Indian Paintings: Modern and folk painting

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), born in Budapest to a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After returning to India in 1934 she painted Indian village women and everyday life, and her South Indian trilogy (1937) and later works show the impact of Ajanta and the Pahari and Mughal miniatures; statement 1 is correct. She died in 1941, six years before the Progressive Artists' Group was formed, so statement 2 is false.

Raja Ravi Varma of Kilimanoor (Travancore) mastered European academic oil painting and used it for Indian subjects: scenes from the epics and Puranas such as Shakuntala, Damayanti and Lakshmi. In 1894 he set up a lithographic press near Bombay (later moved to Malavli, near Lonavala) whose cheap oleographs carried his images of gods into homes across India. The Bengal School arose partly as a reaction against his Western realism.

The Bengal School, emerging in the early 1900s with the Swadeshi mood, drew on Mughal and Rajput miniatures, Ajanta and Japanese ink-wash methods, rejecting the oil realism of the art schools and of Ravi Varma; Abanindranath Tagore was its leading figure, so statement 1 is correct. E. B. Havell, principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, championed Indian art traditions, reformed the school's teaching and worked closely with Abanindranath. Statement 2 is correct.

Company painting was made by Indian artists for British patrons in centres of East India Company power and trade: Murshidabad, Patna (the Patna Kalam), Benares, Lucknow, Delhi, and in the south Tanjore and Trichinopoly. Basohli is an early Pahari centre of the late 17th century, and Chawand was the Mewar capital where the 1605 Ragamala was painted; neither is a Company centre. So two.

Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Abanindranath's pupil, and his students at Santiniketan decorated the pages of the handwritten Constitution with scenes from Indian history, from Mohenjo-daro to the freedom movement; statement 1 is correct. At Nehru's request he sketched the emblems for the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards instituted in 1954; statement 2 is correct. He was the principal of Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, from 1922; statement 3 is correct.

Abanindranath Tagore painted 'Bharat Mata' in 1905, at the height of the Swadeshi movement against the partition of Bengal. Done in the Bengal School's soft watercolour manner, it shows Mother India as a calm, ascetic figure offering learning (book), food (paddy), clothing and spiritual strength (rosary). Sister Nivedita praised it and wished to spread it widely. Ravi Varma died in 1906 and worked in oils, Nandalal Bose was Abanindranath's pupil, and Sher-Gil belongs to the 1930s.

The Progressive Artists' Group was formed in Bombay in 1947, the year of Independence, so statement 1 is correct. Its founders were F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, S. K. Bakre and H. A. Gade, so statement 2 is correct. The group turned towards international modernism (expressionism, cubism, post-impressionism) and explicitly broke with the revivalist Bengal School, so statement 3 is false.

The nine artists whose works are notified as art treasures are Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy, Sailoz Mookherjea and Nicholas Roerich. Their works need permission from the Archaeological Survey of India to leave the country. Members of the Progressive Artists' Group (Husain, Raza, Souza), Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, V. S. Gaitonde and the sculptor-painter Ramkinkar Baij are not on the list.