The most overwhelming and powerful work is Ranbir Kaleka’s huge canvas (eight feet) titled Boy without Reflection. Amazingly, the painting is peopled almost entirely by baying dogs, unleashed from some netherworld and harbingers of our worst fears. A huge, howling dog — its chalk-like skeleton visible — is the centrifugal force of the work. Everything else in the painting exists in relation to it — whether it is the other mauled dogs, cocks (recurrent in Kaleka’s paintings and videos), the sinister looking leash that resembles a snake. Or the sole witness to it: the boy of the title who is a helpless spectator to the devastation. There is something timeless about the work, a context movable back and forth in time, and across continents: apocalypse now, and then. Kaleka says that the first image that came to his mind before he began this painting was of him “standing at the edge of a precipice” and staring at the horrors below. Kaleka, like most of the other artists in the show, is not being literal. Yet you can see that cataclysmic events in India — Partition, the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, the demolition of Babri Masjid and the bloody aftermath, and more recently Gujarat — have left their mark on him and on the other artists.

Madhu Jain is a independent art critic and curator