It must be remembered that investment in art depends primarily on taste. And tastes are intricately linked with social developments, historical processes and the evolution of choice. In the case of tastes in our contemporary art, three trends are clearly visible at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century.

In late colonial India, the Indian pillars of the Raj the maharajas, nawabs and Zamindars naturally shared the tastes of the colonial bureaucracy for academic landscapes, but with an eclectic preference for blousy nudes and devotional iconography reflecting the taste for the human figure and the erotic-devotional blend of traditional temple art and provincial miniature art.

Untitled tempera and ink on silk by Ramkinkar Baij

It is not surprising then that these tastes developed naturally into a much more genuine Indo-Victorian expression in the works of Raja Ravi Varma, Pithawala, Hemen Majumdar and a number of lesser known artists where prudery and voyeurism showed an uneasy coexistence. This was the dominant trend. But it did not last.

This trend lost out to the art of the national movement in the long run. Colonialism, beleaguered by a host of peasant upsurges, began to lose its hold over the minds and tastes of the Indian propertied classes as well. One of the first trends that emerged as a challenge was the Bengal School art of Abanindranath Tagore. This art with its revival of the Mughal imperial and Ajanta styles and imperial themes to go with them, was an Indian art that was the mirror opposite of colonial art.

It was imperial in origin and expression. It definitely distanced itself from the unashamedly naked forms of the temples, preferring the Victorian prudery of diaphanous robes, three-quarter sleeved blouses and housewifely saris to the almost naked figures of our medieval devotional art.

The new Indian ruling classes had shifted away from the lusting landlords of the past and had acquired the self-conscious prudery of the Victorian business and bureaucratic classes, one of whom actually proposed the need to paint adequately modest clothes on the naked figures in the Ajanta murals! Theirs was the art of Brown Englishmen.

It too did not last, except in works that blended this revived imperial expression in its orientalist form with folk rather than epic historical themes, in keeping with the changing times.

The introduction of peasant themes, folk styles and even scenes from the epics in popular folk-scroll forms of a class favouring a break with the Raj overtook the taste brown Englishmen lamenting un British rule in India. So we find the ?Bengal School? of the Kolkata College of Art and the Havell-Tagore duo being replaced by the more radical Santiniketan Art of Rabindranath Tagore, Gagendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ram Kinkar Baij.

This art, reflecting the taste and patronage of the Indian national movement, naturally survives as the best investment in art today just as an independent, secular Indian democracy has survived for 50 years.

However, to leave it at the discovery by these artists of peasant, folk and tribal expressions as a result of the mass peasant upsurges against British Colonial rule would be an extremely narrow presentation of this trend. It would fail to appreciate the extraordinarily broad vision it represents, allowing it to globalise the demand for it and give it a global market.

This art gave itself a global perspective by identifying with European Bauhaus art (which was itself influenced by the India-based theosophists). This art was declared degenerate by Hitler who closed down the Bauhaus. But not only did it survive the fall of fascism, artists of the group are among the best investments in world art today.

It is to the credit of artists like the Tagore that they had the vision to link their art to that of the Bauhaus and develop along similar lines permitting later artists to develop beyond it.

Another link the Tagores forged at Santiniketan was with the art of China and Japan. The investment value of this link has not matured yet, but as the 21st century progresses, the evolution and development of an aesthetic drawing equally from the East as from the West, which gave us the technique of wash painting, will find its place as an important aesthetic influence.

Again one cannot help but admire an aesthetic perception that could not only link itself with western schools of art that rejected the grandiose academic art of the European empires and looked towards the aesthetic traditions of the colonised people of Africa, Oceania, the Americas and Asia, but also with the civilisations of the East that had stood up successfully to the European onslaught.

From this perspective, the artists of the Santinikethan School (to distinguish them from the based ?Bengal School?) are eminent investments. Among them Rabindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Benode Bihari Mukherjee and Ram Kinkar Baij would have an important place.

True, artists like Amrita Shergill, Jamini Roy and Sailoz Mookerjea would also find a place among them, but they rank as individuals where the Santinikethan artists are the founders of a systematic and persevering trend that has a sound basis and an equally sound future.

For those interested in checking out these different trends the exhibition put up at the Delhi Art Gallery is worth a visit for those in the capital.