ABSTRACT
Early modernist painting in India emerged around the first decade of the twentieth century, with the first Indian art movement beginning in Calcutta, the capital of the colonial regime. The stage was set between the academic realism that prevailed in the colonial art schools set up in Calcutta, Lahore, and Madras, and the nationalist style that grew out of the cultural syncretism of different Asian cultures. Bengal took a lead role in cultural nationalism and promoting an indigenous (Swadeshi) ideology 146of art, derived from a modern interpretation of Buddhist and Hindu aesthetics. Despite the Pan-Asian impetus underlying the appropriation of ‘the style and conventions of Mughal miniatures and the Japanese wash technique by artists such as Abanindranath Tagore, the overall thrust of Swadeshi visual aesthetics possessed a sectarian character’ (Dadi 2010: 57). While the rise of national and cultural self-definition brought with it a rejection of British academic oil painting, it at the same time fostered religious identity, which was to later fragment the subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
