It’s taken 140 years, but we’ve finally done it. We’ve got a picture of the snark. On April Fools’ Day, in 1876, Lewis Carroll published The Hunting of the Snark, an epic poem about a mysterious creature that nine men (and a beaver) set out to chase down. The original publication had illustrations by one Henry Holiday. Unfazed by Carroll’s descriptions, which explain that “the Snark was a Boojum, you see” and that it had “a flavour of Will-o’-the-wisp”, Holiday somehow managed to come up with a drawing of the Snark. However, it was not printed. Carroll told Holiday that he wanted the Snark to be unimaginable.

A little more than a century later, snark is all over the map. And so it is that the veil of mystery that Carroll had so assiduously kept in place, has now been removed. It pops up so often that the secret is out: the snark is the critic-journalist in the 21^st century. Or its alter ego. Dr Bruce Banner has Hulk, the online journalist has Snark.

Humans love naming things — it helps us with our illusion that we’ve figured it all out — and sooner rather than later, the Tenties of the 21^st century will be known as the Age of Irreverence, the time when it became cooler to desecrate than to idolise. There’s a lot to be said for this attitude, provided it doesn’t come accessorised with arrogance and ignorance like this dismissal of Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar by one of The Guardian’s art critics, Jonathan Jones.

Jones has been with The Guardian since 1999 and was on the Turner Prize in 2009. He’s known for being opinionated, knowledgeable about Western art and savage in his criticism. As the above article makes evident, we can add “ignorant about Indian art and culture” and “obnoxious” to this list of attributes. Giving the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Khakhar’s paintings a one-star rating, Jones is less critic and more rampaging snark in this artle. Here are a few choice excerpts:

“On the evidence of its latest Bankside exhibition, to be a truly modern painter has (sic) to be a hamfisted hack. Talented artists need not apply.”

“Why are we supposed to be interested in this old-fashioned, second-rate artist whose paintings are stuck in a timewarp of 1980s (sic) neo-figurative chic?”

“Whatever the thinking behind it, this show is a waste of space.”

Jones’s article has everything the internet demands of writing and journalism today. It’s short, aggressively opinionated, written in a rush and attacking an institution. If only it had another attribute that the internet offers to those who seek to be enriched by it: perspective.

It’s not as though Jones is under any compulsion to love Khakhar’s paintings, but to approach it from as narrow-minded and ill-informed a point of view as what’s on display in his review is a disservice to the exhibition, the readers and Jones’s own reputation. Jones isn’t reviewing Khakhar’s retrospective as an art critic. He’s viewing it with a Westerner’s gaze — with all the smugness and pomposity that he can command. As a result, all his reference points are from Western art history and from the words that Jones has chosen, there’s evident rage at Khakhar’s naked fakirs taking up space that Jones believes should be occupied by British (and white) artists.

This is the bias and the conviction that Western culture is the yardstick against which Others must be measured, that postcolonial scholars have been beating their heads against for decades. You’d think it would be unnecessary to point this out in the 21^st century, when the internet is turning the world into a global village, but if Jones’s article is any indication, the road is long for postcolonial theorists.

“That must be why Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney and Frank Auerbach have to make do with retrospectives at Tate Britain, while the incredibly unimpressive Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003, is glorified as an important modern artist in the hallowed…Tate Modern,” writes Jones at one point in his review. Later, he likens Khakhar to RB Kitaj, Joe Tilson and Tom Philips — all British artists. The only detail that Jones is able to appreciate is a “funny caricature of an Englishman in a pub”. Imagine that: in an exhibition full of scenes from Indian lives, the one figure that struck Jones was that of an Englishman. That’s how narrow-minded Jones is while viewing Khakhar’s retrospective.

Jones’s idea of broadening his perspective is to look to Scotland (“Khakhar’s paintings made me think particularly of the Scottish artist Stephen Campbell, whose narrative pictures are similarly big and boring.”) and America (“…the Robert Mapplethorpe of Mumbai he ain’t. More like the Beryl Cook.”).

Because heaven forbid Jones see Khakhar as a distinctive artist who has nothing to do with Western art and therefore doesn’t need to be squished to fit the moulds created by the likes of Campbell, Mapplethorpe and Cook. Why bother to look at Indian art history and the society that Khakhar was responding to and the conventions he rejected, with everything from his stature as a self-taught artist to his homosexual identity and his cheekiness? Best to dismiss all this. To keep any of it in mind, Jones would have to look a little beyond the West that is at the centre of the art world as Jones sees it. Only, according to Jones, that would display “some misplaced notion that non-European art needs to be looked at with special critical generosity”. So Jones casually casts Khakhar, a towering figure in the history of modern Indian art, as a two-bit artist, hovering on the periphery, inching towards the centre through the gateway that is Tate Modern in London. Rule, Britannia!

There’s a certain illiteracy that some Western critics and publications show towards India and the non-West that’s astounding. Take this review of the same show, for example. It’s full of praise, but if you scroll down, you’ll see that there’s a reference to “Ghandi”. Much like The Guardian, which let Jones’s article be published despite missing words and dodgy syntax, The Telegraph too couldn’t be bothered to do a basic copy edit of the review.

If Jones had published the article that’s masquerading as a review on The Guardian as a personal blog post, it wouldn’t be worth much more than a couple of tsks. To his claim that Khakhar is a “second-rate artist”, one could easily lob the counter-claim that Jones has no taste. Or that he should make an appointment with a neurologist because anyone who describes Khakhar’s paintings as “staid” either doesn’t know the meaning of the word or is brain-damaged. (One would assume Jones knows the meaning of the word; hence the neurologist.)

But Jones’s article is not a personal blog post. It’s an article by a writer who is on the staff of a reputed newspaper. From him, one expects critical perspective and insight, rather than just snark.

Khakhar’s paintings are not pretty, as Jones as observed. They’re awkward, dazzling, conflicted and crowded with colours, stories and ideas. They don’t conform to conventions, artistic or social. They’re teeming with details that have been lovingly and meticulously painted. Tableaux that seem haphazard are actually carefully choreographed. Colours that seem to bleed spontaneously highlight very particular aspects of the scene being depicted. The curve of the arm, the direction of a gaze, the intensity of a shade — everything adds a layer to the story being told. A story that’s as real as it is imaginary, because Khakhar, with his amazing empathy and ability to make friends, was a collector of stories.

Khakhar’s paintings are revelations about us as a society, the role of the artist, and the emotional tangle that tautens when an artist chooses his own life as his subject. His paintings show an India that doesn’t exist any more — the India before globalisation — and Khakhar recorded its details with an accountant’s eye before representing with the colourful irreverence of his artist self. Often, Khakhar’s India is exotic, but it’s exotica that glints with self-awareness and rarely has any hint of prettiness. Yet, it’s beautiful, for all its chaos, ugliness and weird alignments.

Perhaps because he had to grapple with having multiple identities as a gay man in the 1980s, Khakhar was keenly aware of the hybrid that is India. That’s what makes his paintings special, whether or not one ‘likes’ them. And here’s the real shame. Jones, with his stubborn refusal to allow the centre to perhaps shift a few steps east of Britannia, can only see an artist who doesn’t belong in the British artist canon.

Khakhar isn’t either the Beryl Cook of Bombay or the Mapplethorpe of Mumbai or a parallel to any other artist. He’s Bhupen Khakhar and that Jones can’t unblinker himself to appreciate that is a shame.