About 1900 to the 1920s · Calcutta (Kolkata) and Santiniketan, Bengal
Bengal School
An early 20th-century movement that turned away from academic oil painting and looked to Mughal and East Asian art for an Indian modern style. It was tied to the swadeshi movement and led by Abanindranath Tagore.
How to recognise it
- A deliberate break from the oil-painted realism of the British art schools
- Subjects from Indian history, myth and literature
- Mughal miniatures as the model
- Later, line borrowed from Chinese and Japanese calligraphy
- Nationalist images such as Bharat Mata
The Bengal School began as a reaction. By 1900 the model for Indian painters was academic realism, taught in British art schools and practised by painters such as Raja Ravi Varma. E. B. Havell, who became principal of the Calcutta School of Art in 1896, tried to change the teaching by having students study Mughal miniatures. The result was a student strike and complaints in the press, some from nationalists who thought it a step backwards.
Havell found an ally in Abanindranath Tagore, the nephew of Rabindranath. Tagore painted in a manner drawn from Mughal art, which he and Havell believed expressed something particularly Indian, against what they saw as Western materialism. His best-known picture, Bharat Mata of 1905, shows a young woman with four arms, like a Hindu deity, holding symbols of the nation’s hopes. It belonged to the swadeshi moment. In 1907 he and his brother Gaganendranath were behind the new Indian Society of Oriental Art. Through the Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzo and the painter Yokoyama Taikan he turned towards a pan-Asian art.
His students and followers included Nandalal Bose, Asit Kumar Haldar, Kshitindranath Majumdar, M. A. R. Chughtai and his own sister Sunayani Devi. The movement’s influence faded as modernist ideas spread in the 1920s. The historian R. Siva Kumar argues that the Santiniketan masters, Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee among them, should not be filed under the Bengal School at all, since teacher-and-pupil lines are not the same as shared style.
What to look for
What the painter was reaching back to: Mughal pages, Chinese and Japanese line, an Indian subject. Labels deserve care, since “Bengal School” is often stretched to cover anything Bengali and early.
