Kalighat painting, Kalighat Patachitra, or Kalighat Pat (Bengali: কালীঘাট পটচিত্র) is a style of Indian paintings which originated in the 19th century. It was first practiced by a group of specialized scroll painters known as the patuas in the vicinity of the Kalighat Kali Temple in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), in the present Indian state of West Bengal. Composed of bold outlines, vibrant colour tones, and minimal background details, these paintings and drawings were done on both hand-made and machine manufactured paper. The paintings depicted mythological stories, figures of Hindu gods and goddesses, as well as scenes from everyday life and society, thereby recording a socio-cultural landscape which was undergoing a series of transitions during the 19th and early 20th century, when the Kalighat pat reached its pinnacle.
Today the Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosts the single largest collection of Kalighat paintings in the world with 645 paintings, including watercolors, line-drawings, and hand-painted lithographs.
History The exact origin of Kalighat painting is a matter of debate among art critics and historians. There exists no historical account that records a specific date or traces the beginnings of this school, established by the patuas at Kalighat. Material evidence, such as the type of paper and colors used in the paintings, suggests that they belong to the first half of the 19th century. Furthermore, noting the dates of acquisition of these paintings by various European collectors, historians have concluded that the emergence of the paintings roughly coincides with the establishment of the present-day Kali temple at Kalighat in approximately the first or second quarter of the 19th century. The Victoria and Albert Museum website mentions, for instance, that the artworks in the museum were "created and collected over a period of 100 years from the 1830s to the 1930s". However, S. Chakravarti estimates “Kalighat paintings were in vogue not earlier than the 1850s”.Moreover, it was by the early 19th century that Calcutta evolved as an economic centre driven by the commercial activities generated by the British and other European settlers which attracted immigrants looking for employment opportunities. The Kalighat Temple, in the southern part of the city, became a popular destination which attracted hundreds of pilgrims, certain foreign visitors as well as the local people. The artisans and craftsmen, for whom the temple premises provided the perfect opportunity to sell their products. The artisans and craftsmen started migrating to the region with the hope of capitalizing on the new growing market. Among them were the patuas, the skilled artists who hailed from rural Bengal, especially from the areas of Midnapore and the 24 Parganas. These artists would traditionally paint long narrative stories on scrolls of cloth or handmade paper, which often expanded to a length of 20 meters and beyond. Such an art form was known as patachitra, each section was called the pat which explains why the artists were known as patuas. The first mention of such a group of travelling folk painters appears in the thirteenth-century text, the Brahma Vaivarta Purana. These artists depicted conventional images of deities and scenes from the two Hindu epics, carrying their scrolls while moving from one place to another, and singing the scenes and episodes portrayed in the paintings in public gatherings or during festivals in villages.
Now, after having migrated to the Kalighat region, these artists, faced with the challenge to speed up their pace of production, and under the influence of different art forms around them, substituted their usual long linear, narrative style with single frames of chouko (square) pat showing one or two figures, they also eliminated unnecessary details, left the background plain and simple, and used a basic color palette, thereby evolving in due course of time the intrinsic features of the Kalighat genre. They were aided by the import of mill-made paper and readymade paints from Britain. These artists no longer had to travel to audiences, for now potential buyers came to them; and their way of conducting business changed as they became sellers of their works, instead of entertainers who earlier used to perform their piece. Hence, there was a complete shift in their style and perspectives from their rural days once they migrated and settled in the city from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. This "basic imperative of producing pictures cheaply, quickly, and in vast numbers to cater to the growing market of the city" served as the major motivation behind the changes in form and format of these paintings as has been pointed out by scholars from W.G. Archer to Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Jyotindra Jain, until recently. These artists would set up stalls and their settlements around the main shrine of Kali, and along the ghat of the Adi Ganga, referring to the old abandoned riverbed flowing beside the temple premises which was the ancient course of the Ganges.
However, notable art historian and museologist Jyotindra Jain holds a different view about the Kalighat artists. He notes that there are “certain inherent correspondences between Kalighat paintings and the traditions of making and painting clay figures, or painting storytellers’ scrolls by the patuas, or between the sutradhar carpenters’ sketches and wood carvings”. suggesting that the potters, carpenters and stoneworkers and the traditional craftsmen of Bengal were also associated with the creation of the paintings apart from the patuas.
Not just with the local inhabitants and pilgrims, these paintings which were “perfect" and "easily portable and concise enough” were carried back home as ‘oriental’ or ‘exotic’ souvenirs by foreign travelers, colonial masters and Europeans who visited the city during this time. John Lockwood Kipling, the father of Rudyard Kipling, had in his collection some 233 paintings, which were donated by his son to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1917. These paintings also found a market among the working classes and the merchants from different parts of the country. Consequently, the market for the Kalighat paintings flourished in the nineteenth century.
Painting method
The method of drawing was simple yet meticulous, every stage definite and clearly defined, and the entire creative endeavour was managed by the family unit, similar to an assembly line production system. Mukul Dey describes the process in detail: "One artist would [be] in the beginning, copy in pencil the outline from an original model sketch, and another would do the modeling, depicting the flesh and muscles in lighter and darker shades. Then a third member of the family would put in the proper colours in different parts of the body and the background, and last of all the outlines and finish would be done in lamp black". The colours were mixed with gum and ground on a round stone using granite mullers, while the brushes were made from goat's tail or squirrel fur. Shading to indicate volume was achieved through a wash of colour from the dark shades on the outer periphery to the lighter central areas, while three-quarter profiles were also experimented with besides the more commonly portrayed front and side profile faces.
A variety of colours have been used in these paintings starting from water-based colours to opaque-based pigments. The shades ranged from blue, indigo, yellow, green, carbon black, etc.B.N. Mukherjee, "Kalighat Patas", Indian Museum, Kolkata 2011.S. Sinha and C. Panda (ed.) "Kalighat Paintings", V&A Publishing in association with Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad 2011. Silver and golden were used for ornaments and in jewellery, while colloidal tin was used extensively to imitate the surface lustre of jewels and pearls. These colours were extracted from a variety of natural substances; for example the Aparajita flower was used to produce the blue colour, yellow came from turmeric root, and black was made with soot obtained from burning oil lamps. Imported factory-made water colours from Britain later substituted home-made colours, saving both time and effort. Gum made from the bel fruit, and sometimes crushed tamarind seeds, was used for binding.
Art collector Ajit Ghose, who provided one of the earliest descriptions of these paintings, noted: "The drawing is made with one long bold sweep of the brush in which not the faintest suspicion of even a momentary indecision, not the slightest tremor, can be detected. Often the line takes in the whole figure in such a way that it defies you to say where the artist's brush first touched the paper or where it finished the work..." Ghose, who was impressed by the "exquisite freshness and spontaneity of conception and execution" of these paintings, compared them to Chinese calligraphy.Ajit Ghose, 'Old Bengal Pantings', Rupam, Nos. 27&28 (July to October 1926), 98-104.
During this period, the British were strengthening their hold over the Indian territory, transforming themselves from merchants to the monarchs of the land, and this entailed a rapid Europeanisation of city's culture, intellectual sphere, and modes of life. It was during this time that these paintings attempted to create a specific Bengali identity in the colonial capital countering the European hegemony. The term "cosmopolitan folk culture" as coined by Milton Singer aptly describes these paintings, which were partly modified from their village predecessors, while partly assimilated into the new urban mass culture of the city.
Themes Kalighat paintings depicted a variety of religious and non-religious themes; while portrayals of the pantheon of Hindu deities were most common, especially Kali, the Kalighat artists also responded to events of the day, and painted contemporary events, recording in their pats, the scenes of life and society of Calcutta in that period. After migrating from rural areas, these painters recorded subjects that piqued their interest in their new urban environment.
Religious themes