Every art season has a sleeper — an exhibition that sounds minor but that turns out to be absolutely terrific. This summer’s example comes courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art. It’s a show of Kalighat paintings, a little-known genre of 19th-century Indian street art, which flourished for a half-century in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of the British Raj in the East Indian state of West Bengal.
The paintings were produced originally by anonymous artists between the 1830s and 1880s and sold as souvenirs in bazaars around the Kalighat Temple, devoted to the goddess Kali, in south Kolkata.
The introduction of lithography in the late 19th century put the painters out of business. In their day, their works functioned as political broadsides, gossip sheets or religious tracts. Today, they offer a rare glimpse of colonial-era street culture in a teeming Asian capital.
In bright, bold strokes, the paintings depict everything from traditional Hindu deities and social-climbing Bengali clerks (known as babus) to an unfortunate Hindu priest who was convicted of adultery, a sex scandal that has an oddly familiar ring in the age of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eliot Spitzer. The radiant watercolors were collected avidly by the museum’s former chief designer, William Ward, who donated 87 examples before his death in 2004 at age 82. This summer’s exhibition, which includes 40 paintings on 37 individual sheets (three of them double-sided) is the first time a sizable number of works from the Ward collection have been displayed.
Deepak Sarma, a religious studies associate professor at Case Western Reserve University, organized the show with an acute eye for early signs of globalization, comical misunderstandings and errors in translation, which adds to the fun.
He discovered, for example, that Kalighat painters used paper developed in India in the late 18th century by the British printer miraculously named William Ward (no relation to the museum’s William Ward) to manufacture Bibles.
Kalighat painters then used watercolor — a favorite British artistic medium — to make images that often ridiculed India’s colonial occupiers. “The paper the British provided is used to lampoon the British and to propagandize Hinduism,” Sarma said. “It’s a beautiful, wonderful irony. I just love it!”
Poignantly, the paintings document disruptions in Indian society caused by colonization. One particularly striking work depicts a barber cleaning the ear of a beautiful woman while she smokes a hookah.
As Sarma explains in a label, the woman is the wife of a babu, an upwardly mobile Bengali man who served the British and who typically would have cavorted with a mistress or prostitute. Feeling neglected, the wives of such babus sought attention from servants. Sure enough, Sarma points out that the woman has flirtatiously bared her left breast to tempt the barber. While many of the Kalighat paintings focus on contemporary life, a majority explore aspects of Hinduism. The cast of deities is immense and fascinating.