The Bengal School and Cultural NationalismClass 12 Fine Arts Notes

The Bengal School and Cultural Nationalism

This period in Indian art history explores the major shifts in painting that occurred under British colonial rule, leading to the rise of a new, nationalist style of art known as the Bengal School.

Company Painting

Before the British arrived, art in India served various purposes, from temple statues and manuscript illustrations to decorations on the walls of village homes. With the establishment of colonial rule around the eighteenth century, the British became fascinated with Indian life.

• Origins: English officers, intrigued by the local customs, people, flora, and fauna, commissioned Indian artists to document the world around them.
• Artists: The painters were local artists, some of whom had previously worked for Indian courts in Murshidabad, Lucknow, or Delhi.
• A New Style: To satisfy their new British patrons, these artists had to change their traditional methods. This led to a hybrid style known as the Company School of Painting.
• Key Characteristics:
  • It was a mixture of traditional Indian painting and European styles.
  • It relied heavily on close observation, a key feature of European art, rather than on memory and traditional rule books, which was common in Indian art.
  • The paintings were mostly done on paper.

This style became very popular, not just with the British in India, but also in Britain, where albums of these paintings were in high demand.

Raja Ravi Varma

The popularity of Company Painting declined in the mid-nineteenth century with the invention of photography, which was a more efficient way to document things. However, the art schools established by the British promoted a new style: the academic style of oil painting.

• The Artist: The most successful artist of this style was Raja Ravi Varma, a self-taught painter from the Travancore Court in Kerala.
• Style and Technique: He mastered academic realism by studying and imitating European paintings. He famously used a European medium (oil paints) to paint Indian subjects.
• Subject Matter: He depicted dramatic scenes from famous Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
• Impact and Popularity: His paintings became incredibly popular. They were mass-produced as oleographs (prints that looked like oil paintings) and sold in markets, even appearing as images in calendars. This brought art into the homes of many ordinary people for the first time.

The Bengal School

Emerging in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Bengal School of Art was a direct response to the Western-influenced art of the colonial period.

• A Nationalist Movement: The Bengal School was an art movement deeply connected to the nationalist (Swadeshi) movement. It originated in Calcutta, the center of British power, but its influence spread across the country.
• Key Leaders: The movement was spearheaded by artist Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951) and supported by E. B. Havell (1861-1934), the British principal of the Calcutta School of Art.
• Core Philosophy: Both Havell and Tagore were critical of how European tastes were being forced upon Indian artists. Their goal was to create a new style of painting that was Indian in both its subject matter and its style.
• Inspiration: They rejected the Company School and the academic style of Raja Ravi Varma. Instead, they drew inspiration from older, indigenous art forms like Mughal and Pahari miniatures.

Abanindranath Tagore and E. B. Havell

The collaboration between these two figures was crucial for creating a new direction for Indian art.

• Indianising Art Education: Starting in 1896 at the Government Art School, Calcutta, Havell and Tagore worked to reform the curriculum. While other British art schools in Lahore, Bombay, and Madras focused on crafts, the Calcutta school focused on fine arts.
• New Curriculum: They designed a curriculum that encouraged the study and use of traditional Indian themes and techniques.
• Promoting Swadeshi Values: Abanindranath Tagore became the leading supporter of Swadeshi ideals in art. He founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art, an important journal created to raise awareness about India's rich artistic past.
• Legacy: The Bengal School, born from this collaboration, set the stage for the development of modern Indian painting. It inspired a new generation of artists, including Kshitindranath Majumdar and M. R. Chughtai.

Shantiniketan - Early modernism

The ideals of the Bengal School found a powerful new home at Shantiniketan, an educational institution founded by the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.

• Kala Bhavana: This was India's first national art school, part of the Visva-Bharati University at Shantiniketan.
• Nandalal Bose: A student of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose was invited by Rabindranath Tagore to head the art department at Kala Bhavana. He was inspired by the local folk art forms he saw around Shantiniketan.
• The Haripura Posters (1937): Mahatma Gandhi invited Nandalal Bose to create art panels for the Congress session in Haripura.
  • These famous posters depicted ordinary rural people—a drummer, a farmer, a woman churning milk—engaged in their daily activities.
  • The lively, colorful figures were shown as contributing their labor to the task of nation-building, reflecting Gandhi's vision of including all sections of society.
• Jamini Roy: Another influential artist, Jamini Roy, initially trained in the colonial academic style but later rejected it. He adopted the flat, colorful style of village folk painting (pats). He wanted his art to be simple and easy to reproduce so it could reach a wider audience, focusing on themes of rural life, women, and children.

Pan-Asianism and Modernism

As the nationalist movement grew, Indian artists began to look not only inward to their own traditions but also outward to other Asian cultures and new ideas from Europe.

• Pan-Asianism: After the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the Swadeshi movement intensified. Kakuzo Okakura, a Japanese nationalist, visited Calcutta and promoted the idea of pan-Asianism—uniting Eastern nations to resist Western imperialism.
  • As a result, two Japanese artists came to Shantiniketan to teach the wash technique of painting, offering an alternative to Western oil painting.
• European Modernism: In 1922, a major exhibition of modern European art from the German Bauhaus School, featuring artists like Paul Klee and Kandinsky, was held in Calcutta.
  • These artists had rejected academic realism in favor of a more abstract language of shapes and colors, which appealed to the Swadeshi artists in India.
• Gaganendranath Tagore: The brother of Abanindranath, Gaganendranath was one of the first Indian artists to be influenced by these new European styles. He created paintings using a Cubist style, constructing images with geometric patterns. He also drew caricatures that poked fun at wealthy Bengalis who blindly copied European lifestyles.

Different Concepts of Modernism: Western and Indian

The debate over what constituted "modern" Indian art was complex and not simply divided along racial lines.

• The Anglicists vs. The Orientalists:
  • Some Indian intellectuals, like Benoy Sarkar, sided with the anglicists. He argued that true modernism was happening in Europe and that the Bengal School's focus on tradition was "anti-modern."
  • In contrast, the Englishman E. B. Havell was a leading orientalist. He believed that a return to native Indian art traditions was the only way to create a truly modern Indian art.
• A Synthesis: The artist Amrita Sher-Gil represented a meeting of these two viewpoints. She used modern European painting styles (like those from the Bauhaus exhibition) to depict purely Indian scenes and people.

Study of Paintings and Artists

Tiller of the Soil

• Artist: Nandalal Bose (1938)
• Description: This panel was one of over 400 posters made for the Haripura Congress session. It shows a farmer plowing a field, representing the daily life of a common villager.
• Style and Technique:
  • Painted in thick tempera with bold brushwork.
  • The style is reminiscent of folk scroll painters (patuas).
  • This folk style was a deliberate choice to represent rural life and Gandhi's political idea of the village as the heart of the nation.
  • The composition and bold colors also show inspiration from Ajanta wall paintings.
• Significance: These posters placed common people at the center of the nation-building project.

Rasa-Lila

• Artist: Kshitindranath Majumdar
• Description: A watercolour painting depicting the divine dance of Sri Krishna with Radha and the sakhis (friends), based on texts like the Bhagvata Purana and Gita Govinda.
• Style and Technique:
  • Uses the wash technique developed in the Bengal School.
  • Characterized by thin, slender figures, gentle gestures, and delicate colors.
  • The figures are drawn with simple, flowing lines.
• Significance: Majumdar was a follower of the Bhakti Marga (path of devotion), and his paintings reflect religious and mythological themes. By drawing Krishna and the gopis in the same proportion, he brings the human and the divine to the same level.

Radhika

• Artist: Abdul Rehman Chughtai
• Description: A painting of Radhika, a character from Hindu mythology, shown walking away from a lamp in a gloomy atmosphere, appearing to be in a trance or state of remorse.
• Style and Technique:
  • A wash and tempera painting on paper.
  • Chughtai was influenced by the Bengal School but developed his own style, incorporating the elegant, calligraphic lines typical of Mughal and Persian paintings.
  • The style has a lyrical, poetic quality and shows influences from Chinese and Japanese masters.
• Significance: Chughtai's work demonstrates how the Bengal School's influence was adapted by artists to explore themes from the broader Indo-Islamic, Rajput, and Mughal worlds.

City in the Night

• Artist: Gaganendranath Tagore (1922)
• Description: A watercolour painting of a mysterious, imaginary city created through a complex interplay of geometric shapes and light.
• Style and Technique:
  • One of the earliest examples of Cubism in Indian painting.
  • Uses diamond-shaped planes, zigzag lines, and prismatic colors to create a sense of fragmented light.
  • The artificial lighting and overlapping planes show the influence of theatre, as the artist was involved with plays staged at his family home.
• Significance: This painting shows how some Indian artists were engaging directly with modern European art movements like Cubism to create their own unique visual language.

Rama Vanquishing the Pride of the Ocean

• Artist: Raja Ravi Varma
• Description: This large oil painting depicts a dramatic scene from the Ramayana. Rama, angry that the ocean god Varuna will not let his army cross to Lanka, prepares to shoot a fiery arrow into the sea.
• Style and Technique:
  • Painted in oil paint using the European academic style.
  • The scene is intended to be momentous, dramatic, and emotional.
  • Varma was a master of lithographic reproduction, which allowed this and other mythological scenes to be widely distributed.
• Significance: This is a prime example of Varma's style: using Western realism to depict epic moments from Indian mythology, making these stories visually powerful and accessible.

Woman with Child

• Artist: Jamini Roy (1940)
• Description: A painting of a mother and child, simplified to their essential forms.
• Style and Technique:
  • A gouache painting on paper, inspired by the folk paintings (pats) of rural Bengal.
  • Features bold, sweeping outlines and flat areas of color.
  • The colors—dull yellow and brick-red—emulate the terracotta art of his home village.
  • Roy made his own paints from organic materials like rock dust, tamarind seeds, and alluvial mud.
• Significance: Roy is known as the "father of the folk renaissance in India." He rejected his academic training to create a style rooted in local traditions, viewing the village community as a symbol of resistance to colonial rule.

Journey's End

• Artist: Abanindranath Tagore (1913)
• Description: A watercolour showing a camel that has collapsed at dusk, its journey over. The painting is highly symbolic.
• Style and Technique:
  • A masterpiece of the wash technique, which Abanindranath invented. This technique creates a soft, misty, and atmospheric effect.
  • The hazy quality is used to evoke a mood and suggest the end of a life or a journey.
  • The painting combines fine lines and delicate tones, showing the influence of Indian miniature traditions.
• Significance: This work showcases the core philosophy of the Bengal School: using a distinctly Indian technique to convey deep emotion and symbolic meaning, moving away from the literal depiction of academic realism.