Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Bedawi, at the First Sight Gallery in Colchester in the east of England.

My guests are the internationally renowned and award-winning artists, the Sing Twins.

They have a major exhibition of their work here.

The Sing Twins combine their dual Indian and British heritage to make provocative art that has a strong political message.

But sometimes do their two traditions collide?

Sing twins, welcome to hard talk.

Now, you were born in England, but you took a trip for the first time to India when you were teenagers in 1980 and that's when you were

first exposed to Indian miniature paintings. You described that as a turning point in your

lives. Why? For a couple of reasons really. We were born and brought up in Britain. We were

aware of our Indian heritage but I don't think we really felt so deeply attached to it until we went to India.

And we had the opportunity to travel around India and experience that culture in all its diversity.

And we really connected with that.

And as part of that interest in our heritage, we also came across the style of painting called Indian miniature painting,

which is a very detailed, exquisite style of artwork, full of satire and symbolism and narrative.

And that was the style that we both adopted as our formal artistic language. And it was

something that really set us up on our journey as professional artists. Because originally you both wanted to become doctors like your father, but then your artistic

talent was identified quite early and he was very supportive in just letting you do what you

want. Okay, so you've created a unique genre in British art, highly decorative, there's the narrative, it's very

symbolic at times. You describe it with this phrase that you've coined, past modern. What do you

mean by that? Well, that phrase really goes back to our days at university when we were studying combined studies degree.

And as part of that, there was an art history course, Western art history.

And it became quite clear to us in that course that anything historical, including the work that we were inspired by, the Indian miniature painting tradition, was seen as not worthy, not of any value, especially

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