Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal

The Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, is an archive of sources of the cultural history of modern Bengal. It consists of microfilmed printed texts as well as documentation of pictorial and photographic material. The archive is based on the premise that visual and textual representations are equally meaningful indices of social and cultural change. Just as the new technology of print assumed a life of its own in 19 century Bengal and profoundly affected its emerging forms of modernity, so did the new techniques of visual representation and reproduction. They produced the well-known ‘high culture’ of the new bhadralok society-a culture of refinement and progress. But equally important were their effects on popular tastes and expression. The archive brings together the works of some renowned artists and photographers of modern Bengal alongside an entire range of little-noticed popular and commercial genres produced by bazaar painters, print-makers, illustrators and studios. The exhibition Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal presents a selection of some of this visual documentation. In her introduction, the art historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta, the curator of the show, takes us through the history of the various genres of art and photography in Bengal from around the middle of the 19 century to the second half of the 20. She explains, in particular, the mix of canonical schools and styles and a variety of lesser-known popular images, often produced by anonymous artists or studios, that belong equally to the visual worlds of Bengal’s modernity.