About the 1830s to the 1930s · Kalighat, Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal
Kalighat painting
Quick, bold watercolours sold near the Kali temple in 19th-century Calcutta. Village scroll painters became city painters, and their gods, cats and pompous babus are drawn with one confident line.
How to recognise it
- One or two figures on a plain, empty ground
- A single sweeping outline, finished in lamp black
- Bright watercolour on mill-made paper, often about A3
- Tin or silver used to imitate jewellery and pearls
- Gods and goddesses beside satire of the westernised Bengali babu
The painters of Kalighat were patuas, scroll painters from rural Bengal, mostly from Midnapore and the 24 Parganas. In the villages they painted long narrative scrolls and sang the stories as they unrolled them. In the early 19th century some came to Calcutta, where the Kali temple drew pilgrims and visitors every day. Selling to a crowd changed the work. Long scrolls became single sheets with one or two figures, backgrounds disappeared, and imported British paper and paints sped things up. Families worked like a production line: one member traced the outline, another modelled the flesh, a third added colour, and the last put in the black outline and finish.
They painted the gods, Kali above all, and also the city. Babus with pleated dhotis and hookahs, courtesans, cats with fish, prawns and lobsters. When a scandal broke in 1873, after Nabinchandra Banerjee killed his wife Elokeshi over her affair with the priest of the Tarakeswar temple, the painters produced the whole story in scenes, much as a newspaper would.
Cheap lithographs, some printed in Germany as copies of Kalighat pictures, undercut them. W. G. Archer placed the end around 1930. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds the largest collection, 645 works, including 233 that once belonged to John Lockwood Kipling.
What to look for
The line: one unhesitating stroke that takes in the whole figure. Some painters signed their sheets, in the Western way. Hand-coloured lithographs exist alongside true paintings and are worth telling apart. Painters in Medinipur and Birbhum still work in the tradition, with organic dyes; their pictures are new work, not old.
