This book offers an analysis of the transformations that occurred in the art and aesthetic values of Bengal during the colonial and nationalist periods. Tapati Guha-Thakurta moves beyond most existing assumptions and narratives to explore the complexities and diversities of the changes generated by Western contacts and nationalist preoccupation's in art. She examines the shifts both in the forms and practices of painting as well as in the ideas and opinions about Indian art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author investigates the complex processes of westernization of Calcutta’s art world: the shifting status of artisans and artists, the emergence of professional and commercial opportunities and the permeation of Western standards and techniques that both created a new Indian ‘high art’ and transformed popular commercial art. Against this background, she analyses the role and nature of nationalist ideology in art, tracing its changing priorities over the period and the multiplicity of attitudes and convictions about ‘Indian’ art. The study deals particularly with the ways in which a dominant nationalist discourse evolved in the Swadeshi period and was mobilized to the cause of a new movement. Led by the reformist art teacher, E.B. Havell, and the pioneer artist, Abanindranath Tagore, it staked its exclusive claim to artistic regeneration, the recovery of tradition and the creation of a new ‘national art’. The author shows how the flourishing of an alternative ‘Indian style’ painting was tied to the reconstruction of an Indian aesthetic, to a new vocabulary of art criticism and a new language of aesthetic discourse. These orientalist and nationalist formulations of Indian art, she argues, operated within a wider milieu of aesthetic self-awareness and a thriving middle-class art culture in Bengal.

Table of Contents:
• List of illustrations • Photographic acknowledgements • Abbreviations • Glossary • Preface • Introduction 1. Artisans, artists and popular picture production in nineteenth-century Calcutta 2. The art-school artists in Calcutta: professions, practice and patronage in the late nineteenth century 3. Indigenous commercial enterprise and the popular art market in Calcutta: the emergence of a new Indian iconography 4. Tradition and nationalism in Indian art: art-histories and aesthetic discourse in Bengal in the late nineteenth century 5. Orientalism and the new claims for Indian art: the ideas of Havell, Coomaraswamy, Okakura and Nivedita 6. The contest over tradition and nationalism: differing aesthetic formulations for 'Indian' painting 7. Artists and aesthetics: Abanindranath Tagore and the 'New School of Indian Painting' Epilogue: the twenties • Bibliography • Index.