<P> The Bengal school arose as an avant garde and nationalist movement reacting against the academic art styles previously promoted in India, both by Indian artists such as Ravi Varma and in British art schools . Following the widespread influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West, the British art teacher Ernest Binfield Havel attempted to reform the teaching methods at the Calcutta School of Art by encouraging students to imitate Mughal miniatures . This caused immense controversy, leading to a strike by students and complaints from the local press, including from nationalists who considered it to be a retrogressive move . Havel was supported by the artist Abanindranath Tagore, a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore . Tagore painted a number of works influenced by Mughal art, a style that he and Havel believed to be expressive of India's distinct spiritual qualities, as opposed to the "materialism" of the West . Abanindranath Tagore's best - known painting, Bharat Mata (Mother India), depicted a young woman, portrayed with four arms in the manner of Hindu deities, holding objects symbolic of India's national aspirations . Tagore later attempted to develop links with Far - Eastern artists as part of an aspiration to construct a pan-Asianist model of art . Those associated with this Indo - FarEastern model included Nandalal Bose, Mukul Dey, Kalipada Ghoshal, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Vinayak Shivaram Masoji, B.C. Sanyal, Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, and subsequently their students A. Ramachandran, Tan Yuan Chameli, Ramananda Bandopadhyay and a few others . </P> <P> The Bengal school's influence on Indian art scene gradually started alleviating with the spread of modernist ideas post-independence. K.G. Subramanyan's role in this movement is significant . Today The Rednova Art Academy of Bankura, India is also notable art academy established by Artist Abirlal . </P> <P> The term Contextual Modernism that Siva Kumar used in the catalogue of the exhibition has emerged as a postcolonial critical tool in the understanding of the art the Santiniketan artists had practised . </P> <P> Several terms including Paul Gilroy's counter culture of modernity and Tani Barlow's Colonial modernity have been used to describe the kind of alternative modernity that emerged in non-European contexts . Professor Gall argues that' Contextual Modernism' is a more suited term because "the colonial in colonial modernity does not accommodate the refusal of many in colonised situations to internalise inferiority . Santiniketan's artist teachers' refusal of subordination incorporated a counter vision of modernity, which sought to correct the racial and cultural essentialism that drove and characterised imperial Western modernity and modernism . Those European modernities, projected through a triumphant British colonial power, provoked nationalist responses, equally problematic when they incorporated similar essentialisms ." </P>

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