Compare the objectives of the Bengal School of Art with contemporaneous art revival efforts in Bombay and Madras Presidencies.

The early twentieth-century "Indian art renaissance" was not one movement but three regionally distinct responses to colonial art pedagogy. Bengal supplied its ideology, Bombay its exhibitionary platform, and Madras its craft-based pedagogy — convergent in purpose, different in method.

Bengal School: revival as nationalist ideology

• Led by Abanindranath Tagore, it sought an "indigenous yet modern" idiom answering the call for swadeshi [1].
• Deliberately rejected oil painting and Western academic realism, including the naturalism practised by Raja Ravi Varma [1].
• Drew subject and material from ancient murals, medieval miniatures and tempera, adapting the Japanese wash technique [1] — the objective was asserting civilizational continuity, not technical proficiency.

Bombay Presidency: exhibition and connoisseurship

• The Bombay Art Society (1888) was founded to promote art through exhibitions, lectures, a journal and a permanent gallery — initially cultivating Victorian academic taste among educated Indians [3].
• Revivalism came later and from voluntary societies: the Society for the Encouragement of Indian Art held an exhibition entirely of ancient Indian paintings and textiles at the Town Hall, Bombay (1926) [2].
• G. Venkatachalam's lecture "The Historical Development of Indian Painting" there argued India's painting traditions had been lost [2] — the aim was recovery and public education, not founding a new pictorial school.

Madras Presidency: craft and industrial arts

• The Madras School of Art (1850, Alexander Hunter), India's oldest, combined Victorian taste with training in "industrial ornamental arts" [4].
• E.B. Havell (Principal, 1884) began vindicating Indian aesthetics and introduced woodcarving, carpentry and metalwork [4] — revival routed through crafts and artisan livelihoods.
• Bengal's influence arrived institutionally when D.P. Roy Choudhury, a student of Abanindranath, became the first Indian principal in 1929 [4].

All three sought to restore aesthetic self-respect, differing only in whether the vehicle was the canvas, the exhibition hall, or the workshop. Their gradual convergence marks revivalism maturing from cultural protest into institution-building — a voluntary tradition the independent state later inherited through the Lalit Kala Akademi (1954), confirming cultural nationalism as a plural, regionally rooted complement to the political movement.