Debashish Banerji
Even during the period of its formation, the question of whether the Bengal School of Art was a revivalistic school was hotly debated. To reconsider today whether he Bengal School was revivalistic, we have to consider if there is any consensus on what is the Bengal School. Is it definable in terms of a style or theoretical principles? Is it just an atelier, consisting of a master and his students? Is it isolated in space and time or is it a continuing tradition or a transhistorical potential?
The name “Bengal School” was not a form of self-identification. It was a later re-appellation of what had more commonly called itself the Oriental School of Art. At the time of its founding, it was the first modern self-conscious school of art in India, attempting to define itself in terms of identifiable principles, that have become closely linked with India’s struggle for political and cultural independence from the British. Fostered and promoted by both British Orientalist and nationalistic interests, it rose in prominence to become the equivalent of a “national school” of art in the first two decades of the 20th century. Subsequently, its hegemony was challenged and it collapsed from national to regional status through its re-appellation as the “Bengal School.” Presently, it has been further localized in time to a period of the early decades of the 20th century and in membership to the artist Abanindranath Tagore and his direct students. However, a hazier understanding of the “Bengal School” also persists, expanding the envelope to include students of students of Abanindranath and those consciously or unconsciously continuing to create art along the lines laid down by the master and his original coterie. These include individuals practicing to this day, particularly in India, but by no means restricted to Bengal. The students of Abanindranath belonged to various parts of India and in the 20s, most of these students found employment as heads of art schools throughout India. Though with the reduction in popularity of its theoretical and stylistic concerns, the numbers of those who still profess affiliation to the school has sharply declined, it continues to retain complex and distinct self-identifying features so that a leading contemporary Bengali artist, Ganesh Pyne, who has not studied under the “lineage” of master or students comprising the school, can claim its membership for himself.
Nevertheless, it is first and foremost a localized phenomenon, and as such is a movement of art founded by the Bengali artist Abanindranath Tagore along with his students, Nandalal Bose, K. Venkatappa, Samarendranath Gangoly, Asitkumar Haldar, Sailendranath De, Kshitindranath Majumdar, Samarendranath Gupta, Surendranath Kar, Hakim Muhammad, Sami Ujjama, Nagabowatta from Sri Lanka, Mukulchandra Dey and Debiprosad Roy Chowdhury (Mitra 1963: 325-6). The originating moment of the Bengal School may be seen as 15 August 1905, the day that Abanindranath assumed office as Vice-Principal and Instuctor of Indian Art at the Calcutta Govt. Art College, at the instigation of its principal, E.B. Havell. 1905 can be marked as the year of the inception of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, as a response to the partitioning of the state by Lord Curzon. Thus it marks a watershed in nationalistic activity. The Swadeshi movement aimed at promoting indigenous culture and industry and boycott of British consumption. Abanindranath and his students were undoubtedly influenced by this movement, the artist contributing a poster featuring the state personified as the Mother, Banga Mata (later to be called Bharat Mata) for a political rally at the time. The tide of nativism swept through Bengali culture, impacting Abanindranath and his students to search for a “native” artistic expression. Themes from history, mythology and folklore and a conscious emulation of miniaturist styles of Indian Mughal and Rajput painting formed the staple of the Bengal School. For these reasons, the Bengal School has been called revivalistic.
However, the Swadeshi movement was not the only input determining artistic practice for the school. There were transnational figures, such as E.B. Havell and Okakura Kakuzo who were interested in an international and pan-Asian reawakening of spiritual forms of culture to stem the threat of rank materialism and pervasive westernization arising from colonialism. Abanindranath’s artistic expression was partly addressed to these concerns as well. Moreover, the Swadeshi movement itself was prepared by more than a half-century of creative and revisionary religious and cultural activity in Bengal, which has been called the Bengal renaissance. Abanindranath’s own immediate family upbringing in the extended Tagore household of Jorasanko put him into contact with some of the principal founders of the Bengal renaissance, so that he could be seen as continuing in the visual arts what this 19th century movement had already achieved in religion, music and literature.
The “Bengal Renaissance” was not a self-conscious movement with a leader and a following, like the “Bengal School”, but a community response to conditions of change, which developed through the efforts of independent creative personalities, who, nevertheless, were often in close interaction. The Bengal Renaissance may be said to have prepared the indigenous cultural conditions for the emergence of political activism towards independence in Bengal. In this, the Renaissance represents a combination of forces of revivalism and innovation or reform in its creative constitution. Within the Tagore household at Jorasanko, in the formative years of Abanindranath, there lived two of the founding personalities of the Renaissance, the artist’s grand-uncle Debendranath and his uncle, Rabindranath. Debendranath was a prominent religious reformist, thinker and mystic who was one of the towering figures in the Brahmo Samaj founded by Rammohun Roy. David Kopf has seen the Brahmo movement as the central intellectual thrust for the Bengal Renaissance (Kopf 1979). Whether one admits this or not, certainly the powerful influence of the Brahmo Samaj on all sections of middle-class intellectual life in Bengal cannot be underestimated. The Brahmo movement was a synthetic attempt at creating an universal religion based on unitarian principles. In its origin and in the formulation given to it by Debendranath, it was not made into an exclusive cult, but saw itself as a reformed and Vedantized Hinduism, which at the same time embraced Islam and Christianity. In this, one may clearly see both strands of revivalism and innovation at work. Rabindranath was Debendranath’s son and imbibed the Brahmo doctrine of his father. To the Vedantic universalism of its doctrine however, he was to add elements of Vaishnav, Sufi and Baul mysticism to create his own poetic vision of a human growth to universality. I believe that Abanindranth attempted in art what Debendranath did in religion and Rabindranath in poetry – i.e. create an universal style, synthesizing Rajput, Mughal, Japanese and western stylistic techniques and Vaishnavic, Vedantic, Sufi and Zen mystic doctrines in an inclusive artistic vision. Thus, I do not see the work of Abanindranath as only or even primarily revivalistic – it seems to me to be more innovative and synthetic. However, how much of this rubbed off on his students is difficult to tell. Revivalism certainly forms an important part of the students’ work, but by dint of following the stylistic practices of their master, their paintings, though often less adventurous than his, also express a synthetic quality.
To locate the Bengal School in the Bengal Renaissance, we need to look at the conditions that gave rise to the renaissance and the turn given to it by some of the principal figures in it, particularly those who had the greatest impact on Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the Bengal School. As mentioned above, the Brahmo movement was one such factor at the vanguard of the Bengal Renaissance, and specially in the formulation given to it by Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore, had a strong impact on both Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore. Though Abanindranath did not become a Brahmo, he assimilated its universalism and the Vaishnavic and Sufi poetic elements added to it by Rabindranath and utilized these in creating his own artistic vision and practice.
The British occupation impacted 18th century Bengal in its socio-religious domain through three major adverse movements, one practical and two epistemological: (1) Practically, through political and mercantile domination, adding a new layer above all others to the hierarchic structure of social oppression. (2) Epistemologically, through the two normative teleological vectors of (a) a post-Enlightenment rational civilization, which viewed Hindu society with its caste system, superstitions, idol worship, fatalism and civic unconcern as ignorant, unscientific, unprogressive and repulsive; and (b) a missionary Christianity which saw the religious beliefs and social practices as polytheistic, devilish and “heathen” and eminently in need of Christian salvation through conversion.
A curious mixture of different intentional attitudes in the British found expression as a result of these three. Though meagre-salaried, the post of a writer of the East India Company became covetable for the British, due to the opportunities it opened up for carrying on private business and for fleecing Indians unfairly (Bose, N.S. 1975: 6). On the other hand, rationalistic thinkers such as Macauley and James Stuart Mill severely criticized the irrational backwardness of Indians and actively promoted a civilizing mission, based on western education and a scientific reformation and restructuring of Indian life. Further, Protestant missionaries, such as William Carey and his associates of the Serampore Mission worked tirelessly to ameliorate the backward conditions of the natives, and in the process, convert them to the “one true faith”. In spite of their distorted understanding of Indian life, these latter two thrusts can be credited with the spread of literacy in Bengal, particularly Calcutta. The missionaries translated and published Sanskrit books as well as books of western education. In 1818, they started the first journals in Bengal, mainly the English monthly, Friend of India, the Bengali monthly Digdarshan and the Bengali weekly Samachar Darpan (Ibid.: 24). Missionary institutions like the Serampore Mission may also be credited with laying the foundation of English education in Bengal and other provinces, both for men and women.
Another important western activity which powerfully impacted indigenous minds was the increased anthropological interest in Europe that followed in the wake of Colonialism and spawned the western descriptions of the East, that has been called Orientalism. Much attention has been paid recently to this phenomenon as a conscious or semi-conscious part of the disciplinary mechanism of Colonialism. The collusive nature of Knowledge and Power in the construction of categorical and exclusionary identities as manageable modules in an organized technology of control has been highlighted in the work of Michel Foucault and applied to the Colonial context by Edward Said (1978) and his followers. Without laboring the point here, we may observe that the first organized manifestation of Orientalist interest in India came with the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, by Sir William Jones (1746-94). Though Indians were not allowed into its membership until 1829, its research activities opened up an understanding of ancient India which fertilized indigenous minds, giving them the raw materials to construct an image of national glory.
The above factors, combined with the relative affluence resulting from the employment of Indians in colonial service or as merchants or landowners, were largely instrumental in the emergence of a western-educated middle-class, particularly among the urban Bengalis of Calcutta, which has been called the bhadralok. Though a section of this class was intent on merely aping British ways as a sign of civilizational superiority, others responded to the western (mis)understandings and mistreatments of Indians with a mixture of shame and anger, and sought to answer the charges of irrationality, barbarism and selfishness through calls for social and cultural change. Of course, this is not to suggest that without the British intervention, Indian intellectuals would never be awake to a social or moral conscience, but rather to point to the catalytic role played by colonial occupation in quickening and intensifying an Indian Renaissance. It is also to indicate that the religious and social reform movements internalized, due to these causes, the liberal humanist values of a post-Enlightenment Europe and thereby found new standards for measuring indigenous conditions.
These new standards however, were not accepted wholesale, but engendered numerous conundrums in their cohabitation with Hindu values, which were voiced in an internal debate that raged with many variations in Bengali bhadralok society. The differences among these thinkers were often subtle, and categoric labelling seldom serves to do justice to their complexity. Nevertheless, broadly the debate could be said to fall into the dual camps of Reform and Revival. On scrutiny, both camps reveal internal struggles in the construction of an Indian modernity using selectively western and traditional values. On the Reformists’ side, the emphasis falls more markedly on rational reconstruction of individual and social life; while for the Revivalists’, the preservation of the riches of tradition were the greater concern. In the socio-religious domain of 19th century Bengal, some prominent examples of Reformists are Rammohun Roy, Keshub Chandra Sen, Henry Dorozio and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar; while among the Revivalists could be counted Radhakanta Deb, Vivekananda and Bhudev Mukhopadhyay.
Undoubtedly, in this regard, the person who could be called the Father of Modern India, is Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), whose efforts at social and religious change, individually and through his organization, the Brahmo Samaj, created the groundwork for a modern Bengali (and national) social identity. Well versed in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and English, he tackled the problem, not merely of Hindu superstitionism, but of all sectarian narrowness and fanaticism in religions. From a thorough study of the religious scriptural texts of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, he arrived at a monotheistic universalism, which he believed to be the essence of all Religion. He started weeklies in Bangali and Persian, in which he wrote tracts, often under different names, reinterpreting Islamic, Christian and Hindu doctrine to emphasize their monotheistic bases. His first publication was the Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin in Persian which tried to lay a common foundation of an Universal Religion in the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. He also spoke out against idolatry, superstition and sectarian narrowness in this work. Addressing the Hindus, he published several translations in English and Bengali of the Upanishads and other Vedantic literature and wrote an English book titled The Abridgement of the Vedanta. In these works, he exhorted Hindus to purify their religious practice of the mass of customs and rituals related to idol worship and cleave to the monotheism of the Vedanta. Similarly, in 1820, he published The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness – a work directed at Christians, in which he isolated the teachings of Christ from the miracles and emphasized the rational, humanitarian and universalistic bases of Christian morality. This precipitated a controversy with the missionaries which was to continue for several years. Rammohun started several organizations to propagate his religious ideas, the most significant of which was the Brahmo Sabha (later called the Brahmo Samaj) in 1828. This was a religious body, “to teach and to practice the worship of the one God”, with a temple of its own, where congregational worship took place, free from idolatry and superstition, modeled mostly on Unitarian worship. Related to these efforts at the reform of religion, were his social crusades for the amelioration of the condition of women and for the availability of western education for Indian children. He opened a number of schools for Bengali children and the founding of the Hindu College in 1817, as an institution of higher learning for Indian youth, initiated by him jointly with David Hare, was a landmark in the history of the growth of western education in India. Rammohun is also rightly famous for his long and successful campaign for the abolition of sati, the self-immolation of widows on the funeral-pyres of their husbands, and he fought incessantly against child marriage and for female education. To achieve these goals, he was among the first Indians to use the instrument of the vernacular press, to organize public opinion through meetings and petitions and thus, to precipitate social change both through indigenous institutions and government intervention. These methods would later become the foundations for political agitation in India.
Rammohun collected around him a small number of very able Bengali intellectuals, who aided him actively in his pursuits. Among his closest allies was the rich industrialist Dwarkanath Tagore, the grandfather of Rabindranath, who financed many of Roy’s projects, though he himself remained on the periphery of the action and never became a Brahmo. His son, Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) however, was attracted to Rammohun’s ideas and activities from a young age and embraced Brahmoism as a faith. After the passing of Rammohun in England in 1833, Debendranath took charge of the Brahmo Samaj and gave it a new direction. He changed the Samaj from a loose society into an organization with members formally initiated by ceremony. He drew up a declaration of faith, established a theological school, sent out the first Brahmo missionaries, and created a new liturgy, the Brahmo Rites. However, during the leadership of Debendranath, a latent knot in Rammohun’s thinking became reified and led to a breach in the Samaj. Though Rammohun was outspoken against the caste system, he never himself abandoned his Brahmin status and saw Brahmoism as the “true Hinduism” and not a breakaway sect. However, in calling for humanitarian reform of religion, he privileged the rational over the mystical, essentially putting to question the entire psycho-spiritual orientation of Hinduism. Debendranath, on the other hand, was more inclined towards the contemplative and mystical bhakti aspects of Hinduism and not minded towards rationalistic tampering with religion. With a stress of devotion, ethical duties, and the near-Vedic but non-idolatrous Brahmo rites, the Samaj moved closer to the Hindu mainstream and quickly grew in numbers. But a younger group of the Samaj, headed by Keshab Chandra Sen, was more iconoclastic, and clamored for an emphasis on rational editing of religion with an eye to social reform, such as the overt repudiation of Hindu cultism, the rejection of caste and the liberation of women from domestic seclusion and patriarchal oppression. This brought about a split in the Samaj in 1866, Debendranath’s group calling itself now the Adi Brahmo Samaj.
The factors which played into the cultural renaissance in 19th century Bengal were the same as those which led to religious and social reform and eventual political activism. The British occupation of India, bringing with it western education with its basis in post-Enlightenment scientific rationalism and Christianity, along with the political subordination of the native peoples, resulted on the one hand, in the appearance of a western-educated native middle-class intelligentsia and on the other, in the growth of an awareness in a section of this intelligentsia, of the need to affirm a modern native identity. Cultural representations of such an identity, initially of a regional “Bengali” variety and later extending to the idea of an Indian nation, saw a marked impetus in the 19th century and could be seen as a crucial factor in the creation of ideal images of liberated Bengali social existence and an inner domain of resistance to Eurocentric hegemony, which paved the way both for reform and anti-colonial politics. The particularly expressive forms of culture which gained prominence in 19th century Bengal were all mostly literary – namely, prose, poetry and drama. Music, specially as a medium of popular appeal, also saw much increase; though, a Bengali renaissance in art lagged behind and arose only in the early 20th century.
The appearance of an urban environment in Calcutta, along with the availability of western education, played no small part in the birth of a modern cultural Renaissance. The missionaries of Serampore, albeit with religious motive, studied and produced educational and propagandist literature in Bengali prose, which might be seen as the beginnings of modern Bengali prose literature. Figures like Ishwarchandra Gupta (1812-59), Gaurishankar Tarkavagish (1799-1859), Madanmohan Tarkalankar (1817-1858), Debendranath Tagore and Akshoykumar Datta were all prominent precursors to the appearance of a modern Bengali literature, through their poetic and journalistic exercises. However, none of these figures could be said to belong to the cultural renaissance proper. In the words of Nemai Sadhan Bose, “the flowering of the Renaissance began with the poetry of Madhusudan Datta, the drama of Dinabandhu Mitra and the novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Ibid.: 337).” Of these, we are primarily concerned with Bankimchandra as a shaping influence on modern Bengali literary and political consciousness.
Undoubtedly the father of the modern novel in India was Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838-94). Like others of his age, Bankim internalized the rational positivism of the west and the organic life of native Bengal and thought deeply in his novels about the conundrums raised by the confrontation of these forces and the new life-forms that were seeking to be born therefrom. Several of Bankim’s novels were set against a historical background and utilized this means to probe the social and philosophical issues of a life under various forms of oppression. Bankim was a believer in destiny, but also in the ability of human beings to dominate destiny through intellect, courage and self-restraint. Bengali women play very important roles in most of his novels as powerful and courageous figures. Indeed, through his positivistic portrayals of his heroes and heroines, there run the parallel threads of the two major mystic traditions of Bengal, which Bankim inherited – the Vaishnav and the Shakta. If it is a reformed Vaishnavism that he introduces early in his Krishnacharitra, his later works are informed with the vision of the Divine Mother as an inspiring presence and motivator for violent action in the cause of truth and justice. The last works, Anandamath, Devi Chaudurani, Sitaram and the revised Rajsinha, all have a historical background of war and violence, mythically invoking the Mother Kali or Durga. Small wonder that Bankim’s stories were to serve as such inspirations for the political extremists of early 20th century Bengal and he has been hailed as the prophet of revolutionary nationalism. The justly famous Bande Mataram from Anandamath became the clarion call of an entire generation of Indian freedom fighters and came close to becoming the national anthem of India. Of course, the reason that it is not the national anthem today, is the same that was held against Bankim as a thinker at a later stage of the freedom struggle – the claim that it (the song) and his version of nationalism meant little to non-Hindu Indians, particularly Muslims. However, the seminal contribution of Bankim should be seen for what it is – the generation of powerful and abiding messages and images that were to move an entire people, showing the power of cultural representations to shape history. Along with his stature as a novelist, Bankim’s contribution as an essayist and journalist need to be acknowledged. In 1872, he started the Bangadarshan, a literary and cultural journal, carrying articles on history, archaeology, phonetics, music, literary reviews, humorous and miscellaneous writings, all in Bengali. Some of Bankims’s own novels were serialized for the first time in the Bangadarshan. This activity evidences Bankim’s reformist idealism. Indeed, in the latter part of his life, he stopped writing fiction altogether and focused entirely on this journalistic activity, leading the revolutionary, Sri Aurobindo to comment that if the earlier Bankim “was an artist…, the later Bankim was a seer and a nation-builder (quoted in Bose, Op. cit. 353).”
The subjective, yet all-pervasive vision of Rabindranath Tagore, the great seer and poet, marks the completion of the 19th century. It may be argued that Rabindranath’s genius had not grown to its full maturity by the end of the 19th century, yet the unmistakable stamp of that genius was noticeable in all the branches of literature he had touched by that time. While still in his teens, he published his Sandhya Sangit (Evening Songs, 1881), in which Bankimchandra was among the first to foresee the rising sun of Bengali literature. Soon, he was to publish the now famous literary deception of Bhanu Singher Padavali (1884), hiding behind the pretence of a “genuine” medieval Vaishnav text. This was followed by the publication of Prabhat Sangit (Morning Songs) and three more volumes of poetry. But the acme of this period is to be found in his Sonar Tori (Golden Boat), published in the 1894, the year of Bankim’s passing. In 1891, Rabindranath launched a literary journal, Sadhana, on which the mantle of Bankim’s Bangadarshan fell after the latter’s death. By the end of the century, the foundations of Rabindranath’s views on nationalism, humanism, transcendentalism and the synthesis of east and west found voice through this journal. In the words of Nemai Sadhan Bose, “the Golden Boat had been launched and it was destined to make history for nearly fifty years (Ibid.: 354).” Rabindranath’s output was the most prolific and consistently of the highest quality. It is not possible to do any justice to the scope of his work in this short essay. He left his mark in every genre of Bengali literature – the novel, short story, drama, essay and literary criticism and richly deserved the Nobel Prize which he was awarded in the early 20th century. He can be credited with having fashioned a modern Bengali language, whose impact extended far beyond the pages of his books to enter into living speech. Actively concerned with the political, social and spiritual independence of India, his novels, essays and social programs were powerful factors in the shaping of the national consciousness. Against all forms of narrowness, Rabindranath’s vision of the human being, based on the Vedanta, was one of spiritual growth into the image of the Universal Man, Vishwa Manav. This universality needed to be reflected in all human social institutions, from sectarian religion to nationalism. Towards this cause, all forms of oppression needed to be challenged and overcome, but the means to this overcoming were of prime importance to Rabindranath and needed to be free from hatred and violence. The poet came to tower, not only over the literary scene of Bengal, but the entire cultural sphere of the nation as a spiritual guide, Gurudev, whose advice was sought by all, including political leaders as disparate as Gandhi and Subhash Bose. Indeed, all his works are laced with Vaishnav mystic metaphors translated into an extraordinarily wide range of contexts. However, this romantic Vaishnavism flows into the transcendental philosophy of a Brahmo Vedanta; the lyricism of Kalidasa and the lofty metaphysics of the Upanishads were given the earthy vigor of rustic folk idioms and cast into moulds often adapted from western forms. During his lifetime, Rabindranath was undoubtedly the most vital creative force in the cultural renaissance of India and represents its finest achievement.
In the sphere of art, the Renaissance in Bengal had a late start at the turn of the century. Under British occupation, the miniature tradition of the Punjab and Rajasthan was discouraged, as being naive and not possessing the most rudimentary skills, such as the ability to depict perspective or shading, necessary for naturalistic rendering. By the mid-19th century, twenty-two schools of Industrial Art had been set up throughout the urban centers of colonial settlement, aimed at teaching the natives the rudimentary skills of drawing and painting, according to precepts of academic naturalism. The students of these schools were largely employed as technical draftsmen by the British government, but many also were commissioned to make portraits of the native rulers (rajas, nababs) or of the officers of the colonial Crown; or to paint romantic landscapes or exotic scenes as souvenirs for the British stationed in India. Under these conditions, a principal of the Calcutta Govt. College of Art, E.B. Havell, who was closely affiliated with the later Pre- Raphaelite movement of William Morris, challenged the western orthodox notions of art and its teaching, and entered into a collaboration with Abanindranath Tagore, a nephew of Rabindranath, which was to revolutionize the idea of art in India and steer it to its modern expression. The ideas of Havell and Abanindranath hearkened back to the conceptual bases of classical Indian art. In this, Havell saw a similarity with medieval and Pre-Renaissance European theories, which saw art as the representation of spiritual ideas in sensible forms rather than an imitation of nature. Abanindranath was profoundly influenced not only by Indian classical and miniaturist traditions, but by the Zen art of Japan, to which he was introduced by the Japanese nationalist ideologue, Okakura Kakuzo and his students. Abanindranath learnt and adapted the Japanese technique of the wash, and used this along with Indian and Japanese compositional schemes in a quasi-miniaturist format to evoke scenes from Indian history, landscape, folklore and mythology. Though this was hailed as a national revival of art, it was more in the nature of a modern reconstruction based on broad interpretations of Indian art amplified with homologous concepts taken from other traditions. In 1905, Abanindranath was brought in by Havell as vice-principal and Indian art instructor of the Govt. Art College at Calcutta and became instrumental in a thorough revisioning of the art curriculum and pedagogical methods, leading to the founding of a new art movement, later to be called the Bengal School. The year 1905 may also be seen as the initiation of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, arising in response to the Partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in that year. As part of the demonstrations accompanying the heady revolutionary activity of this year, was the use of what could perhaps be called the only explicitly political painting of Abanindranath, his Bharat Mata. Interestingly, like Bankim’s vision of the Mother in Anandamath, Abanindranath’s too was conceived originally as Banga Mata, Mother Bengal, but transformed to symbolize the entire nation at the call of the political forces. Abanindranath and his students, promoted by Havell in England and Okakura in Japan, were among the first Indians of the Bengal Renaissance to attain to international recognition, a phenomenon that was instrumental in the subsequent discovery of the genius of Rabindranath and his award of the Nobel Prize. By the 1920s, Abanindranath’s art movement, aided by the popularity of print journalism, had managed to influence the idea of taste and norm in art sufficiently to cause a widespread modification of art practice in the country and the installation of all the master’s students in positions of authority in national art schools and policy centers all over India.
Thus, in the context of the Bengal Renaissance, the Bengal School shows itself as a creative effort to synthesize elements from the Bengali, Indian and transnational past into an expression that bridges the discourses of tradition and modernity. Tradition implies the existence of a community through a continuity in time, with oral and performative practices that are handed down and reproduced with improvisatory innovations through the generations. Cultural expressions manifesting in much of the Bengal Renaissance cannot claim such continuities. In the literary experiments of Bankimchandra and Rabindranath, a new language, at once exalted and colloquial, is produced. It is a language that helps to bridge Sanskrit classical textuality and communal Bengali speech. It thereby attempts to “create” a new community – one defined not in terms of western civilizational norms but with the expectation of a standard of refinement based on ancient India, combined nevertheless with the quotidian complexities of modern existence. Narrated in novelistic form, a structuring of events in time following a “western” and thereby “modern” format is expressed, and with themes familiar enough to bhadralok society to make them interesting. The popularity of Banikim’s and Rabindranath’s novels and Rabindranath’s poems and plays in Bengali turn-of-the-century society are evidence of their ability to “create” community – Bengali common speech changes after Rabindranath. At the same time, this “modern” individualistic creative enterprise is itself backgrounded by a “tradition” of heterodox Bengali mysticism, already alienated from homogenous cultural continuities and combining Buddhist, Tantrik, Vaishnav and Sufi metaphors in varying subcultural combinations. The difference lies in a translation of the trope of such a tradition into a modern setting in Bankim and Rabindranath. The recognition of the national and transnational domains as new forms of quasi-community bring new demands upon the practices of universalistic mysticism, and these are addressed by the writers of the Bengal renaissance.
A similar attempt is made in the field of art by the Bengal School. There was no living Indian tradition of artistic practice from which Abanindranath could draw. So he synthetically “created” a tradition out of British, Japanese, and Indian folk and textual sources. This tradition was “framed” in classical Indian terms, to give it the sense of continuity in a discourse of nationalism. This “framing” emphasizing Indian historical themes, moral messages and “traditional” miniaturist styles was carried out mostly by Orientalist and nationalistic critics, such as Havell, Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita. But this framing and this discourse did not exhaust the universe of meanings that found expression in the work of Abanindranath and his disciples. In Abanindranath’s own case, a sub-tradition for the creation of modern universalistic traditions already existed in his extended family at Jorasanko, and this he certainly drew from. Moreover, as with the work of Rabindranath and several others of the Bengal Renaissance, a heterodox tradition of Bengali mysticism was “translated” by him into an urban and modern discourse. And yet, it was not as if these hybrid elements were alien to common Bengali experience. Metaphors, sentiments, ideals that were living to the “traditional” discourse were tied to homologous elements from other cultures and presented. His paintings could speak thus to several registers of community and create several traditions – (1) a private community of the Tagore subculture; (2) a regional Bengali community, such as that addressed in Rabindranath’s novels; (3) a “national” community, where pan-Indian cultural and religious symbols are integrated; (4) a “pan-Asian” community, where Sufi, Zen and Vaishnav mysticisms are synthesized; and (5) a transnational community, where universalistic aesthetical principles prioritizing subjectivity are presented as an alternative “spiritual” approach to art. Skilfully negotiating these registers, Abanindranath and his disciples blurred and bridged the division between “tradition” and “modernity”, in the process of creating a “new tradition” and a “new modernity”.
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