Rise of the art market in Calcutta - Kalighat Pats and Battala prints

Battala, often considered the earliest hub of printing and publishing in

Kolkata, is now all but lost from public memory; Bengal’s print culture is
now generally associated with the thriving book market around College
Street and the printing presses running at full throttle in the adjoining
alleyways. Starting in the late 1770s, Battala near Chitpore Road in North
Kolkata saw a thriving business in the production of ephemera —
pamphlets, novellas, satires, erotica, textbooks, and so on — that was
popular with the masses, especially the poorer and lower middle-class
sections of Bengali society. In the mid-1800s “Battala culture” began to
signify all things popular, cheap, and often “indecent,” which made it the
focus of disciplining or civilizing actions from both the British
administration and the highly educated Bengali upper-class baboos.
The very ability to produce multiple copies of the same thing made written
materials cheaper and more accessible to a broader cross-section of people.
Some of the oldest printing presses in Bengal were in Hooghly, and then in
Serampore. These establishments were initially controlled by missionaries
and colonial officers.
Alongside the growing popularity of texts, visual culture in the form of
woodcut illustrations for these books also came to be part of public life.
Battala illustrations were woodcut engravings of folksy themes, often bold
and vivid, with strong outlines filled in with watercolors. These illustrations
made printed matter even more enticing for larger sections of the society.
The first illustrated Bengali book was Bharatchandra’s Annada Mangal,
with six full-page illustrations.
Unfortunately, studies of Battala woodcuts are few and far between, and
often merely accuse them of being cheap copies of Kalighat pat paintings.
Traditional Bengali pats are visual narratives, often vivid mythological
drawings, painted on scrolls that are unfurled as the storyteller or patua
sings or recites the stories. This tradition continues today in rural parts of
Bengal.
Kalighat pat paintings are the result of this migration by one such group of
performing artists, whose work evolved through their struggle for survival
in the environs of the increasingly modern city of Calcutta. In the early
decades of the nineteenth century, pat artists converged on the religious
center of Kalighat, the late medieval Kali temple in south Calcutta, and
started selling paintings on individual sheets of paper, rather than scrolls
made of layers of fabric. These drawings were often outlined by a master
painter, whose family and assistants would later fill them in with colors.
This change in the mode of pat production was probably not immediate.
The time-consuming tasks of painting lengths of coarse cloth and
composing chants to accompany the images were modified, instead
focusing on creating single images on standardized folio-sized sheets of
imported paper without an accompanying song.
Around the same time, in the 1840s, the ephemeral Battala woodcuts
premiered. These woodcuts were hand-engraved variations of the more
popular Kalighat pats, block-printed en masse for public consumption. Like
Kalighat pats, they also depicted popular themes of “Bengali” life: fish,
baboos, and scandals, along with traditional religious and folklore motifs.
Battala artists were essentially engravers — people who could chip away at
a block of wood to create signature designs. In some cases, the prints
include the name of the engraver or an abbreviation, the press, and the
place it was engraved. Battala woodcuts, in combination with other popular
art forms of colonial Calcutta, create a rich, visual narrative whose archival
value is often ignored. Few woodcut prints survive and the woodcut blocks
themselves are now a rare find in the age of offset printing. While Kalighat
pat is considered the epitome of the evolution of Bengali art forms under
colonial rule, Battala woodcuts are an equally valuable source of
information about contemporary Bengali society.

These Kalighat paintings owed its popularity to the efficiency and skill in its
production, which was a collaborative family effort, resembling an assembly line
production process. According to painter-engraver Mukul Dey,[7] the method of
drawing was very simple: One artist would in the beginning, copy in pencil the outline
from an original model sketch, another would do the modelling, depicting the flesh and
muscles in lighter and darker shades. Then a third member of the family would put in
the proper colours of the different parts of the body and the background, and last of all
the outlines and finish would be done in lamp black. These Kalighat paintings owed its
popularity to the efficiency and skill in its production, which was a collaborative family
effort, resembling an assembly line production process. According to painter-engraver
Mukul Dey,[7] the method of drawing was very simple: One artist would in the
beginning, copy in pencil the outline from an original model sketch, another would do
the modelling, depicting the flesh and muscles in lighter and darker shades. Then a third
member of the family would put in the proper colours of the different parts of the body
and the background, and last of all the outlines and finish would be done in lamp black.

A bulk of Chittoprasad’s works are in his black and white drawings

prints and watercolors. His woodcuts, linocuts and posters are
renowned for their brutally honest depiction of human suffering. They
remind viewers more of contemporary graphic novels. The carved
faces, barren trees and lined rib cages of his illustrations tell a story of
inescapable scarcity and deprivation through strong, simple black
strokes. The protagonists seem to tear the surface and come out of
picture frames, communicating with the viewers. His hard-hitting
caricatures and sketches of the poor dying during Bengal famine
worked like modern day reportage and shook the middle class and
even British officials. In his later years, he was hurt to see his party
comrades get involved in squabbles leading to the disintegration of the
party. He consciously stepped back from the party though his faith in
the philosophy of social equality remained intact till the very end.
Meanwhile, he continued to depict rustic life in his experimental
woodcuts, prints and watercolor paintings. His works reveal his
lifelong mission, best summed up by Chittoprasad himself in Czech
filmmaker Pavel Hobl’s short documentary on him: “To save people
means to save art itself. The activity of an artist means the active
denial of death.”