Abstract: Abanindranath Tagore was an Indian artist known as the founder of a 'national' school of art in the early 20thc., now called the Bengal School. The 'national' basis of this art, in its turn, has been seen as derived from the Orientalist constructions of an Indian art history by figures such as E. B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy. My contention in this thesis is that while this is to some extent true, the central concern in the art of Abanindranath Tagore is not the normalization of national or oriental principles, but rather an engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity as the underlying paradigm behind colonialism and nationalism, anticipating the objectification and fragmentation implicit in its order and countering these with a seeking, on the one hand, for transcendence or individual autonomy and on the other, the use of the freedom gained by this seeking as the basis of the creative practice of a communitarian intersubjectivity. In this, I see the fragmented subject of modernity as constituted by a variety of distinct discourses corresponding to imagined and lived communities. Modern capital's teleology, progressing towards globalism, establishes its regime institutionally through nation-states and symbolically through the modern metropolis. Late 19thc./early 20thc. Calcutta was the site of a number of such coexisting discourses with their specific trajectories and within this contested territory, Abanindranath Tagore made his art practice into a variety of hybrid negotiations between modernity and community or subjective autonomy and intersubjectivity. These hierarchical yet distinct discourses, brought into engagement by Abanindranath in this person and his art work, included the intersubjective realms of his Jorasanko family community, Bengal regionalism as exemplified through the movement of cultural politics known as the Bengal Renaissance, Indian nationalism, pan-Asianism and international Orientalism. Within this hermeneutic practice lay the potential of producing an ongoing limited transformative action that can be thought of as an alternate nationalism.