Ashit Paul, artist and designer, offers a collection of early Calcutta woodprints covering a wide range – mythological, social scenes, book illustrations and advertising – all from between 1816 and the early years of the twentieth century, with our essays by scholars and artists in different aspects of this popular urban art tradition, shortlived but intensely vital, and recording the evolution of culture that was a mix of the Western and Eastern. The four essays cover the social and technological history of printmaking by woodblock in Bengal, the tradition that these urban folk artists drew on, the aesthetic values that they created and left behind for their successors, and the iconography of the woodprints. They often touch upon the connections that linked the woodcut printers and the better known and studied Kalighat pots, a parallel tradition. In the prints reproduced, the popular imagination of a growing city takes a wide area of human experience in its stride on its own indigenous and uninhibitedly eclectic terms. Battle scenes from the classical epics, with dancing demons and flying heads, the river flowing down from the heaven and through the world below, dancing belles with their accompanists, everyday domestic scenes, fighting couples, the city’s scandals, the pranks of the mischievous god Krishna, the heady sensations of the time, satire directed at the nouveaux riches and the gallants, pieces of sheer fantasy, illustrated advertisements for hair oil, ink tables, dramatic illustrations for the more popular novels of the period, a ‘sure remedy for tooth ache’ and calligraphy appear in the large assortment of prints. They project an image of Calcutta never before revealed in a graphic candour and richness, with a whole history of manners, mores, traditional beliefs and conflicts, often with humour and invariably with a sense of down-to-earth realism.
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