Art in India in the early 20th century is inextricably tied up with the politics of the period. Among the front-ranking provinces of a colonised nation, Bengal became the epicentre of the tensions and dichotomies of a nascent nationalism. On the most obvious level, the province demonstrated the need to counter the imperial British presence, an assertion of Indian identity as much in the construction of Swadeshi as in the need to modernise and locate India among the comity of nations. This forward-backward pull in the political sphere made for a slew of contradictions, and for a critical period of transition. Inevitably, the art of the period in different centres reflects these conflicts and tensions. The usual readings of modernity in Indian art are located in the introduction of oil painting and the Western academic style that reached an apogee of acceptability in Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906).
However, the spirit of modernity, in its unselfconscious critique of a growing urbanism and its fluid influence on popular taste, was demonstrated in the late 19th century in the art of Kalighat. Kalighat painting is best seen in close conjunction with what is generically described as Early Bengal painting. This phase, initiated in the 19th century, reflects the untutored efforts of the unidentified Indian artist to adapt the foreign medium of oil painting to Indian mythic subjects. One of its leading features is that it falls outside the Company School, which had an affinity for ethnographic and caste studies; by contrast, Puranic narratives were a mainstay of the Early Bengal style. Early Bengal art explored the possibilities of translating the religious, mythic subject, previously painted in tempera, into the new, luminous medium of oil. In the movement from a traditional practice to an unguided and relatively liberal framework, changes take place that make for both optical distortion and a free play in the interpretation of myth.
By contrast, in Kalighat painting the idiom of a nascent modernity is more stylistically refined and developed. Kalighat as a body of work is highly attitudinal: from the late 19th century, it took on the role of social documentation and critique. Its choice of images could be journalistic, and occasionally risqué. Kalighat painting placed divinities and the slightly ridiculous Bengali Babu on the same footing. It represented Puranic myths, folk adages and the leading scandals of the time without any overt sense of hierarchical value. Like the prints of Battala and Chitpur, its role was as much to edify as to entertain its patron. In the corpus of 19th and early 20th century art, Kalighat also presented the woman as a sexual object for visual consumption.
The social and cultural elements that fed into the making of Kalighat painting were numerous. It drew from jatra (street theatre), swang (pantomime), khemta (a form of popular dance), kobiwalla (poetry) and padavali kirtan (devotional singing). Another leading influence was women appearing in theatre as actresses for the first time. Usually described as a courtesan, the plump and sensuous nayika of Kalighat is painted in highly mannered postures as she looks into a mirror, combs her hair or smells a rose. The significant contribution of the Kalighat artists is that the subject engages directly with the viewer, in a returned gaze. This marks a strong shift from the numerous nayikas of the miniature tradition, who remain oblivious to the viewer looking in on their private acts of bathing, having their hair combed, and so on. It marks a distinct shift in the social status of the nayika, from the courtly to the common.
In comparison to the larger corpus of Indian art, Kalighat is both secular and common. Its significant contribution is that it negotiates a space for the new patron of art: a space that marks the easy overlap of the sacred and the sexual image, that evokes for the first time the city as subject, and that pushes for new modes of image construction in the corpus of Indian art history. The contribution of Kalighat in the 20th century lies as much in its own intrinsic values as in its position as a model of eclecticism for contemporary art.
Vinayak Pasricha.