CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 34 of 120

Correct — B, Abanindranath Tagore. The Indian Society of Oriental Art was founded in Calcutta in 1907 by the brothers Gaganendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, with a group of Europeans in the city backing it and Lord Kitchener as its first president. Abanindranath was the moving spirit of what came to be called the Bengal School: he had trained in European academic technique, turned away from it, and looked instead to Mughal and Rajput miniature and to Japanese wash for a way of painting that would be recognisably Indian. The Society gave that project an institution — exhibitions, a journal and a teaching circle out of which Nandalal Bose, Asit Kumar Haldar and Kshitindranath Majumdar came. Art historians classify his work as revivalist for exactly this reason.

• (a)Rabindranath Tagore — Abanindranath's uncle, and a painter himself from the late 1920s, but his canvases belong to a private, almost automatic idiom that owes nothing to the revivalist programme. He is not named among the founders of the Society, and the school he did found was Visva-Bharati at Santiniketan.
• (c)Dwarakanath Tagore — Dwarkanath Tagore, the family's founding entrepreneur, died in 1846 — sixty-one years before the Society was set up. He belongs to the world of the Union Bank and the Carr, Tagore and Company, not to twentieth-century art.
• (d)Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya — Bankim Chandra was a novelist, the author of Anandamath and of Vande Mataram, and he died in 1894. Nothing in his career touches the visual arts or this Society.

The Bengal School was the first organised attempt to build a modern Indian art on Indian sources rather than on the academic naturalism taught in the colonial art schools. Abanindranath Tagore led it; E. B. Havell, principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, backed it from inside the system; and Ananda Coomaraswamy supplied much of the theory. The Indian Society of Oriental Art, founded in 1907, was its main platform.

Three of the four names are Tagores, which is the whole difficulty. Sorting them by date does most of the work — Dwarkanath belongs to the 1830s and 1840s, Rabindranath's own painting starts around 1928, and only Abanindranath is both an artist and active in 1907. Bankim Chandra is a novelist and can be set aside at once. It is worth remembering that Abanindranath is also the painter of Bharat Mata, around 1905, which is how he most often turns up in a history paper.

• The Indian Society of Oriental Art was founded in Calcutta in 1907 by the brothers Gaganendranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore.
• It was sponsored by a group of Europeans in Calcutta and Lord Kitchener was its first president.
• Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) led the Bengal School and drew on Mughal and Rajput miniature painting and Japanese wash technique.
• UPSC has keyed his paintings as revivalistic, the term art historians use for the school's turn away from Western naturalism.
• Nandalal Bose, Asit Kumar Haldar and Kshitindranath Majumdar came out of his teaching circle.

• Picking Rabindranath Tagore because he is the famous Tagore; his own painting begins two decades after the Society was founded.
• Confusing Dwarkanath Tagore, who died in 1846, with Debendranath or Abanindranath.

As a person-to-institution or person-to-movement match, or as a question on who founded or led the Bengal School.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The painting 'Bharat Mata', made around 1905, is the work of which one of the following artists?

  • (a)Raja Ravi Varma
  • (b)Nandalal Bose
  • (c)Abanindranath Tagore
  • (d)Jamini Roy

  Answer(c) Abanindranath Tagore — the image, painted during the Swadeshi years, is the best-known single work of the Bengal School.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs is correctly matched?

  • (a)Nandalal Bose : Company School
  • (b)Raja Ravi Varma : academic naturalism
  • (c)Jamini Roy : Mughal miniature
  • (d)Gaganendranath Tagore : Rajput miniature revival

  Answer(b) Raja Ravi Varma : academic naturalism — his oils in the European academic manner are what the Bengal School set itself against.