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DREAM OF REASON - Oindrilla Maity Surai
The Lost Art
The long road that connects the north of the city of Kolkata to the south was once known as the Pilgrimage Road. At places it has witnessed the flowering of several different cultures as well as seen how these merged together in the course of time to generate a unique blending of a single common culture.
One of these were the woodcut prints. The print culture that sprawled around the Battola area of Chitpur catered to the needs of a wide range of readers and consumers in varied forms. It manifested itself as advertisements for hair oil, ink tablets, almanacs, dramatic illustrations for the popular novels of the time, everyday domestic scenes, the epic novels, the city’s scandals, farces – touching upon all sorts of human experiences in the most uninhibited and an indigenous way, reflecting the dreams of a growing city through an urban folk art form.
In fact, this urban folk art form grew out of the art of the rural patuas who had come to the city from different parts of the State, bringing with them their regional styles, which, over the years, had developed a kind of togetherness, thus becoming the voice of the society.
What interests the reader/ audience about the Battola prints is that they show a marked tendency towards an eclecticism and at the same time exhibit an indigenous nature. Their porous nature is evident from their display of absorbing the two predominant cultures then prevalent in India – the European as well as the Islamic. This is evident from the designs of the costumes of the characters in a sequence, or in architectural details or settings of an illustration.
Woodcut illustrations also display a unique compositional structure. Often these can be associated with the spatial treatment of the Mughal miniatures and Egyptian murals.
In the image of the Durga with Laxmi, Sarawati and others (fig 1.) a predominance of the European subjects – the artless winged fairies and flagstaff bearers in the pinnacles as well as in the lower registers stand amalgamated spontaneously with the Indian icons. European subjects enter at ease and reside in households that have an ambience purely Indian in style (fig.2). The table at the centre points to the conceptual knowledge of perspective and the schematic designs of folk art. However, interesting deviations in spatial compositions were often witnessed such as in subjects like the Descent of the Ganges, (fig. 3) where the flowing river breaks the rigidity of the two rather flat, nonchalant halves, and turns them into somewhat interactive units, sharing a parlance. Disruption of scale is just another aspect which threw light on understanding the notions of the gender and its politics of the time (fig.4)
The Battola book trade dealt with religious texts, plays, farces and most popularly, the erotica. These were cheap reproductions and were sold at a cheap price, but mechanical reproduction, with endless repeatability as its chief characteristic, turned India into an ‘iconic society.’ It affected the elite as much as the underclass, as elite artists competed with artisans to capture the greatly expanding market in cheap prints.
The woodblock prints are, in a sense, a variation of the Kalighat paintings – belonging technologically to the age of printing, but spiritually to the style of the Kalighat Pat, in subject, imagery and other elements. They were triggered by economics.
The enormous pressure faced by the traditional ‘patuas,’ forced them to take very occasional recourse to lithography to cope with increasing demand. The woodblock prints developed in ‘Bat-tala’ – in a competitive spirit – therefore, had an excellent market. Unashamed copying of Kalighat's secular pictures, satirical pointers, and contemporary themes, gave these prints a distinctively modern feel, and ensured their wide circulation. An interesting difference was that, while the Kalighat ‘patuas’ can be classified in the category of the ‘true artist,’ the ‘Battola’ engravers were craftsmen.
The mesmerising charm of the Battotala prints continue to enthrall even the very contemporary print maker till date, whose works resonate with the style of the prints and vitality. But, the artists as well as their art, faded out with the oleographs from the West out shadowing them.
However, the very nature of mass reproduction itself contributed to the weakening and diluting of the monolithic character of the elite nationalism, and the woodcut of print of Battola played nonetheless a role in doing so.
(Oindrilla Maity Surai is a Kolkata-based art historian, independent curator and practicing artist. She teaches Art History at the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Email: oindrilla.maity@gmail.com.)
