One hundred years ago, in 1896, Ernest Binfield Havell (1861-1934), appointed that year the Principal of Calcutta Art School, hectored his Indian students to get back to painting in their own (Indian) style and tradition. Havell returned to Britain in 1906 but his mission thrived, in the able hands of Abanindranath Tagore. Initially located in Calcutta — until 1911 the capital of British India — the Ha veil-inspired art movement spread in due course to most parts of India. Pramode Dasgupta, a leading member of a small band of modernists who questioned the hegemony of the Bengal School in the 1940s, compares the latter's great influence with the spread of Buddhism in the India of Asoka.1 Havell continued to support the art movement he had launched, writing a series of books defending Indian art from the disdainful Eurocentric art historians who applied inappropriate European standards to denigrate it. He wrote these books from an 'Indian point of view', which he constructed out of his reading of Indian philosophy, literature and mythology.
Partha Mitter, in Much Maligned Monsters, a rivetting account of the reception of Indian art in Europe, marks 1910 as "the great watershed" when Indian art could at last be said to have arrived "with its rehabilitation complete with the powerful affirmation of its aesthetic and not merely archaeological significance". Mitter continues:
If one were to search for a name to give the credit for this extraordinary transformation, it would no doubt be that of Havell. It was his dedicated work which was in a large measure responsible for generating wide interest in learned circles.2