Parul Kapur

Censorship and the Imperiled Modern Artist in Nehru’s India

February 26, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CT
Watch lecture Youtube recording here.

Outline of a woman against a red and yellow block pattern

Presentation Description

INSIDE THE MIRROR by Parul Kapur (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), winner of the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award and the AWP Prize for the Novel. Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the New American Voices Award.

Six young painters in Bombay ignited India’s modern art movement in 1947 when they announced their artistic liberation soon after Independence. Rejecting both Indian folk traditions and the British academic art some had been schooled in, the Progressives claimed kinship with revolutionary Parisian modernism. Nehru embraced modern art as part of the project to modernize India, yet obscenity charges, court trials, and the threat of jail dogged the boldest of the Progressives for their nude paintings. The talk examines how obscenity charges derailed the lives of legendary talents like Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee, hobbling the rise of modernism in India. My 2024 novel, Inside the Mirror, which fictionalizes the Progressive Artists’ Group and complicates it with female artists, explores the ways a woman painter can be destroyed by the smear of obscenity. Through the lens of the female experience, I will discuss the conflict between the artist’s quest for voice and freedom, and society’s determination to enforce its norms and steer the course of women’s lives. The questions of censorship remain the same today as in 1950s India: What constitutes obscenity? Who decides what is obscene? Can the artist—particularly the woman artist—bear the cost of defiance?

About the Speaker

A woman smiles at the camera. She is wearing a blue shirt decorated with colorful embroidery and sitting on an orange chair.

Photo by Leah Roth

Parul Kapur is a novelist, literary critic, and journalist based in Atlanta. Her novel Inside the Mirror, a story of twin sister artists in 1950s Bombay, was inspired by her experiences as a reporter in India. Inside the Mirror won the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award and the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the New American Voices Award. Kapur was named 2025 Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel. She has served as a press officer at the United Nations in New York and spent a decade as a freelance journalist in Germany, France, and England. Her articles and reviews appear in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, ARTnews, Art in America, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and The Paris Review. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is currently working on a novel about a young family in trouble in 1960s India.