Kalighat painting emerged from the changing world of nineteenth century Calcutta, with old and new images seemingly layered one upon another on a transparent plane. Traditionally inherited techniques, iconography, and artistic practices co-mingled with revivalistic Mughal court culture, Sanskrit drama, the proscenium stage, and swiftly churned out and circulated images from photo-studios and lithographic presses in the fast-growing urban centre, translating folk art forms into popular genres. Artists expressed themselves in a language that they continuously recalibrated in line with transformations occurring in their immediate environment–the emergence of new lifestyles and aesthetic norms, shifting standards of morality, the influx of new imagery from the age of mechanical reproduction. How they confronted change, how they saw in the process of transformation, the essence of expression and how, as artists, they articulated a pictorial language, is the theme of this book.
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