Kalighat: Kolkata's 19th-Century Pop Art
Cheap, fast, and gloriously rude — the painters near Calcutta's Kali temple invented Indian pop art and used it to roast their own neighbours.
Long before anyone said 'pop art,' painters near the Kali temple in nineteenth-century Calcutta were already doing it: cheap, quick watercolours sold to pilgrims, knocked out in single bold strokes, no fussy backgrounds, vivid as a film poster.
These were the patuas — scroll-painters from the Bengal countryside who moved to the temple and reinvented themselves for the souvenir trade. Gods sold well: Kali, Durga, Krishna. But the patuas had a sideline that has aged even better. Satire.
Their favourite target was the 'babu' — the Westernised, English-educated social climber — painted lounging with a hookah, chasing courtesans, or being beaten with a broom by a thoroughly fed-up wife.
One painting shows a cat with a holy mark on its forehead and a stolen prawn in its mouth. Translation: beware the 'holy' man who can't keep his paws off the goods.
When a real 1873 murder scandal erupted — a wife, a temple priest, a jealous husband — the Kalighat painters serialised it like a tabloid. This was pictorial gossip, sold by the sheet.
The style faded by the 1930s, but it didn't vanish. The modernist Jamini Roy threw away his Western training to chase those bold Kalighat lines, and built a whole career on what pilgrims once bought for pennies.
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