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Early last week, Dr Jyotindra Jain, Director of the Crafts Museum at Delhi, gave a quite enthralling lecture at the art gallery in Oxford Bookshop. The subject was Kalighat painting, supplemented and illustrated by slides of pictures in Dr Jain’s book on the same subject.

The aim of the lecture was to show us how the paintings of the Kalighat patuas were embedded, artistically and psychologically, in the popular culture and history of the time; how the profane and the contemporary elements of urban existence – an existence whose provenance lay in colonial contact and capitalism – entered the space of paintings whose function would otherwise have been the straightforward retelling of mythological narratives about Hindu gods and goddesses. The paintings, then, reflect, embody, and opportunely exploit the birth of the urban modernity in nineteenth-century Calcutta with which its own birth is concordant.

Dr Jain tells us, for instance, how gossip and scandal, as a sort of ‘low’ form of history, are incorporated as subject-matter by the patuas. There are hilarious scenes from babu life which depict the babu as an ineffectual male dominated, and even physically abused, by his wife or mistress. (Surprisingly, these representations of the babu as a neutered male are not too far from the British colonialist construction of the effeminate bhadralok.)

The series of paintings about the seduction of Elokeshi, wife of Nabin, an employee at a printing press, by the head priest at Tarakeshwar, a bearded, ardent, pot-bellied specimen of unreconstructed nineteenth-century manhood, is not unrelated to this subject; the series culminates with pictures of Elokeshi’s subsequent murder by her jealous husband, and, finally, of the trial of Nabin and the head priest. This incursion of scandal and gossip – the kind of thing that would belong to the more prurient among our tabloids and magazines – is not, after all, unknown to the stylized and remote universe of the imagination. Dante’s Inferno provides an early and illustrious example of such an incursion; being part an epic account of hell and part a dubious tabloid populated with the feuds and jealousies of the time.

But the Kalighat painting refers not only to contemporary events and figures, but to other forms of art that were at the time in the ascendant – like proscenium theatre, for example – and it’s in the uncovering of these references that the heart of Dr Jain’s argument lies. The Elokeshi affair was, indeed, the subject of twenty or so plays at the time, and the Kalighat paintings on this subject (and, as we see, on other ones) are obviously, then, also a homage to contemporary theatre. Certain scenes are borrowed straight from the stage; and it is interesting that a figure in a certain painting, bent low before the feet of another figure, asking for forgiveness, should, instead of directing her attention to the feet, be giving us the benefit of a frontal view of her face, as if she were appraising her audience.

Dr Jain cites other examples of the interface between the paintings and theatre, too numerous to cite here; the most notable among these is the pleated curtains of proscenium theatre which form the border of many of the Kalighat paintings, as if the scene depicted in them were a scene from a play. Dr Jain points out with some relish how even the saris that some of the female figures wear are made to resemble theatre curtains. Moreover, in another gesture towards theatre, the faces of well-known actresses on the stage were used, not infrequently, by the patuas for the women in their paintings.

Proscenium theatre and babu society aren’t the only urban discourses that the paintings refer to. The patuas didn’t hesitate to borrow images and motifs from the urban ephemera of the time – labels, postcards, and photographs. Moreover, many of the painters, Dr Jain claims, were potters and artisans, or collaborated with potters; the shading of the Kalighat paintings, he argues effectively, is less an acknowledgement of the chiaroscuro of Western painting than it is intended to suggest the rounded surfaces of the clay figures that the patuas were also, otherwise, engaged in producing, or painting.

Finally, the paintings are often implicitly located in the bazaars of Kalighat where the patuas sat. Dr Jain showed us a painting of Shiva and Parvati taking Ganesh out on a family outing, looking rather like a lower-middle-class family in Marxist Bengal, a listless Shiva carrying the small, elephant-headed child in his arms, using the damru as a rattle to placate his son. The cosmopolitan world of colonial Calcutta, too, is everywhere in these paintings; in one of them, the god Kartik wears the Westernised buckled shoes that were then in fashion.

Listening to Dr Jain’s lecture, I felt with renewed force something I’ve felt before: that the inheritors of the Kalighat patuas are the craftsmen and artisans who transform the Durga Puja from a harvest festival into a creative exploration, and occasionally an outrageous comment, on urban reality. As the scandals of Calcutta, the embarrassments of middle-class life, and a vivacious degree of cosmopolitanism marked the world of Kalighat painting, our contemporary scandals and public events – the death of Princess Diana in an automobile accident; Satyajit Ray receiving the Oscar; the so-called ‘plague’ in India in the mid-Nineties; a scene from Kaun Banega Crorepati? or Titanic – form the subject-matter of the men from Chandannagar who do the lighting for the Pujas. These are our patuas, though their medium is at once brighter and more evanescent than the Kalighat pat ever was; like the pats, these lights are part social comment and part parody. Again, as in Kalighat, the proximity of the sacred seems to actuate, rather than impede, these artists’ (for they are artists) embracing of the profane elements of contemporary urban culture.

Moreover, does not the pandal itself echo, subliminally, the proscenium? We enter it – seeking darshan – as if entering an auditorium; and Parvati, her family, and the asura appear before us like actors upon a stage gathered at curtain-call. And just as the figures in Kalighat paintings (often inspired, Dr Jain reminds us, by clay figures) are inscribed into urban reality, women made to resemble actresses, Shiva made to look like an itinerant family man in a bazaar, so with the Puja images; one will confront, not infrequently, a Durga whose face is uncannily like Hema Malini’s, or an asura that seems to be the twin of the taxi driver who took you home yesterday. After the Kargil conflict, some of the asuras came to resemble Nawaz Sharif closely, in a typical Kalighat-type metamorphosis of the sacred into the political.

Finally, the chaos and hurly-burly of the Pujas recreate, almost inadvertently, the ambulant bazaar atmosphere of Kalighat. In his essay, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin notes how the ‘amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street’, is imprinted on Baudelaire’s creativity as a ‘hidden figure’, and how it is also a significant constituent of nineteenth-century modernity in capitalist Europe. ‘The crowd – no subject was more entitled,’ says Benjamin, 'to the attention of nineteenth century writers. It was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata who had acquired facility in reading. It became a customer; it wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages.’ Among the people in this ‘amorphous crowd’ is, Benjamin points out, the flaneur, a typical figure in the urban landscape, the loiterer – often a gentleman of leisure or citified dandy - who plunges into the crowd for no particular reason, except to window-shop, observe, and survey the various ephemeral items of urban paraphernalia displayed on pavements and in windows.

If the crowd is the ‘hidden figure’ imprinted upon Baudelaire’s creativity, it is the ‘hidden figure’ in the Kalighat paintings as well; and it is through these paintings we realize that, as in Paris, the flaneur and the crowd are all-important elements in the construction of modernity in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Flaneurs, in modern, bourgeois India, often operate in families; and the picture of Parvati, Shiva, and Ganesha out on a stroll portrays the sort of family that would loiter in, and pass through, the long stretch of Kalighat with its bazaar, part devotee, part aimless, urban flaneur. Kartik, too, is represented as flaneur and leisured dandy, with his buckled shoes and Prince Albert-style haircut. The crowd is customer; like Benjamin’s novel-readers in nineteenth-century France, who wanted to read about their own fictionalized incarnations, and like the erstwhile courtly European patrons who would have their likenesses painted by professionals, the customers in the bazaar crowds of nineteenth-century Calcutta too must have demanded to see themselves in the pat; to see the divine family become as themselves, secularized, itinerant, and slightly louche.

The chaos of the Pujas, too, agglomerates us, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, into crowds and flaneurs, forcing us to abandon our immobile, traffic-stalled cars and take to the streets, contained and disciplined only by bamboo barricades; it turns entire areas of present-day Calcutta into something like the bazaars of nineteenth-century Kalighat. This is almost a conscious homage to what the modern metropolis used to be like; for most post-modern cities in the developed world are inimical to the sort of exploration on foot that was once a fundamental part of urban life, and have become suburban enclaves connected to each other by motorways. There are exceptions – for instance, New York, San Francisco, London; the death of Princess Diana witnessed, again, a mapping of London by crowds, on foot, as the hearse made its way out of London.

During the Pujas, the crowd is both loiterer and customer; as it moves towards the pandal, it pauses at stalls selling fast food, soft drinks, balloons. The crowd wishes to pay obeisance to the deity, but it also wishes to consume its own image and its concerns – the films it is familiar with; the reports in the newspapers it reads – in what it sees around it. Thus the Durgas who still look like Hema Malini, the asura who resembles Nawaz Sharif, the stories in lights about Princess Diana and Satyajit Ray. And we relive the illusion, as the crowds in the bazaar did, of inhabiting an extraordinary city.

Originally published in The Telegraph, Calcutta