The Influence of Western Culture on Indian Art The modern Indian art traces its roots to colonial era when western influences were highly felt when Indian artists started to draw inspiration, styles and techniques from western schools established during this time. Indian artists also internalized the western artistic designs and successfully used them to portray Indian social themes. Indian art is today composed of many western elements as well as transformation of the traditional Indian art to resemble that of the western world. The influence of western culture in Indian art was once felt during the colonial era and has continued to be felt all through to the 21st century (Meecham and Sheldon 83). Dallapiccola points out that a greater part of this influence has been indirect where Indian artists have adopted and developed artistic styles of American artists to demonstrate and establish Indian social and cultural themes (4). After independence of India from the British rule, many schools provided access to new and sophisticated western artistic techniques a step that was too inviting for western artists and their styles. Through the interpretation of Indian culture and ideas, the American artists developed art works especially Gandhara sculptures and paintings that didn’t represent any value to the western culture but was only used to pass the western artistic designs to the Indian artistic works. Influence of Indian art by the western culture has occurred at different levels but prevalently, the cultural level though recently such influences have been extended to social and religious levels (Kumar 121). This influence has been necessitated by the fact that India has a combination of many races, religious movements, languages as well as varied cultural practices and as such has a wide variety of art works, paintings, architectural designs and other traditional arts. The presence of different religious
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