Vivan Sundaram’s political coming of age, by all accounts, began during his years at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where he landed a Commonwealth scholarship in 1966 after being mentored in the fine arts department of the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. He was deeply influenced by British pop artists such as David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and by his tutor RB Kitaj, a British American figurative artist from a generation of abstract expressionists whose cast of characters included Rosa Luxemburg, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Dreiser and T S Eliot. Sundaram also took a course in the history of...