Insurgency  and  the  Artist  explores not merely how Indian printmakers and artists responded to the freedom struggle but rather  how the art they fashioned  invoked their own conception of the nation, their sense of the past, and the contours of the movement for India’s emancipation from the yoke of colonial  oppression. Recent scholarly work has been almost entirely riveted on nationalist prints, and much of it has focused on the idea of Bharat Mata, but this book seeks to furnish a more rounded account of the artwork—including etchings, paintings, woodblocks prints, and cartoons—contemporary to the freedom struggle and also highlights the work of neglected artists such as Babuji Shilpi, S.L. Parasher, Zainul Abedin, and M.V. Dhurandhar, among others. The author considers how the Indian past was rendered  as one of martial  resistance to ‘foreign’ rule, the manner  in which artists worked with mythic material, and, of course, the treatment of the larger-than- life figures of Gandhi,  Bhagat Singh, Subhas Bose, and  other  patriots in nationalist art. This gloriously illustrated work simultaneously offers a narrative history of the freedom struggle and the rich interplay of text and images is designed to offer insights that neither conventional histories nor images can offer in isolation.  Insurgency and the Artist is also an inquiry into how ideas travel across borders, the porousness of culture, and the relationship of art to politics.