On guarded twangs of the popular 19th-century Kolkata, a city in India, the Kalighat painters painted all the works that depicted the city. These Kalighat painters—largely peasant immigrants looking for greener pastures—sat just outside the famous Kalighat temple tenortali zed upon simple papers in bright colors. Encor-Ped’s infantile idols and culturally enthusiastic life turned their activity into the creativity of uniting the two elements in dedicated works of art. Thus, their works were sold to the temple and pilgrims, allowing the artists to assimilate into the city’s visual language. However, towards the end of the century, the new wave of modernity led by the Chitpur lithography was about to engulf this folk-based art and lead it into virtual extinction. It is indeed the story of change that came with technology or social transformation, which led to the downward trend of Kalighat Indian art form, as witnessed by the emergence of Chitpur lithography. They are also emblems of fractured Hibernian metropolitan identity, where colonial modernity jostled with deep-rooted realities and tantalizing traditions in the 19th century. The contemptuous image of the Kalighat painting, known as Bengali Babu, emerged in a frame of paradox whenever and wherever moral supreme evolution was in full view.
Kalighat Painting: The Common Man’s Art
Kalighat painting is a form of art that began to flourish at the beginning of the 19th century. It was developed by patua scroll painters who migrated from rural Bengal to the urban colonised area. However, in Bengal, the scroll painters turned to painting individual sheets for the fast-growing population around the Kalighat temple when they arrived in Calcutta. These unpretentious works, painted with simple, distinct lines and primary colours, were not meant for the elite but for the common folks—pilgrims, travellers and locals needing cheap religious pictures.
Kalaighat actively contested the traditional practice of mythologising themes through more engaging and very real social issues. While Kali, Durga or Lakshmi were primary figures in many of the artworks, a fair amount also explored the common life, frequently taken to a humorous level. The dualistic attitude of colonial British officials, the inanity of the newly formed urban middle class, and the decline in moral values of the Bengali social system due to the influence of the West were all fair game for these folk artists. It was a kind of social critique that painted over the actual society in bright colours and whimsicality. This is Kalighat, the art of people, for people.
How Chitpur Lithography Triumphed
In the 1870s, however, globalization and a new form of art were revolutionizing Calcutta’s visual culture. Chitpur Road, a few miles north of Kalighat, was the location where the city’s first lithographic presses were established. Brought to Bengal by Europeans in the nineteenth century, lithography—a technique of printing from a stone—was considered a more acute image-making process than the rest. By the mid-19th century, this process had found its way in the local artisans of Chitpur, making them able to produce well-detailed and affordable prints for the emerging middle class.
Compared to the few Kalighat handpainted products in a day, Chitpur lithography enabled artists to print multicolour canvases of the same design in hundreds. These lithographs were more affordable, accurate, and complex in their treatment of even Indian subjects because they incorporated western perspective and naturalism. Whenever a Kalighat painting had an endearing naive folk-art appeal, lithographs became an elegant alternative that satisfied the Westernising taste of the Bengali bourgeois.
This change in technology grievously affected Kalighat painters, as they could not keep up with lithographs because the latter were faster, better, and cheaper. As the marketplace for their artwork by hand reduced, many quit the art or moved to other types of work. Kalighat painting had nearly come to an end by the beginning of the 20th century, owing to the culture of industrialization and commercialization.
The Babu
The Babu became one of the most revered subjects in kalighat painting. In 19th-century Calcutta, the Babu was a personification of society’s greatest fears. The Babu was a Bengali male of professional class, belonging chiefly to the high castes, who had made gains during the British colonial period. He was educated in English, held clerical or administrative jobs, and was at times prone to modern dress styles and ideologies. The Babu’s composite persona placed him in between tradition and modernity, which further made him an intriguing range for satire.
The Kalighat painters remained sensitive to the manipulations and contradictions in their era’s culture, painting the Babu as one with vain and decaying morals. In these paintings, the Babu is usually dressed in Western attire, although a waistcoat, trousers, and a top hat are typically worn, splitting the loyalties of the equipped Indian. One of the images that was famous was the Babu with his beloved, who would be dancing with a courtesan, a dancing girl, one such who personified erotic pleasures and Babu’s residing attachment to an external facade.
In these works, the Babu has also shown the stereotype of the colonial ape, with the Babu being a cultural turncoat basking in the cheapened idealism of modernity. He is depicted in a number of instances holding a mirror and admiring himself or doing trifling things, which only seeks to fortify the assumption held by the Kalighat artist that this class was narcissistic with no notion of actualising gentleness. His figure was typical of a disorderly society where, after assimilating western ways of conduct, people pulled away from the old foundations.
Kalighat, its social critique, and its collapse
These babus were depicted in a satirical sense, but they also served as a critique of colonial modernity. Nonetheless, these depictions captured the Kalighat artists’ fears in some way. The patuas were previously making a living by patronage selling religious paintings, but now there were challenges posed by an urbanising center. The Babu middle class, who adopted westernism, was a reflection of the changes that were taking place in Calcutta’s economy and society, which left folk artists like the Kalighat painters further out in the periphery.
The Babu sauntering in the company of prostitutes, among other luxuries, brought to light an excessive disparity between the social elite class living in the city and the working class and other ordinary people who formed the audience at Kalighat. As the middle class began to adopt a more European model of decorative art and commodities, kalighat paintings became less marketable (the folk view), and there has been more and more demand for these artworks in the past.
By the late nineteenth century, it was the introduction of Chitpur lithography that lucklessly put the last nail on Kalighat’s coffin. The fine printing of lithographs that catered to a mass audience became popular with the upwardly mobile middle class much quicker than had been anticipated. Kalighat artworks were highly rustic and made strong societal commentaries, which were rendered useless in this new dominated art world.
Legacy: The Rediscovery of Kalighat Art
Although it ceased to be popular in public spheres by the early 20th century, the art of Kalighat painting did not completely vanish. Gaganendranath Tagore and Jamini Roy, among other modernist artists, were influenced by Kalighat art’s aesthetic and form in the 1920s and 1930s modernism movements. They perceived in these creations the beginnings of a truly Indian modernity, in opposition to the academic and European art styles that reigned at the time.
Modern Kalighat artwork is described as a crucial aspect of Indian painting development, and this is largely accepted today. From the Victoria and Albert Museums in London to the Indian Museum in Kolkata, we find Kalighat paintings in their respective major museum collections. The pictures of gods, social life, and Babu culture all indicate that there was a period when art served both religion and society rather than the fulfillment of a creative individual genius alone.
The Babus and the Kalighat in Indian Art History: Legacy
Even if these two figures have withered away, the depiction of the Babu figure and their Kalighat paintings, respectively, still hold great significance in understanding 19th-century Bengal society. The Babu, as portrayed in the Kalighat paintings, perceived the colonial encounter as antagonistic and showcased the struggles faced by the urban Indians, who sought an identity as Englishmen and most often than not suffered comic tragedies. The images give an insider’s perspective of a period in Bengal in which modernity was being embraced but was balanced on the thin line between allegiance to the colonists and self-defending cultural provisions.
Even now, these artworks illustrate the situation and interactions of power in society during this period. The critical interpretation, which Kalighat woodblock painters launched against their Babu portrayals, indicates an internalisation of the absurdities of colonial rule and the problems of cultural mixture. Although the Babu may be becoming a distant memory in the minds of contemporary people, as he rests in artworks of Kalighat and Zombie of the Babu, the contradictions and contradictions of colonial India… still live on.
Kalighat painting in general and the depictions of the Babu in particular fit within the larger frame of Indian art history at the time, which saw the struggle between folk and modern, tradition and change. This was also the period that shaped the character of modern India as we know it today. These works provide not merely an artistic inheritance. They also provide a socio-political analysis and value, which is still today highly relevant in discussions about postcolonial identities, globalization and cultural change.
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