One of the problems with press previews is that all too often they can become about everything but the art. This was the experience I had when I went to see “Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India,” which is currently open at two venues: the Asia Society Museum and the Queens Museum of Art. So much attention was given to breakfast, lunch, and the curator’s, director’s, and president’s ideas surrounding the show that there was not nearly enough time to take in the artworks themselves (especially the videos and DVDs) – let alone to digest how, exactly, the art related to the themes of the exhibition.

I mention this not to seem a carping critic, but because this shortsightedness is endemic to the problem with the organization of the show overall, which is attempting to do everything but let the art speak for itself. “Edge of Desire” comprises 80 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and interactive media (from 1993 to the present) by 38 artists and collectives. It is divided into five themes: “Location/Longing” and “Unruly Visions” at the Asia Society Museum and “Transient Self,” “Contested Terrain,” and “Recycled Futures” in Queens.

The show’s purpose is supposedly to introduce us to the diversity of contemporary “cutting-edge” Indian art, and to dispel current stereotypes about Bollywood, outsourcing, yoga, and Third-[art]World provincialism. But the theory-leaden categories have very little to do with, or overpower, most of the art on view, and so the show seems here mainly to convince us that India’s contemporary artists (like its businesses on the economic stage) are up-to-date and can compete in a global, postmodern market.

Despite India’s rich cultural heritage and its ongoing and overwhelming struggles politically, economically, religiously, and environmentally, much of the art in “Edge of Desire” does not feel inherently “Indian.” Most of the artworks betray the unfortunate influence of contemporary Western art-theory, which demands that art challenge rather than engage society. Walking through the show, I could feel traditional Indian culture slipping away; as its art and mythology are being watered down by, or actually drowning in, the au courant cesspool of art obsessed with sociopolitical commentary.

What we are presented with is a collection of artworks that speak first and foremost not about the issues of contemporary India but about those of contemporary art. Many of the artworks, while they deal with “India” as a subject, have more to do with Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, and Matthew Barney: They look as if they could have been made almost anywhere.

Here are a few of the pieces that illustrate this:

Atul Dodiya’s triptych “Tomb’s Day” (2001) is a badly painted, illustrative, and kitschy billboard of three views of the Taj Mahal, which poses Bill and Chelsea Clinton in one panel, President Putin in another, and P.C. Sokar in the third. Self-consciously hip, it has nothing to offer to the tradition of painting or to the relations of nations.

Subodh Gupta’s self-portrait “Bihari” (1998) depicts the artist’s face in a surface smeared with cow dung. An LED sign spells out “Bi-Ha-Ri,” which designates him as from a lower class, as well as backward, uncouth, and corrupt. Gupta’s self-portrait “Vilas” (2000-3), a C-print, shows the artist, nude and smeared with Vaseline, slumped in a green chair. These two works, included in the section “Transient Self,” are said to deal with identity, but their focus is the identity politics of art.

Included in “Contested Terrain” is L. N. Tallur’s “Made in England – A Temple Design for India” (2001-02). The sculpture, a very tall interactive installation, is comprised of two large inflated, phallic objects, including a tent that you can enter through a vaginal opening. Inside, aided by a flashlight, you can look at cryptic drawings made from reflector tape. The sculpture makes reference to Shiva, Nandi, and the “mania for temple building.” Yet its goofy, offhand, Thanksgiving Day parade disregard for deities and temples reduces it to nothing more than merely laughable.

Shilpa Gupta’s “Blame” (2003), an all-inclusive marketing campaign in response to the India-Pakistan conflict, the United States-led “war on terror,” and violence against Muslims in Gujarat, is an installation of roughly 200 bottles of the product “Blame,” which the artist gave away on trains and at shopping malls. In the installation the bottles, filled with red liquid, are lined up on Plexiglas shelves and lit by red fluorescent lights. A DVD display, which (like a cosmetics video at a department store) shows how to use “Blame” and documents the “giveaway” on the street, runs in a continuous loop. It’s big-idea endeavor is childish. Like so many of the works on view, it feels politically rather than personally motivated.

The best works in the show expand beyond, and therefore feel misrepresented by, the exhibition’s themes, as if they were being pigeonholed to fit the curator’s larger postmodern agenda. I was particularly intrigued by Raj Kumar’s two carved teak totems “Apne Zindagi Ka Khambha (The Pillar of My Life) I” (2002-03) and “Apne Zindagi Ka Khambha (The Pillar of My Life) II” (2003). The hieratic pillars, of climbing, clasping figures that at times become elephant- and monkey-like, move in an upward spiral and tell the story of the artist’s journey from laborer to artist. I could not make out a clear narrative in the sculptures, but the figures, which combine a kind of rustic Romanesque and totem-pole carving, are accomplished and feel truly unique.

I was also taken with Nilima Sheikh’s four hanging scrolls “Firdaus I” through “IV” (2003-04) and Gulammohammed Sheikh’s four painted and carved “Traveling Shrine[s]” (2002-04). Ms. Sheikh’s large “Firdaus” painted scrolls, which hung as a group from the ceiling, were made up of grids that merged image, narrative, map, and word. Richly saturated, at times jewel-like, their delicate colors are soft, and often shimmer gold. Each scroll feels woven as much as painted and has a sophisticated and different color range: blue/orange; red/green. Ms. Sheikh, who clearly understands the power of the grid, merges poetry and journey in works that are at once painting, craft, decoration, and pattern. She is sensitive as both a storyteller and an image-maker. Although the artist lacks a certain power as a draftsman, in each work she intuitively finds her way toward a compelling whole.

Mr. Sheikh’s “Traveling Shrine[s]” feel like personal, fantastical stories, visions, or fairy tales. Made up of unfolding, hinged wooden panels that close up to form a box with a handle, traveling shrines are traditionally carried on the torsos of village storytellers, transforming the performer’s body into a stage. Mr. Sheikh’s images of clouds, mystical animals and trees, winged beings, scribes, deities, maps, ships, and text bring the internal story gradually out into the open through layered, overlapping doorways.

“Traveling Shrine 4: Musings and Miscellanies,” less busy than the other three, was my favorite. A magical, intimate flow between word and image, it felt both Old World and fresh, and it seemingly fused children’s story and myth, object and box, the story spoken and the story seen. These two artists do not merely mirror contemporary taste. Fully engaged with their country’s past and present, they give us the qualities of an exotic journey to another culture and place.

“Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India” at the Asia Society Museum and the Queens Museum of Art until June 5 (725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, 212-288-6400); (New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, 718-592-9700).