Kalighat paintings

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He was a pat painter by lineage, by having learnt his father's occupation. He had moved to Calcutta a few summers ago. One day a rich patron with a taste for the cheap- he lived with an aged prostitute when he came to Boribazaar for three, sometimes five weeks and more- gifted a picture of the gods, spectacular, fresh from some new 'press'. It lay in the back of his hut, in pride of place. He quite admired it, without wanting to, and felt derisory without wanting to either. His own Kali, he thought, was a single line. Continuous as a human hair was the stroke of the hair brush that made it. That was the way with their paintings.

The first thing he noticed about the print that the landowner gave was the pursed lips in the lines, a kind of mendicancy of making. Those small, careful strokes compensated for by the profusion of colours. The colours did not stand out, they sank into the paper in the machines they came from, they became the picture. The devi was looking away angrily.. yeah, it showed she was angry, like he had never shown her.. that look away at someone.. she never looks thus when she looks at you, like she did in their scrolls. It's when she looks at someone else, that the anger in the same widened eyes, shows. Who had dreamed up such an apparition, he wondered.

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The famed Kalighat painters or Calcutta had to seriously contend with the oleograph, the wood-cut print, and the newsheet to make their work viable.

The outlines of the Kalighat paintings were simple, allowing them to be copied in the lithograph presses and then filled in with colour. (But only with the coming of the chromolithograph was it possible to render the vivid colour in these paintings.)

But the motifs did not only move one way.. while many cheap industrial copies of motifs and paintings developed by the pat artists were made, at the same time, the pat painters began incorporating motifs from these industrially produced pictures, which frequently worked Indian motifs with Western perpectivalism. ---