Bengal School of Art

The Bengal School of Art was a nationalist art movement centered in Calcutta from roughly 1905 to the 1940s, led by Abanindranath Tagore, nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who developed a style drawing on Mughal and Rajput miniature painting, Ajanta cave murals and Japanese wash technique, learned partly from the visiting Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzo and painter Yokoyama Taikan, as a deliberate alternative to the academic Western oil painting taught in colonial art schools. Abanindranath's Bharat Mata, Mother India, depicting the nation as a saffron-robed goddess, became an iconic image of the swadeshi movement against British rule, and the school's soft-focus watercolor wash technique and subjects drawn from Indian myth, history and literature were promoted internationally through the British art historian E. B. Havell and the critic Ananda Coomaraswamy. Though its romanticized nationalist idiom was later challenged by more modernist Indian artists from the 1940s onward, the Bengal School remains recognized as the first organized modern Indian art movement to assert an explicitly indigenous visual language against colonial academic training.