Modern painting
Modern painting — Bengal school · Progressive Artists Group
12 min read · Updated 2026-05-25
What is Modern Indian painting?
Modern Indian painting is the art of roughly 1850 to the present, moving through four phases: Raja Ravi Varma's academic oils on mythological subjects; the Bengal School's nationalist wash-technique revival led by Abanindranath Tagore from about 1900; independent voices such as Amrita Sher-Gil and Jamini Roy; and the Progressive Artists' Group founded at Bombay in 1947 by F.N. Souza.
The story
It is December 1947, a few months after Partition. A group of young artists meet in Bombay's Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute. The leader is Francis Newton Souza — 23, Goan, recently expelled from the Sir J.J. School of Art for participating in the Quit India movement and "drawing obscenities". Around him sit M.F. Husain (then a billboard painter who used to paint cinema posters in Mumbai), S.H. Raza (working at Bombay Pictorial News), K.H. Ara, H.A. Gade, and S.K. Bakre.
They draft a manifesto. They reject the Bengal School's Orientalist nostalgia. They reject Raja Ravi Varma's salon realism. They reject the colonial academy. They want a modern Indian art — Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, all the European modernist vocabulary — filtered through Indian subject matter and Indian colour. They name themselves the Progressive Artists' Group (PAG).
Within fifteen years all six founders would be dead, exiled, or internationally celebrated. Souza's Birth (1955) would later sell at Christie's for $4 million. Husain would paint horses and goddesses on cinema-poster scale for sixty years. Raza would settle in France and paint nothing but the bindu — the cosmic point. And the PAG would become the most-asked Art & Culture entry in UPSC after the Bengal School.
Why this matters for UPSC
Modern Indian painting is asked almost every year in Prelims — typically as "match the painter to the school" or "founder of Bengal School". It surfaces in Mains GS-I roughly once every three years on the cultural-synthesis or decolonisation angle. Interview boards probe it for the post-Independence cultural confidence question and for any candidate with a humanities optional.