Calcutta of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a thriving cosmopolis, second only to the capital city of the British empire, London. Its distinctive cultural milieu attracted people from across the world, in turn giving rise to two social classes. The first, forming the upper echelons of society, consisted of the nouveau-riche ‘Babus’, who were educated in English and were influenced by western ways and sensibilities. They were either land-owning gentry or engaged in business and looked down upon popular art and culture as being crass. The second were the masses, who enjoyed ridiculing the babus for being disconnected from the real world, painting them as spoilt, entitled snobs born into wealth.
As the two classes were loath to mix with each other, the popular art of the time—“Bazaari” art as it’s referred to—began documenting these societal distinctions. It is most visible in the vivid and stark imagery of Kalighat pats. One also sees it in the intricate detailing of rich oil paintings commissioned by wealthy patrons, as well as in the rare examples of reverse glass paintings from Canton (present-day Guangzhou) made for sale in the Calcutta market, and later through increasingly popular prints. Nearly 250 of these seminal works are currently on display in an exhibition by DAG, New Delhi, entitled The Babu & The Bazaar: Art from 19th and Early 20th-Century Bengal.
“Inexpensive when made, these Kalighat pats are now valuable collector’s items, and major exhibitions have been devoted to them,” explains Giles Tillotson, senior vice president, exhibitions, DAG. “Less well known is our second group: highly finished oil paintings, also mostly of sacred subjects, commissioned by the city’s wealthy elites: the bhadralok. They afford us a glimpse into the world of the babu: a world that was closely tied to (even as it gazed contemptuously at) the world of the bazaar.”
In the works since 2018, this exhibition has been put together from the expansive collection of DAG. Ashish Anand, CEO and MD, has been collecting them from India and abroad ever since the 1990s. They also include a few loaned works. Aditi Nath Sarkar, art historian and curator who specialises in the Pattachitra style of art and its offshoot, the Kalighat paintings, was roped in to sift through the collection and present it thematically. He was aided by Shatadeep Maitra, from the exhibitions team of DAG. They have also co-authored a book of the same name, which was released alongside the exhibition.
The exhibition spans two floors of the gallery, with the first dedicated exclusively to the Kalighat pats and the small but impressive collection of glass paintings, and the second containing oil paintings and prints. Vitrines with photographs of Calcutta at the time, books, letters, lithographic stones used for printmaking and more, add to the narrative.
Draupadi’s Vastraharan, oil on Canvas
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Though it may seem like the focus of Kalighat paintings was mainly religious, Maitra asserts that the intention of the exhibition is to show them as vital tools of social commentary. He explains, “Everything they captured was a part of society. The iconography shown here was essentially playing on stereotypes, it’s what they saw happening around them. Hence, they were valuable aids to documentation as well as social critique.”
First emerging around Calcutta’s famed Kalighat temple, the pats were later found throughout the city, and places like Orissa and Bihar. Artist Mukul Dey documented their importance in the 1930s after the art was nearly wiped out. Essentially meant to be condensed summaries of religious stories that have been narrated for hundreds of years and recorded in books, they mostly depict Hindu deities. Yet, with time, they expanded to include secular themes encompassing humour, erotica and children’s stories.
Owing to their tremendous popularity, these works caught the interest of western collectors as well. Art historian WG Archer is credited with highlighting this genre of painting through his book and a landmark exhibition showcasing these works at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London in 1971. John Lockwood Kipling, the father of Rudyard Kipling, also possessed a sizeable collection of these which he donated to the V&A.
“The highly finished oil paintings, mostly of sacred subjects, were commissioned by the city’s wealthy elites: the Bhadralok. They afford us a glimpse into the world of the babu: a world that was closely tied to (even as it gazed contemptuously at) the world of the bazaar,” says Giles Tillotson, senior vice president, exhibitions, DAG
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Many of these antiquities have found their way back to the country through Anand. A prime example of the retrieved works are the 101 postcard-sized Kalighat pats made on card stock paper, many of which adorn an entire wall of the exhibition. Going by its uniformity, the set seems to have been commissioned by a single patron to the same artist or art studio. The paintings cover a variety of subjects including religious iconography, animals, horoscopes, and some social subjects as well.
The collection’s individual Kalighat pats show scenes from the great epics, including Draupadi’s vastraharan, Savitri pleading with Yama to spare Satyabhama’s life, Parvati intervening between Arjuna and Shiva to prevent them from fighting, and various portraits of goddess Kali. Some social realities creep into the religious works such as the depiction of Kartikeya as a dandy wearing a fashionable hat in the style of the day and sporting long locks mimicking those of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. Other paintings show the Hargila Pakhi (Greater Adjutant Stork) or “bone-swallowing bird” whose role as a scavenger made it an important icon.
Apart from the content of the paintings, their materials and form provide interesting insight as well. A few of the Kalighat pats have rare lithographic outlines, which date them to roughly after the 1870s when these technologies were widely available in the market. Many used rang or colloidal tin as a silver pigment for illumination. Later, when the price of metal increased and the popularity of these paintings decreased, white gouache was used instead.
The patuas were innovative in their pursuit of economy in other ways too, “They were very smart. You will see three separate goddesses but each of them will be sitting in the same posture. The multiple heads of deities would share eyes to reduce the work, but they were painted so well, it was hard to notice this fact until you looked for it. They would employ any way to make the iconography easier to navigate and easier to create,” says Maitra.
Lithograph Of Bijoya
Some of the secular Kalighat pats portray rotund, westernised, moustachioed babus as characters of ridicule. These paintings emerged when life began changing in Calcutta around the 1860s and ’70s. A popular trope evolved from the Tarakeswar murder case of 1873, when government official Nobin Chandra beheaded his wife with a kitchen knife upon learning of her affair with the head priest of the Shiva temple. Common people vilified the priest as a religious hypocrite, portrayed the wife as a social manipulator, and Chandra as a cuckolded, ignorant babu, inspiring a number of paintings recreating this and similar scenarios.
Another series comprises pin-ups of sundaris or sex workers who wore white garments to signify their status as widows who were discarded by families after the abolition of sati. These voluptuous women are shown in scenes of intimacy with their babu patrons, holding roses or garlands of jasmine. An interplay of cultures is evident in some of them, where the sundaris seem inspired by Mughal tawaifs, portrayed as objects of desire instead of mere performers. Babus are clad in Bengali dhotis and hats, English coats, leather Oxford shoes, complete with well-groomed moustaches, in keeping with the fashion favoured by the bhadralok.
Essentially meant to be condensed summaries of religious stories, the pats mostly depict Hindu deities. Yet, with time, they expanded to include secular themes
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Children’s stories and folk tales are other popular subjects of these paintings. ‘Sheyal Raja’ or the ‘Fox King’ based on a story by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, and ‘Cat Stealing a Prawn’ are apt examples. The former shows the fox king holding court in the forest, as two hunting dogs are captured and beaten up for daring to hunt foxes. It is a detailed and unique scene, with a court stenographer, also a fox, recording events in English, Bengali and Persian. The latter, which captures a cat in the act of stealing food from a household, in turn leaving its residents hungry, is meant to signify the ruthlessness of the wealthy and elite. Other social idioms that worked their way into the paintings include stage curtains referencing studio photography and proscenium theatre plays that were rising in popularity.
A section is devoted to reverse glass paintings. “These were a happy discovery in the collection because they are such rare findings,” says Maitra. It was Christian missionaries who first introduced this art to India from Guangzhou. Their eye for detail, distinctive features, similar colour palette of red and blue pigments, and hilly backdrops mark them as Oriental in origin, however, their penchant for copying the designs, storylines and subjects of the Kalighat paintings suggest that they were made for sale in the Indian market. Maitra points out, “It just proves how popular the Kalighat pats actually were and the effect they had on everyone.”
Their popularity soon made the Kalighat themes proliferate into other mediums like oil paintings and prints. Maitra explains, “The wealthy also wanted the Kalighat pats, but they didn’t want what everyone else had. So, they started commissioning oil paintings of the same or similar works.” At first, the babus turned to the same travelling European artists who were being commissioned to paint their portraits, but as they weren’t adept at painting Indian themes, it eventually led to the development of the school of early Bengal oil paintings.
According to Maitra, “With this, an interesting amalgamation emerged. In some of these paintings, the technique of making miniatures was being employed while later some western techniques started coming to the forefront.” The major difference between the two was in the creation of perspective to show the depth of objects. It was something that western artists were skilled at while Indians had no experience of.
Scenes from Ramayana, reverse glass painting
This is evident in an interesting grouping of a monochrome engraving of the Dussehra celebration at the court of Mysore, set next to an oil painting depicting Draupadi’s vastraharan. The scene and setting of the latter are exact copies of the former. Though details and figures are replicated, the perspective is skewed as the floor tiles are shown the wrong way. Maitra believes that the Indian artists were struggling with this concept as it was difficult to master, yet it was what the patrons wanted.
The only signed painting in the exhibition is Radha and Krishna in the Forest by popular British artist GW Lorrie, which due to its intimate nature, seems to have been a commissioned one. Another important piece is Krishna with Gopis, in which Lord Krishna and his gopis are superimposed into a Palladian mansion in Calcutta. The liberal use of gold leaf and the ghagra-cholis of the gopis point to the patron perhaps being a Marwari or Rajasthani.
This popular art form eventually began to fade with the advent of cheap and uniform oleograph and lithograph prints, some of which are also on display. The change in preferences ultimately led to the rise of the modern Bengal school where artists like Bamapada Banerjee, who was trained at the Calcutta Art School, flourished. His work, Vishnu Sahasranamam, showing the churning of the cosmic ocean, bookends the exhibition.
Summing up the appeal of this historic collection, Ashish Anand says, “I have spent a lot of time in Kolkata since the 1990s, understanding the city and its art. This is an opportunity for us to look further back into the history and art of the land and the culture of its people.”
(The Babu & The Bazaar: Art from 19th and Early 20th-Century Bengal is on display at DAG, Delhi till July 1)
Noor Anand Chawla
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02 Jun, 2023
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