Mother India

Abanindranath Tagore, a pioneering twentieth-century Indian artist and an active proponent of revivalist art, was the founder of what came to be known as the Bengal School. His painting Mother India became a nationalist symbol for India’s freedom struggle as it was appropriated by the political leadership of the time after the Swadeshi movement was at its height, and became invested with an emotional response in the cause of the motherland. This chromolithography by the founder of a ‘new school of Indian painting’ illustrates how his work came to signify a new chapter in the annals of the country’s art history.