Figurative-narrative art developed in the early 1980s, centred on the creative ferment of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, in the Indian state of Gujarat. Rejecting the purity of abstract painting, artists instead incorporated a range of pictorial techniques into their work while remaining firmly rooted in an immediate social reality. They expanded the possibilities of modern art to include popular stories, references to art history, and indigenous and vernacular styles. As senior figure Gulammohammed Sheikh explained it, this was a way of articulating the Indian experience of ‘living simultaneously in several cultures and times’, where past and present coexist, ‘each illuminating and sustaining the other’. Featured here is the work of several generations of artists who taught or studied in Baroda (now known as Vadodara).