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Parul Dave Mukherji is a professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawajarlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. In 2013 she was a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program.

When I attended the College Art Association’s 101st Annual Conference in New York as a participant in the 2013 CAA-Getty International Program, little did I realize the long-term benefits of interacting with scholars from different parts of the world. While learning about different art-history teaching and research methodologies in areas as far flung from my native India as South Africa, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and China, among others, it was meeting art historians from neighboring countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh that laid the groundwork for future collaboration and the possibility of rethinking South Asian art history in both global and regional terms. It is indeed ironic that I “discovered” art historians from these South Asian nations in New York.

When Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren invited me to contribute a chapter about South Asian visual arts to their edited volume, The Modernist World (New York: Routledge, 2015), I was reluctant to represent the art histories of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka and wanted to invite art historians from these regions to write about their own art histories. The CAA-Getty Program played a key role by offering a global platform for art historians from diverse regions to meet and exchange notes about their research and pedagogical practices. Meeting a fellow participant, a young art historian from Bangladesh, AKM Khademul Haque, helped me develop a fuller account of South Asian modernism and paved the way for future collaborations. Haque, Simone Wille, and T. Sanathanan, and I coauthored the chapter “Visual Arts in South Asia” in The Modernist World.