Modern Painting & Bengal School

Modern Indian painting is the phase of Indian art from roughly the mid-19th century onward, when painting moved away from court-patronised miniature traditions toward new styles shaped by the colonial encounter, nationalism and global modernism. The Bengal School is an early-20th-century nationalist art movement (c. 1900s–1920s) led by Abanindranath Tagore that consciously rejected Western academic realism and revived Indian themes and techniques. Fix the vocabulary on first use: academic realism is the European salon style of accurate, illusionistic oil painting; nationalism in art is the use of art to assert cultural identity; modernism is the 20th-century break from realism toward abstraction/experiment; and the avant-garde are the experimental pioneers. The story is a chain of reaction and counter-reaction: Company/Ravi Varma (Western) → Bengal School (revivalist) → the Progressive Artists' Group (international modernism).

1. Background — Why Modern Painting Emerged

• The decline of Mughal and Rajput/Pahari patronage after the fall of the courts, and the arrival of British colonial art education and Western oil/easel painting.
• Company Painting — a hybrid Indo-European watercolour style for British patrons (natural-history studies, Indian trades/festivals) at Murshidabad, Patna (Patna Kalam — Sewak Ram, Shiva Lal), Tanjore, Delhi; the Impey and Forbes albums.
• Kalighat Painting — bold, swift, satirical watercolour patas near the Kalighat temple (Kolkata), mocking the colonial "babu," a bridge between folk and urban-modern art (it influenced Jamini Roy).
• The colonial art schools — Calcutta, Madras, and the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay (1857) — taught the European academic style.

2. Raja Ravi Varma — The First "Modern" Indian Painter

• c. 1848–1906, from Kilimanoor, Travancore (Kerala).
• Fused European academic realism and oil technique with Indian (Hindu mythological) subjects — "Shakuntala," "Damayanti," "Galaxy of Musicians," scenes from the Ramayana/Mahabharata.
• His oleograph press (near Bombay) mass-produced prints, democratising the imagery of the Hindu gods; he won a medal at the Vienna exhibition (1873).
• Significance & criticism: hugely popular, but nationalists (and the critic A. K. Coomaraswamy) dismissed his work as "too Western / calendar art" — he is the foil against which the Bengal School defined itself (his reputation has since revived).

3. The Evolution at a Glance

4. The Bengal School of Art (the core topic)

• Aim: a reaction against Western academic realism and Ravi Varma's style — to create a distinctly "Indian" national art.
• Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) — the founder/father (nephew of Rabindranath). Key work: "Bharat Mata" (1905) — originally conceived as "Banga Mata," a serene four-armed ascetic mother (holding a book, sheaves of rice, a cloth and a rosary), painted during the Bengal Partition/Swadeshi agitation and championed by Sister Nivedita as a nationalist icon; also "The Passing of Shah Jahan" and his "Arabian Nights" series.
• E. B. Havell — the British principal of the Calcutta School of Art who turned its teaching toward Indian art and mentored Abanindranath; with him, Abanindranath founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art (1907).
• Techniques & features: the wash technique and tempera; the influence of Japanese painting (Okakura Kakuzo's "Asia is one"; the painters Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunso visited Calcutta in 1903 — the hazy "Morotai" manner); and the revival of Mughal/Rajput miniatures and Ajanta murals (Lady Herringham led the Ajanta copying). Soft colours, a lyrical/spiritual mood.
• Gaganendranath Tagore (Abanindranath's brother) experimented with Cubist-influenced work and caricature — an early modernist within the family.

5. Key Artists of the Bengal School

• Abanindranath Tagore — founder (above).
• Nandalal Bose (1882–1966) — the most famous disciple; the Haripura Congress posters (1938), the iconic lino-cut of Gandhi on the Dandi March ("Bapuji," 1930), and the decoration/illumination of the original manuscript of the Constitution of India (he and his Santiniketan team designed the borders; the pages were illuminated by Beohar Rammanohar Sinha and calligraphed by Prem Behari Narain Raizada).
• Asit Kumar Haldar, Kshitindranath Majumdar, Mukul Dey, Sailendranath Dey; M. A. R. Chughtai (Lahore) extended the Bengal-School aesthetic.
• Jamini Roy (1887–1972) — academically trained but broke away to draw on Kalighat and folk/Pat traditions (flat, bold forms, earthy colours) — grouped with modern, not strictly Bengal-School, art.

6. Santiniketan & Rabindranath Tagore

• Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan — the art school of Visva-Bharati, founded by Rabindranath Tagore (1919).
• Rabindranath Tagore as a painter — began painting late (c. 1920s); spontaneous, expressive, modern (often growing out of his manuscript doodles), not in the Bengal-School wash style.
• At Santiniketan: Nandalal Bose, the muralist Benode Behari Mukherjee (who continued working after going blind) and the pioneer modern sculptor Ramkinkar Baij.

7. Indian Modernism — Beyond the Bengal School

• A reaction against the Bengal School's perceived sentimentalism/revivalism.
• Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) — Indo-Hungarian; trained in Paris (her "Young Girls" won a gold medal), she fused European post-impressionism (Gauguin) with Indian rural subjects and Ajanta/Pahari influence ("Three Girls," "Bride's Toilet," "Brahmacharis," "South Indian Villagers Going to Market") — a pioneer of Indian modern art (her works are now "National Art Treasures").
• The Progressive Artists' Group (PAG), Bombay, 1947 — founded around independence to seek a modern, international idiom. Founder-members: F. N. Souza (founder), S. H. Raza ("Bindu"), M. F. Husain (horses), K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade, S. K. Bakre; later associated — Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta (Mahishasura/Falling Figure), Ram Kumar, V. S. Gaitonde (abstraction). The group dissolved by 1956 but defined post-independence art.
• Other directions: Jamini Roy (folk-modern), Rabindranath Tagore, George Keyt; later the Baroda School (Bhupen Khakhar), the neo-Tantra movement (G. R. Santosh, Biren De), and the Cholamandal artists' village (Madras, K. C. S. Paniker).

8. Comparisons & Legacy

• Bengal School vs Company/Ravi Varma: Indian-revivalist vs Western-academic.
• Bengal School vs PAG: nationalist-revivalist vs internationalist-modern.
• Art and the freedom struggle: Bharat Mata, the Bapuji lino-cut and the Haripura posters; lasting legacy in nationalist iconography and India's art identity.

9. Quick Reference Tables

Modern-painting questions are usually artist–work–movement matching; the Bengal School and Nandalal Bose are the highest-yield.

For Mains, the staple is the "art + nationalism" reading of the Bengal School and the reaction/counter-reaction arc to modernism.