As I file this, I realise it is my hundredth article for THE WEEK. The number invites a pause. Not a victory lap, but a moment of calibration. Centenaries perform a similar function in the cultural world. They interrupt momentum, slow the gaze, and ask what has endured not merely what has been most visible.
In the arts, one hundred years is a particular kind of distance: close enough for disagreement, far enough for myth. It is why centenaries retain their power. When Tate marked its centenary, it used the occasion to question the very category of ‘British art’, expanding its collections and narratives beyond a narrow national frame. MoMA’s anniversaries have repeatedly prompted it to rewrite the story of modernism, acknowledging how women artists and non-Western practices were sidelined in its early canon. At their best, such moments turn celebration into critique.
India’s centenary culture offers similarly revealing case studies, though the stakes are often sharper. The birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in 1961 did not simply honour a cultural icon; it reasserted Santiniketan as a living, internationalist experiment at a moment when the newly independent nation was defining its intellectual identity. Amrita Sher-Gil’s centenary decades later unsettled comfortable nationalist readings of her work, recasting her instead as a figure shaped by migration, gender, and cultural negotiation.
Institutions show their hand most clearly at the century mark. Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan used its centenary to return to its radical pedagogical ethos, privileging process and dialogue over display. Elsewhere, anniversaries have exposed the degree to which Indian museums and academies continue to operate within inherited colonial and bureaucratic frameworks. Like their counterparts in London, Paris or New York, Indian institutions are increasingly pressed to ask who their histories serve.
Global examples offer a useful contrast. When the Centre Pompidou marked key milestones, it foregrounded interdisciplinarity and dissent, embracing architecture, design and performance as equal partners to fine art. Such gestures underscore a broader truth: centenaries matter most when they expand, rather than entrench, cultural categories.
Yet the temptation to substitute longevity for legitimacy is universal. From New York to New Delhi, anniversary programming can slip easily into pageantry, safe retrospectives, familiar names, and reassuring narratives. The danger lies not in celebration, but in mistaking it for self-examination. A centenary that leaves institutional power structures intact while polishing their image is a lost opportunity.
The most compelling centenaries resist this drift. They invite friction, acknowledge gaps, and reopen settled debates. Revisiting movements such as India’s Progressive Artists’ Group alongside global modernisms reveals not a single heroic story, but a network of contradictions, cosmopolitan ambition alongside exclusion, radical form alongside uneven access. This is where centenaries earn their relevance.
At one hundred years, the question is no longer whether an artist or institution deserves admiration, but whether it can withstand scrutiny. Can it confront uncomfortable archives? Can it resist being absorbed into nationalist nostalgia or market-friendly mythmaking? These are the questions that distinguish cultural maturity from institutional inertia.
A centenary, at its best, is not a monument but a hinge, a moment when culture decides whether to harden into ceremony or remain open to interrogation. In an era when cultural institutions worldwide face pressure to simplify themselves, the centenary becomes a test of nerve.
That is why the number still matters. Not because it signals completion, but because it demands responsibility. Something that reflects with me after writing one hundred articles. Marking no mastery but the willingness to keep revising inherited narratives, to stay alert to omission and change, and to believe that culture survives not through reverence, but through sustained, intelligent attention.