Bengal Art Movement in India

In the early 20th century, it was said that “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow” after Indian Statesman Gopal Krishna Gandhi’s comment during the movement against Partition of Bengal in 1905 AD. The same trend was evident in fields of craft and literature. The new form and style of paintings and sculptures emerged out against the traditional ones taught in the Art Schools of the British administration. This trend was an attempt to liberalize Indian paintings and establish art gallery in major cities like Mumbai from colonial legacy of British rule. As it was against the prevailing Western traditions and it sought as well to create brand new form and style inherited from historic and folk forms and styles of India, it has rated as avant-garde movement. Besides, it has been also rated as an attribute of Indian Nationalist Movement for it was an endeavour to free Indian paintings and sculptures from the British hegemonic forces.

The proponents of this movement were Abanindranath Tagore and contemporary students of the Calcutta Art School. A fraction of the British Administration supported this movement. Actually this movement has its root in the teaching endeavors of Earnest Binfield Havel. He encouraged students to emulate from the Mughal miniatures instead of academic art promoted by promoted in India by Raja Ravi Varma and in British Art School. He was inspired by the influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West. The advocates of Bengal school tried to imbibe Indian spirituality in their pictures instead of Western Materialism. The famous of the all of this newly invented form is “Bharat Mata” by Abanindranath Tagore. In this picture a young woman resembling Hindu deity was holding motifs of Indian national aspirations in her four hands.

On a later phase, with the leadership of Abanindranath, the practitioners in this discipline took ventures for establishing pan-Asianist model by establishing communications with Japanese artists. Yet this movement ended abruptly at the advent of modernist movements in the 1920s. Among the advocates of this school Sanat Chatterjee lived in the millennium.