INDIA’S UNREST.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 30 June 1924, Page 9

INDIA’S UNREST.

EFFECT ON ART. The Earl of Romildsliay in an address at a meeting of the India Society ip London, on “Some reflections concerning an Indian art Renaissance,” said iiat it was in Bengal that the chief evidence of an art renaissance v*as to be found. It was provided mainly by the existence in Calcutta of a modern school of Indian painting. The prolonged period of peace and order, which had been a oift of priceless value from Great Britain to the Indian peoples, said Lord Ronaldshay, was favourable to a recuperation of their exhausted energies, and with renewed vitality came an instructive realisation that good as were the gifts which they had received from the West, they were not in all respects in harmony with their own peculiar genius. The rapidly growing strength of this conviction in recent years had been a factor of no little influence in about the unfortunate antagonisms which for some time past had darkened and embittered the relations between the British and the Indian peoples. While almost all the pictures of the Bengal school which he had seen possessed an attractive prettiness, they did not in all cases carry conviction.' fie thought he was justified in claiming that there was positive evidence of a renaissance in Indian art. The significance attaching to the movement was found in an awakening race consciousness expressing itself in terms of art. On all sides in Bengal he had seen unrest of spirit at work. He had traced it alike in movements which he had had unequivocally to condemn and in movements which had seemed to him to be worthy of the highest encouragement and praise, in the sphere of liter, ature and art, in the arena of violent revolutionary agitation.