Kalighat painting

also: Kalighat Patachitra · Kalighat Pat

school c. 1830-1930 Kolkata (Calcutta), India South Asia

Kalighat painting (Kalighat Pat) was born around the Kali temple in nineteenth-century Calcutta, where patua scroll painters migrating from rural Bengal found a mass market of pilgrims and city buyers. To sell quickly they abandoned the long narrative scroll for single sheets of cheap paper - one or two figures, a bold outline swept on in a single brushstroke, washes shading the flesh, and a plain background. Gods and goddesses shared the sheet with satirical portraits of the city: the overdressed babu, the courtesan, the Tarakeshwar murder scandal, tiger wrestlers, and pampered cats. Produced assembly-line style by family workshops and sold as souvenirs, the pats are at once folk and startlingly modern - Stella Kramrisch compared their brush drawings to Matisse. Cheap chromolithographs killed the school by the 1930s, but its economy of line fed directly into the modernism of Jamini Roy.

Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Kalighat painting".
Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Kalighat painting".CC0 (credit: anonymous) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Single, continuous contour lines drawn in one confident sweep of the brush
  • Bold simplification: one or two figures on an empty, plain background
  • Shading by washes running from dark edge to light center to model volume
  • Cheap, fast production on mill-made paper for a souvenir market
  • Satirical urban subjects - babus, courtesans, scandals - beside Hindu deities
  • Vibrant watercolour with lamp-black outlines, gold and silver for jewelry

Key figures

  • Anonymous patua painters (19th century) — Rural Bengali scroll painters who settled around the Kalighat temple and invented the style for the urban market
  • Jamini Roy (1887-1972) — Modernist painter who drew on the Kalighat idiom and acknowledged his debt to it

Example works

  • Two Aspects of Kali (Kali Enshrined) — Anonymous patua painter (19th century (Cleveland Museum of Art))
  • Durga and Mahishasura — Anonymous patua painter (c. 1880)
  • Hanuman Fighting Ravana — Anonymous patua painter (c. 1880)

Sources

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