain of modernism, supported by Geeta Kapur’s defence of artists such as Bhupen, Gulam, Nalini, Sudhir and Vivan.That description matters because it helps distinguish two things too often collapsed. There was, first, a historical formation: a set of artists, critics, pedagogies, journals, exhibitions and debates clustered around Baroda and allied spaces like Kasauli. There was, second, what later came to be canonised as “Baroda modernism” or the “Baroda School”: a retrospective condensation of that formation into a legible art-historical object. Those are not the same thing. The first is messy, uneven, internally argumentative. The second is already a story about importance.The counter-gesture haunting the current controversy emerged from within this very scene. The real hinge is not quite “1989 Questions and Dialogue,” as later memory sometimes compresses it, but a sequence that begins with Questions and Dialogue at Baroda in March 1987 and hardens by 1989 into a more openly antagonistic southern and anti-centrist politics. Dube’s recollection is unambiguous: the Radical group announced itself with the manifesto Questions and Dialogue at the opening of its exhibition in Baroda in March 1987; it called for an alternative “philosophy of praxis,” attacked mainstream practices, provoked heated arguments with the painters of the narrative movement, and became the first and last exhibition of the group in the north. She says elsewhere that the manifesto was received like an “anarchist bomb.”This is where the present dispute deepens. Questions and Dialogue was not simply another group show. It challenged the distribution of authority within Indian art. Dube writes of an “empowered idea of the margin, speaking for itself,” a challenge to the “discursive hegemony at the centre,” raised along a South-North axis and with class struggle at the fulcrum of cultural history. The Radical formation did not merely disagree with the Baroda narrative painters on style. It challenged the social and geopolitical architecture through which style became history in the first place. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kerala Lalithakala Akademi (@keralaakademi)That is why the current RADICAL exhibition cannot be read only as tribute. The issue is not whether these artists were important. It is whether a movement that defined itself by contesting the very centre that later historicised Indian contemporary art can now be folded back into a clean memorial object. The poster’s rhetoric does precisely that: four dead men, one title, one sanctioning Marx quotation, one retrospective glow. But the historical Radical group was never that clean. Even sympathetic accounts describe it as brief, conflict-ridden, structurally precarious and politically overcharged. The group disbanded in 1989 after Krishnakumar’s death and its legacy has remained polemical ever since.By the time we reach 1992, another shift is underway, and it changes the terms of the argument. The question is no longer only who owns the modern. India’s liberalisation reforms had opened the economy in 1991 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, followed by the Bombay riots of 1992–93, marked a political and moral rupture that contemporary art could not simply absorb into earlier debates about narrative figuration or regional modernisms. The wall text for Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, co-curated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, is telling here. It describes Bombay as India’s “foremost capitalist city” seeking a position in global finance, notes the 1995 renaming to Mumbai, and identifies the 1992–93 riots as the moment when “an extreme polarisation of classes and communities ruptured the cultural fabric of the city.”That formulation marks a decisive re-siting of the contemporary. The pedagogic province yields to the metropolis. The axis shifts from Baroda’s seminar room and studio politics to Bombay/Mumbai’s embattled visual culture under liberalisation, communal violence and financial aspiration. The 1990s did not simply expand the field; they scrambled its coordinates. As Tausif Noor argues in an essay on the Babri Masjid’s political aftermath, the cultural politics of the period were shaped at once by Hindutva and by the neoliberal politics engendered by globalisation, with Sahmat and allied practitioners mobilising exhibitions, campaigns and pedagogical forms in direct response.This is where the historiographic issue becomes acute. If 1981 helped install a Baroda-centred figural modernism as one compelling answer to the problem of the modern and 1987–89 produced a Radical critique of that answer from the margin, then the post-1992 period displaced both into a new terrain shaped by finance, metropolis, communal fracture, public pedagogy, installation and activist collectivities. Yet the history books did not simply describe this transition; they organised it.A missing hinge here is the market. With Timeless Art, the dispute ceased to be merely aesthetic and entered the theatre of price, sponsorship and public consecration. What the auction staged as celebration, the Radicals read as incorporation: the conversion of a hard-won artistic argument into spectacle, prestige and saleability. Seen in retrospect, the passage from Place for People to Timeless Art reads like a cultural prehistory of liberalisation. If 1991 named the formal opening of the economy, the art field had already begun rehearsing its grammar: corporate mediation, accelerated visibility and the naturalisation of value. As Anshuman Das Gupta suggests in “Sculptural Embodiments: Unmaking and Remaking Modernity”, the struggle over Baroda modernism was never only about painting; it was also a struggle over sculpture, embodimentand the material terms through which modernity was being remade.By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Baroda had already become an art-historical category. In survey accounts, the “Baroda School” named the artists associated with this formation who had turned toward narrative, figurative and allegorical modes. It remained a significant frame until the expanding Indian art market diversified the field and pushed practice beyond an older Baroda-centred paradigm.But canonisation always produces losers, omissions and counter-memories. A 1997 review, “Face to Face with Baroda Group” is useful not because it settles the matter but because it shows that contestation over Baroda historiography is hardly new. It points to how common parlance had narrowed the larger field of the “Baroda School” into the more selective “Baroda Group,” and quotes Ratan Parimoo’s letter attacking Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Contemporary Art in Baroda as full of “distortion, exaggeration, lop-sided judgements” and the “exclusion of significant factual information.” The same review insists that many Baroda artists had been “quietly upstaged.”That longer argument helps explain why Chandra Mohan belongs here. With him, the issue is no longer simply the canonisation of Baroda modernism or the memorial softening of the Radicals. It becomes a question of whether the university can still function as a site of contestation at all. He stands at the far end of a line running from Place for People through Questions and Dialogue to the post-1992 convergence of liberalisation, majoritarian force and institutional capture. He does not inherit the Radicals so much as register the return of their unresolved challenge in another form: not as movement, but as crisis.Seen in that longer light, this is why the current controversy cannot be dismissed as social media noise. It belongs to a larger problem: how a historical formation becomes a canon, how a canon becomes a brand, and how everything that does not fit that brand returns later as grievance, correction, or insurgent memory. Art historian Shivaji Panikkar, for his part, has warned against treating the word “radical” as though it carried its own explanation. Critic Sandip K. Luis’s complaint, on social media, is that the Radical group was flattened by Baroda-centred historiography into a caricature, then further provincialised as “Kerala Radicals.”Whether one accepts all of his claims or not, the broader point stands: the history of Indian contemporary art after the 1980s is not a neutral sequence of exhibitions and books. It is a struggle over narrative possession. Anita Dube, responding in turn, rejected the assumption that she had functioned as the group’s representative and pointed instead to the absence of a serious study from within the relevant regional-intellectual context. The point is not that social media has suddenly produced history. It is that history, inadequately worked through, has returned in polemical form.Seen from that angle, the present RADICAL show repeats an old operation under a different sign. Earlier, a heterogeneous Baroda formation was narrowed into the prestige object of “Baroda modernism.” Now a volatile, contradictory, unfinished Radical formation risks being narrowed into a devotional afterimage: four dead artists, one authorised title, one soft-focus inheritance. Both moves tidy what history had left jagged.The deeper question, then, is not whether the current exhibition is right or wrong. It is whether Indian art history has yet found a form adequate to its own antagonisms. Place for People named one modernism. Questions and Dialogue exploded the comfort of that naming from the margin. The post-1992 conjuncture moved the whole argument into a harsher landscape of market expansion, sectarian violence, and metropolitan spectacle. What came later under the label of “Baroda Modern” was never exactly false; it was too victorious a story for a field made of fracture.That is what the Ernakulam controversy lays bare. The argument around RADICAL is not only about who deserves commemoration. It is about whether the unresolved can be exhibited without being domesticated. Every avant-garde returns twice: once as intervention, and once as someone else’s history. The trouble begins when the second arrival forgets the violence of the first.Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His latest book is Form as History – When History No Longer Requires Us (Daraja Press, 2026).