The Bengal School chapter compares Western and Indian concepts of modernism in colonial India. Which of the following pairs is correctly matched?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → E. B. Havell – in favour of a return to native art
Option (1) Benoy Sarkar – sided with the orientalists — Incorrect. Benoy Sarkar, a Bengali intellectual, sided with the anglicists. For him, the Oriental Bengal School was regressive and anti-modern.
Option (2) E. B. Havell – in favour of a return to native art — Correct. Havell, an Englishman, favoured a return to native art to create a true modern Indian art.
Option (3) ‘The Futurism of Young Asia’ – an article by Ananda Coomaraswamy — Incorrect. This article was written by Benoy Sarkar. Coomaraswamy was an art historian who wrote about Swadeshi in art.
Option (4) Amrita Sher-Gil – used the wash technique to depict Indian scenes — Incorrect. She used the kind of style the Bauhaus exhibition showed to depict Indian scenes. The wash technique was taught at Shantiniketan by two Japanese artists.
Note: This topic was not named in the CUET 2026 syllabus, but it was part of the NCERT chapter. In 2025 and 2026, NTA also asked questions on topics in NCERT that the CUET syllabus did not name. So our mocks have questions from every part of the NCERT chapter, to give you enough practice. Read the whole chapter, not only the sub-topics named in the syllabus.
NCERT (2026-27): “Different Concepts of Modernism: Western and Indian The divide between anglicists and orientalists, as mentioned earlier, was not based on race. Take the case of the Bengali intellectual, Benoy Sarkar, who sided with the anglicists and considered modernism that was growing in Europe as authentic in an article, ‘The Futurism of Young Asia’. For him, the Oriental Bengal School of Art was regressive and anti-modern. On the other hand, it was E. B. Havell, an Englishman, who was in favour of return to native art to create a true modern Indian art. … Amrita Sher-Gil, whom we will discuss in the next chapter, is a perfect example of the meeting of both these points of view. She used the kind of style that the Bauhaus exhibition showed to depict Indian scenes.” “Pan-Asianism and Modernism …Ananda Coomaraswamy, an important art historian, wrote about Swadeshi in art and joined hands with a Japanese nationalist, Kakuzo Okakura, who was visiting Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta. … Two Japanese artists accompanied him to Calcutta, who went to Shantiniketan to teach wash technique of painting to Indian students as an alternative to western oil painting.” |