Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

nineteenth century Calcutta, as apparent from their caste names such as Karmakar or Svarnakar, came from the hered itary families of metal casters and goldsmiths who were mainly instrumental in transforming folk art forms into popular genres . European manners had become the model for upward social mobil ity for the nouveau riche Bengalis of the nineteenth century. The Bengali el ite's social propinquity with the colonial settlers and their conscious distancing of themselves from the local, m iddle and lower classes on the one hand , and the latter's sharp perception of the absurd ities that arose from the pseudo-imitation of European lifestyle on the other, inspired new sarcastic imagery that occupied the centre-stage of Bengali literature, theatre and the visual arts of the period . The bazaar painters as much as the street performers were qu ick to portray, with a tinge of sardonic mockery, the new images of foppish gentlemen, trendy lad ies, dimwit dandies and seductive courtesans - the products of the new hybrid lifestyle of the idle rich of Calcutta . By Victorian moral standards, the prevalent folk or popular culture of Calcutta as reflected in the street theatre or the bazaar painting was considered 'indecent'. Anti-obscen ity legislation enacted during th is period directly curbed the cultural expression of the lower classes. Seeing this, the upper class Indians began to distance themselves from patronising them. The vacuum was to be filled by rediscovery of the classical cultural trad ition pedigreed by Brahmin patronage, having at its core the central agenda of 'Indian identity' , which at an academic plane found expression in the great Orientalism discourse. One of the outcomes of this euphoric reconstruction of lndianness was a movement towards massive 'Sanskritisation' of the Indian languages and literary taste. In the sphere of art it meant turn ing away from the folk traditions and turn ing to the classical : the cou rt paintings of the Mughal and Rajput days; which often saw depiction of H indu mythological characters in the image of the Greek gods and goddesses, but dressed in Indian clothes - the heroes dressed in semi-Mughal attire and the heroines draped in the Indian sari . This led to the birth of nee-classicism in I ndian art. To cater to the new souvenir market of the rising metropolis of Calcutta, the bazaar artists abandoned their original village practice of painting storytellers' scrolls in favour of cheap pictures painted in newly introduced translucent watercolour on mill-made paper. The Kalighat artists were greatly charmed by the European academic method of shading and thereby evoking a sense of volume. They deployed vestigial rather than real istic European chiaroscuro in combination with their earlier practice of making painted clay figures to beget a new pictorial language. They did not paint their images in natural light and shade but l it them up with multiple sources of light, depend ing upon the conceptual emphasis of form required . By shading a limb from both sides, the artists created an illusion of a bulging form . A language, so constituted, was then used to portray a roly-poly godman , a pompous dandy, a voluptuous courtesan or a pot-bellied Shiva. · The visual impact of European-style theatrical performances on the construction of popular pictures has been grossly overlooked . The presence of rippled curtains, compacted background scenery making the characters in the foreground look like cutouts, sharp contrast lighting accentuating drapery folds, dialogic stance of characters, frontal postures and sharply-directed gazes of players as depicted in the popular calendar prints of the period clearly speak of performative contexts. The iconisation of theatre actresses in Calcutta had already begun in the first half of the nineteenth century. There was a market demand for pictures of heroines and actresses to which bazaar painters and photographers swiftly responded . By 1 860 there were about 330 photographers in Calcutta alone. Photographic portraits of celebrities and women in seductive poses, in the form of carte-de-visite, had attained a degree of popularity in Calcutta in the 1 860s. Around that time Vallantine Twin Lenses for carte-de-visite were available in Calcutta. Bourne and Shepherd specialised in the job. It is remarkable that Kalighat and other popular pictures , including lithographs and oleographs, especially of the portrait variety, from the last three decades of the nineteenth and first three of the twentieth century reflect photographic stylisation . Certain mannerisms of fashionable sitters - their contrived postures, their manner of sitting 81