The Imaginary Institution of India: a 'compelling' exhibition

In 1975, faced with major strikes, mass protests and a court ruling that threatened to remove her from office, India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, suspended the nation's constitution and declared a state of emergency. The memory of the period "can still make people shudder today", said Cleo Roberts-Komireddi in The Guardian.

Censorship and mass jailings followed, while Gandhi's son Sanjay, obsessed with curbing the country's population and beautifying its cities, had slums cleared by violence, and embarked on a programme of forced sterilisation of millions. This exhibition at the Barbican is a survey of the art produced in India between the declaration of the emergency and its last major nuclear test in 1998 – an era of "political tumult", violence, and rapid, destabilising change.

Bringing together 150 exhibits by 30 artists working in a variety of media, many of whom will be unfamiliar to Western visitors, it shows how the upheavals of the era stimulated Indian art, as its practitioners embraced activism and "reckoned with the reality of the terms of their nationhood". The show brings to life "India's extraordinary metamorphosis" during this period, as it urbanised, liberalised and emerged as a great power. It reminds us "that the struggle for human dignity is in fact a never-ending battle".

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The complex political history of the period is brought to life by the "vibrant artworks" on show, said Katrina Mirpuri in The London Standard. Paintings which initially seem "soft and inviting" take on new resonance once you understand the context: a "striking" canvas by Gulammohammed Sheikh, for example, depicts animals inhabiting abandoned buildings. It was painted during the emergency and is entitled "Speechless City": the absence of humans points to the "severity" of the political situation, with its censorship and Hindu-Muslim riots.

The photojournalist Pablo Bartholomew chronicles the aftermath of the Bhopal gas catastrophe in 1984 – still the world's worst industrial disaster – with pictures of "hazardous wasteland, corpses and dead livestock". Another photojournalist, Sheba Chhachhi, captures the "sturdy" faces of women fighting against "dowry- related violence".

There's humour here, too, said Maya Jaggi in the Financial Times. We see how some artists turned to "satire and caricature": Vivan Sundaram's 1976 drawing "The Pair", for instance, depicts Gandhi and her son Sanjay as "grotesque gangsters", while a "brilliantly economical oil" by Rameshwar Broota sees an "arrogantly enthroned" general intimidate his "faceless minions".

Others, such as Sunil Gupta, were drawn to marginalised communities: his photo series "Exiles" (1987) sees gay men standing, sometimes embracing each other, in front of public monuments at a time when homosexuality was criminalised. The show culminates with a section on the 1998 Pokhran nuclear test, an event met with "pride and protests". Nalini Malani conjures it with a video installation splicing footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with film documenting the effects of Partition. It's a climactic end to "a compelling" show that is full of artistic "inventiveness".

Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2. Until 5 January