The Bengal School and Cultural Nationalism

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Fine Arts Class XII (An Introduction to Indian Art Part II), Chapter 6.

Can a painting be a political statement?

A calendar on a shopkeeper's wall, a poster at a political meeting, a wash painting of a collapsed camel at dusk. All of them are art, and all of them were, in different ways, answers to one question that Indians asked from the late nineteenth century: what should modern Indian art look like, and who gets to decide? This chapter follows that argument from the Company School, through Raja Ravi Varma, to the Bengal School and the first national art school at Shantiniketan.

Before the Bengal School: Company painting

Before the British, art in India served different purposes. You could see it as statues on temple walls, as miniature paintings that often illustrated manuscripts, and as decoration on the walls of mud houses in villages. From around the eighteenth century, colonial rule brought a new kind of patron. English officers were charmed by the manners and customs of people of all ranks, by tropical plants and animals, and by varying locales. Partly for documentation and partly for artistic reasons, they commissioned local artists to paint what was around them.

Many of these artists had migrated from the earlier courts of Murshidabad, Lucknow or Delhi. To please their new patrons, they had to bend their traditional way of painting. They relied more on close observation, a striking feature of European art, and less on memory and the rule books of traditional art. This mix of the traditional and the European is the Company School of Painting. Paintings were largely made on paper, and albums of them were in demand in Britain too.

Why it faded. When photography arrived in India in the mid-nineteenth century, the camera did the job of documentation better. Company painting declined.

Raja Ravi Varma and the academic style

What flourished instead in the art schools set up by the British was the academic style of oil painting, which used a European medium to show Indian subject matter. Its best examples were found away from these schools, in the work of the self-taught artist Raja Ravi Varma of the Travancore Court in Kerala. By studying copies of European paintings popular in Indian palaces, he mastered academic realism and used it to show scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. His paintings became so popular that many were copied as oleographs (colour prints) and sold in the market. They entered people's homes as calendar images.

By the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism was rising. In this climate the academic style began to be looked down on as foreign and too western to depict Indian myths and history. The Bengal School emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century amid this thinking.

Two views. For the exam: nationalist opinion of the time held that Ravi Varma's academic style was too western for Indian myths, and the Bengal School was the response. Another reading: his prints made epic scenes familiar in homes across the country, which many later scholars count as a major way a shared visual world of myth was created for ordinary people. Both are reasonable ways to read the same fact, which is that his pictures reached very large numbers of people through oleographs.

The Bengal School: what it was, and what the name hides

The term "Bengal School of Art" is not fully accurate. The first move to create a modern, nationalist school did happen in Bengal, but the movement was not limited to it. It began in Calcutta, the centre of British power, and later influenced artists in many parts of the country, including Shantiniketan. It was associated with the Swadeshi nationalist movement and led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), supported by the British administrator and principal of the Calcutta School of Art, E. B. Havell (1861–1934).

Both men were critical of colonial art schools and of European taste being imposed on Indians. They wanted a new painting that was Indian not only in subject but in style. For them the better sources of inspiration were Mughal and Pahari miniatures, not the Company School or the academic style taught in colonial art schools.

Pause and predict: why would nationalists in the early 1900s prefer Pahari and Mughal miniatures as models rather than Ravi Varma's oil paintings?

Check your answer: miniatures were Indian in style as well as subject, so copying them meant recovering a tradition that was ignored in colonial schools. Ravi Varma showed Indian stories but in a European medium and manner, which nationalists thought left the style foreign.

1896: Indianising art education

The year 1896 is important in the history of Indian visual arts. Havell and Abanindranath Tagore saw a need to Indianise art education, starting at the Government Art School, Calcutta, now the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata. Art schools were also set up in Lahore, Bombay and Madras, but their focus was crafts like metalwork, furniture and curios. Calcutta leaned more towards fine arts. Havell and Abanindranath designed a curriculum that encouraged technique and themes from Indian art traditions.

Abanindranath was the main artist and creator behind an important journal, the Indian Society of Oriental Art, and was the first major supporter of Swadeshi values in Indian art. His painting Journey's End shows the influence of Mughal and Pahari miniatures. Art historian Partha Mitter writes that the first generation of his students worked at recovering the lost language of Indian art. Younger artists followed him, including Kshitindranath Majumdar (Rasa-Lila) and M. R. Chughtai (Radhika).

Shantiniketan and Kala Bhavana

Nandalal Bose, a student of Abanindranath, was invited by the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore to head the painting department of the newly established Kala Bhavana, India's first national art school, part of the Visva-Bharati University at Shantiniketan. Nandalal built an intellectual and artistic atmosphere to create an Indian style in art. He paid attention to the folk art forms around Shantiniketan and illustrated primers in Bengali with woodcuts, recognising that art could teach new ideas.

For this reason Mahatma Gandhi invited him to paint panels for display at the Congress session at Haripura in 1937. These are the Haripura Posters. They showed ordinary rural people busy with their work: a musician drumming, a farmer tilling, a woman churning milk. They were painted as lively, colourful, sketchy figures and shown as people contributing their labour to nation building. The posters echoed Gandhi's vision of including marginalised sections of society through art.

Kala Bhavana inspired many young artists and became a training ground for people who taught art across the country. K. Venkatappa in South India is a prominent example. They wanted art to reach a wider public rather than only the elite, anglicised class.

Jamini Roy is a unique case. He trained in the colonial art school, rejected it, and adopted the flat, colourful style of village folk painting. He wanted his paintings to be simple and easy to duplicate, so that they could reach a wider public, and he chose themes of women and children and rural life.

The colonial art policy and the divide

The struggle between Indian and European taste continued in the art policy of the British Raj. For example, the project of mural decoration for the buildings of Lutyens's Delhi went to the students of the Bombay School of Art, trained in realistic studies by its principal Gladstone Solomon. Bengal School artists, on the other hand, were allowed to decorate the Indian House in London, under close British supervision.

Pan-Asianism and modernism

After the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the Swadeshi movement was at its peak, and it showed in ideas about art. Ananda Coomaraswamy, an important art historian, wrote about Swadeshi in art and joined hands with the Japanese nationalist Kakuzo Okakura, who was visiting Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta. Okakura brought ideas of pan-Asianism: uniting India with other eastern nations against western imperialism. Two Japanese artists came with him and went to Shantiniketan to teach the wash technique to Indian students as an alternative to western oil painting.

Ideas about modern European art also travelled. In 1922 an important exhibition of works by Paul Klee, Kandinsky and other artists of the Bauhaus School in Germany came to Calcutta. These artists had rejected academic realism, which appealed to the Swadeshi artists. They built a more abstract language of squares, circles, lines and patches of colour. It was the first direct encounter of Indian artists and the public with modern art of this kind.

The influence is clearest in Gaganendranath Tagore, brother of Abanindranath. He made several paintings in the Cubist style, building interiors out of geometric patterns. He was also keenly interested in caricature, often making fun of rich Bengalis who blindly followed European ways of living.

Pause and predict: why would a Japanese nationalist and an Indian art historian both promote wash painting rather than oil painting in Calcutta around 1905?

Check your answer: oil painting was the western medium taught in colonial art schools. Wash technique was an eastern alternative, so it fitted the pan-Asian idea of eastern nations uniting against western imperialism.

Two kinds of modernism

The divide between anglicists (who admired European standards) and orientalists (who valued India's own art) was not based on race. The Bengali intellectual Benoy Sarkar sided with the anglicists and considered the modernism growing in Europe authentic, as in his article "The Futurism of Young Asia". For him the Bengal School was regressive and anti-modern. On the other hand, E. B. Havell, an Englishman, favoured a return to native art to create a true modern Indian art. That is the context for his work with Abanindranath Tagore.

Two views. For the exam: modern Indian art is the result of a conflict between colonialism and nationalism. Colonialism brought art schools, exhibition galleries, art magazines and art societies, and nationalist artists accepted these while asserting Indian taste, even accepting a wider Asian identity for a while. Another reading: the textbook itself shows that this is not a simple contest between Indians and the British. Sarkar, an Indian, wanted European modernism and Havell, an Englishman, wanted native art. The chapter ends by saying Indian art keeps moving between internationalism, drawing ideas from the West, and the indigenous, staying true to one's own tradition.

Amrita Sher-Gil (whom the next chapter covers) shows both views meeting. She used the kind of style the Bauhaus exhibition revealed to depict Indian scenes.

Timeline

Key works, described in words

Six pictures, looked at closely

Journey's End (Abanindranath Tagore, 1913). The wash technique gives a soft, misty, impressionistic landscape. That hazy, atmospheric effect suggests the end of a life. A collapsed camel lies against a red dusk, and the end of the day stands for the end of a journey. The camel is drawn in fine lines and delicate tones. Abanindranath also painted The Forest, Coming of Night, Mountain Traveller, Queen of the Forest and a series of 45 paintings on The Arabian Nights.

Tiller of the Soil (Nandalal Bose). One of the Haripura panels, it shows a farmer ploughing, an everyday act in the village. Bose made pen-and-ink brush studies of local villagers first. He used thick tempera in a bold cursory style with broad brush work, recalling the folk art of the patuas or scroll painters, so that the folk style stands for rural life and Gandhi's idea of the village. An arch in the background, strong formal design and bold colour show Ajanta's influence. More than 400 posters were prepared at Kala Bhavana under his supervision.

Rasa-Lila (Kshitindranath Majumdar, 1891–1975). A wash painting of Krishna dancing with Radha and the sakhis, set among trees that suggest a simple village, as in the Bhagvata Purana and Gita Govinda. The lines are simple, flowing and delicate. Krishna and the gopis are drawn in the same proportion, which brings humans and God to the same level. Majumdar was one of Abanindranath's early students and a follower of the Bhakti Marga.

Radhika (Abdul Rehman Chughtai, 1899–1975). A wash and tempera painting on paper. Radhika walks away from a lighted lamp against a gloomy background, as if in a trance or remorse. The line is calligraphic, like Mughal manuscripts and old Persian painting, and has a lyrical quality, "as if a poem finds visual form". Chughtai was influenced by Abanindranath, Gaganendranath and Nandalal Bose, and is described as a descendant of Ustad Ahmed, chief architect of Shah Jahan. He also painted legends, folklore and history of the Indo-Islamic, Rajput and Mughal world.

City in the Night (Gaganendranath Tagore, 1922). A watercolour using the language of Cubism, with diamond-shaped planes and prismatic colours, to show imaginary cities like Dwarka or Swarnapuri. Zigzag planes make a tight structure, and the scene is lit mysteriously by artificial light like a theatre. He used stage props, partition screens, overlapping planes and stage lighting, linked to Rabindranath Tagore's plays staged at home. Endless corridors, pillars, halls, half-open doors, screens, windows, staircases and vaults all sit on one plane.

Woman with Child (Jamini Roy, 1940). A gouache painting on paper by Roy (1887–1972), called the father of the folk renaissance in India. In the mid-1920s he travelled to the Bengal countryside to collect folk paintings (pats) and learn from folk artisans. A mother and child are painted with bold simplification, thick outlines and sweeping brush strokes, in dull yellow figures on a brick red background like the terracotta relief of his home village, Bankura. He used seven basic colours with tempera, made from organic materials such as rock dust, tamarind seeds, alluvial mud, indigo and chalk, and lamp black for outlines. He made his own canvas from homespun fabric.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Jamini Roy borrowed from folk pat painting to challenge colonial taste. In reality: he made the choice to use village art as the base for a modern Indian identity at a time when art schools taught European methods. The textbook reads his use of the village community as a political act of making the local signify the national. Why it matters: a question may ask why a trained artist would give up academic training. The answer is the combination of a wider audience and a nationalist view of the village.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the Bengal School is the first nationalist school, and Calcutta is its centre. In reality: the movement took on an Asia-wide outlook through Okakura and the Japanese wash technique, and then absorbed Bauhaus ideas through Gaganendranath. So the school that looked inward to Mughal and Pahari art also looked outward. Why it matters: it explains why a single chapter holds both pan-Asianism and Cubism without contradiction.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: The Pahari Schools of Painting and The Mughal School of Miniature Painting are the traditions Abanindranath and Havell wanted artists to learn from.
• Next: The Modern Indian Art carries the story to Amrita Sher-Gil, the Progressives and later movements.
• Also see: The Living Art Traditions of India for the folk painting that Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy admired.