Tradition · bazaar painting tradition
Kālīghāṭ painting and the Patuas
Also known as Kalighat pat, Patua, Kalighat
A cheap, fast watercolour sold to pilgrims outside the Kalighat temple through the nineteenth century, made by Patua scroll-painters who had moved into Calcutta from the Bengal villages, with sweeping brushed outlines and no background at all.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 22.520, 88.343
Worth knowing
The subjects turned worldly almost at once: the babu with his hookah, the courtesan, the cat with a prawn, and above all the Tarakeswar affair of 1873, in which a priest and a young wife were caught and the husband killed her — sold as a series of prints while the trial was running. It is the first Indian popular press in pictures, and it collapsed when cheap lithography arrived.
Connections (3)
- Craft tradition ofPaṭṭachitra, Raghurajpur
Both are Patua or chitrakara work — hereditary scroll painters who sang the scroll as they unrolled it — but they went opposite ways. The Puri painters stayed attached to a temple that needed them liturgically and kept the old line and mineral palette; the Bengal Patuas who came into Calcutta lost their village patrons, started selling single sheets to pilgrims at Kalighat, and within a generation were painting court cases and adulterous babus in a fast new brushed style.
- Shrine within cityKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Kalighat painting existed because of the temple's pilgrim traffic in the southern suburbs of the colonial capital: sheets sold for a few paise at stalls on the approach, as souvenirs of a visit. That market supported a volume no village patron could, and it carried no liturgical requirement, which is why the pictures drift within thirty years from Kali to the babu, the courtesan and the Tarakeswar murder trial. Cheap lithography took the same buyers in the 1890s and the craft ended.
- Site withinKolkata
Kālīghāṭ painting and the Patuas lies within Kolkata — the two sites sit about 6 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Kālīghāṭ painting and the Patuas is one of the specific sites that give Kolkata its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kalighat painting”. Geographical Indications Registry (Government of India) filings; Ministry of Textiles and Sangeet Natak Akademi craft documentation.
Open Kālīghāṭ painting and the Patuas in the repository →