Cosplay, Video Games, & More: We're Witnessing A New Era Of Indian Interdisciplinary Art

For a growing number of contemporary artists in India, their practice is no longer defined by the medium they work in, but by what a particular idea requires. These artists increasingly see painting, photography, poetry, design, performance, illustration, cosplay, and video games less as discrete territories and more as parts of a shared vocabulary.

Medha Srivastava, a Mumbai-based concept artist whose practice moves between gaming, illustration, film and cosplay, describes this fluidity simply: “I’ve never really seen art as something that fits into one medium. For me, every discipline is simply another way of telling a story.” For her, moving between practices is less about accumulating skills than about understanding how an idea can exist differently across forms. “Rather than treating these as separate practices, I see them as different languages that all contribute to the same conversation.”

Rhea Gupte, a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, writer and poet, arrives at a similar place through a different route. “Everything I read, feel, think deeply about, finds its way into how and what I create,” she says. “Each medium is very different and demands very different things from me. Moving through these mediums has gifted me an abundant vocabulary and an incessant will to get better in how I communicate my thoughts and ideas, whether it is through a poem with a couple of lines written at the spur of a moment or a video game that took years to make. At times they inform each other and very often they show up as these unsurmountable monstrosities that I need to slowly chip away at, a day at a time, with a completely different mindset and approach for each one.” 

For Srivastava and Gupte, the movement between mediums is not incidental; it is part of the work. This interdisciplinarity is increasingly visible across India’s contemporary creative landscape. The boundaries between fine art, design, popular culture, and digital media have grown more porous, and younger practitioners now enter the arts through overlapping ecosystems instead of a single institutional discipline.

India’s independent game-development scene is a revealing example of this. Indie developers increasingly draw on regional histories, visual cultures, architecture, music, and storytelling, positioning games as a cultural and creative form rather than mere entertainment. Gaming offers something that fixed, traditional art forms cannot: real-time interaction and participation. A painting constructs a world for a viewer to look at; a game lets the player enter it, move through it, and make decisions that shape the experience.

This distinction has significant implications for contemporary artists interested in world-building. For Srivastava, world-building begins with understanding why a world exists. “A world becomes immersive when everything within it feels intentional,” she says, extending this logic from architecture and costumes to props and colour. Her cosplay experience feeds directly into this thinking. Translating a two-dimensional character into physical form means thinking about weight, movement, materials and engineering — considerations that alter how she approaches concept art.

“Every costume is essentially a multidisciplinary design project,” Srivastava says about cosplay. It’s an apt description of a practice historically dismissed as fandom despite demanding skills spanning sculpture, tailoring, painting, makeup, photography, performance and design. India’s cosplay and gaming communities have expanded considerably over the past decade, alongside conventions, collaborations and dedicated showcases, while the wider games ecosystem has developed formal structures for emerging creators, from game jams and student programmes to indie showcases.

For Gupte, games represent a potent extension of her long-standing interest in storytelling. “I have always had an innate need for storytelling in my life, whether through creating imaginary worlds of my own or having the privilege of entering imaginary worlds created by others. It is how I have learnt the most valuable lessons in life, through the laughter and tears of characters on my screen and in the books I read, through their failures and motivations and the simple moments they cherished even while on big adventures,” she says.

Her debut game Fishbowl, made with her partner Prateek, grew out of a dream nearly a decade in the making. What attracted her to the form was its capacity for immersion. “Video games, especially indie games with meaningful stories and characters, have always been a powerful medium for building empathy,” she says. Games can place the audience inside the sensory and emotional architecture of a story: “the audience, the player, is completely immersed in the sound, feelings, visuals, often embodying the character and becoming one with the story.”

India’s indie games studios have already shown the medium’s capacity to engage with identity, history, and social realities, from games that incorporate regional cultural heritage to projects that use interactive storytelling to address subjects such as human trafficking. Studio Oleomingus—founded by Dhruv Jani and run with Sushant Chakraborty, Salil Bhayani, and Suparna Chakraborty—for example, treats the studio’s absurdist games as spaces for literary, political, and historical inquiry.

Yet the rise of interdisciplinary practice should not be romanticised as evidence that creative boundaries and constraints are disappearing from India’s contemporary art scene. Gupte points to the material conditions beneath experimentation: “I feel having the opportunity to work between different mediums and to have a sustainable practice in them comes with the caveat that you have the time, finances, resources to explore, to make time to learn something completely new and most importantly have the privilege to fail.”

“I don’t want to present a romanticised version of what it takes to build a practice, but a realistic one. I feel that as artists become more secure, they can branch out and pursue multiple creative passions. Irrespective of the discipline, it would be fruitful for India’s creative landscape to be defined by creating support and safety nets for artists such that they can sustain long careers in their practice and not have to give up due to the very real challenges of rent, bills, health, access and so much more. The more longevity artists have to create, the more they will be able to sustain their craft, experiment with mediums, grow their skills, and have the elasticity to try different things,” Gupte says.

The ability to move between mediums is itself a form of privilege, requiring time, money, education, equipment and communities willing to accommodate experimentation. If interdisciplinary practice is to become a durable feature of India’s creative landscape rather than a luxury available to a few, artists need the infrastructure to sustain it. But for artists like Srivastava and Gupte, the future of Indian storytelling lies in the interstices beyond mediums, using whatever discipline best serves an idea.

Follow @medha.vi and @rhea.gupte on Instagram.

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