Souvenirs, now in museums

In the nineteenth century, a pilgrim leaving the Kali temple at Kalighat, in the south of Calcutta, could buy a picture of the goddess on the way home. It was painted in watercolour on a single sheet of mill-made paper, with a few fast strokes and a plain background. It was cheap and it was light. Most of them were thrown away or wore out on walls. The ones that survived are now in museums on three continents.

Who made them

The painters were patuas, hereditary scroll painters from rural Bengal, many of them from Midnapore and the 24 Parganas. In the villages they had painted long narrative scrolls, often more than twenty feet, and sung the stories as they unrolled them. When they came to the city, they set up stalls around the temple and along the Adi Ganga, the old bed of the Ganges beside it, where the buyers came to them.

A scroll takes weeks. A pilgrim wants something today. So the patuas cut the story down to a single square frame, one or two figures, no background. Imported British paper and ready-made paints helped them work faster. The V&A dates the works in its collection to roughly a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1930s.

A family business

The painting was done in stages, like a small workshop line. The artist Mukul Dey described it: one member of the family copied the outline in pencil from a model sketch, another shaded the flesh, a third laid in the colours, and the last added the outlines and finish in lamp black. Colours were bound with gum from the bel fruit. Colloidal tin was used to imitate the shine of pearls and jewels.

The line is what people notice first. The collector Ajit Ghose, one of the earliest to write about these pictures, said the figure was often drawn in one long, bold sweep of the brush, without a tremor. He compared it to Chinese calligraphy.

Gods, and then everyone else

The first subjects were the obvious ones for a temple market: Kali, Durga, Lakshmi, Shiva carrying the body of Sati, Krishna as a child. Then the painters started looking at the city around them.

Calcutta in the nineteenth century had a new class of rich, Westernised men, the babus, and the patuas painted them with little affection. They painted the English rulers, quarrels at home, the changing place of women, servants, courtesans and wandering mendicants. They painted fish, prawns and lobsters. A circus strongman of the 1890s, Shyamakanta Banerjee, who wrestled tigers, turned up in the pictures. So did a real murder. In 1873 Nabinchandra Banerjee killed his wife, Elokeshi, after learning of her affair with the chief priest of the Tarakeswar temple. The patuas painted the case in scenes, as if for a newspaper that had not yet learned to print pictures.

The painting above, from 1875, shows a woman beating a man with a broom. It needs no caption.

How souvenirs became art

Foreign visitors bought these pictures too, as small, portable souvenirs. John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s father, collected them. On 8 August 1917 his son gave 233 of them to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A now holds about 645 Kalighat works, the largest collection in the world.

The timing is the wry part. Collectors and curators began to treat Kalighat pictures as art in the early twentieth century, just as the tradition was dying. Cheap prints from Germany and from Bombay took over the market. Mukul Dey wrote that imitations of the Kalighat pictures themselves were sold in large numbers. The patuas’ children took up other work. The historian W. G. Archer placed the end of the school at around 1930.

Stella Kramrisch, showing them in her Philadelphia exhibition Unknown India, wrote that some of the brush drawings came before Matisse and prefigured him.

Where to see them

In Kolkata, the Indian Museum holds about 40 and the Victoria Memorial Hall about 24. The Gurusaday Museum has more than 70 paintings and drawings, and there are important groups at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, the Ashutosh Museum and Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan. Abroad, besides the V&A, there are collections at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Náprstek Museum in Prague, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.

The tradition did not end completely. The V&A notes that patuas still paint in rural West Bengal, in Medinipur, where many of the old families came from, and in Birbhum.