Art 'Chor' - A 200 year old feud
- Ritwik Raha
- Jun 13
- 7 min read
In colonial Calcutta, the most expensive art in the country and the cheapest art in the country were made about a mile apart. One side had royal patrons and varnish. The other had a banyan tree and a grudge. Who won?
Picture two artists in Calcutta around 1850, both technically employed in the business of making pictures, both about to pretend the other does not exist.
The first works in oil. He has crossed an ocean for this, survived the dysentery, and set up a studio where he charges a Bengali landlord or a freshly rich East India Company official the equivalent of a small estate to be rendered in a velvet coat he is not wearing, against a column that is not there, gazing into a middle distance that contains, presumably, his portfolio. The second works under a tree. He carves into a block of wood with a tool he probably also uses for jewellery, inks it, slaps it onto newsprint so cheap it will not survive the next monsoon, and sells the result for less than a cup of tea.
These two men are not competitors in any way either of them would admit. And that is exactly what makes them worth putting in a ring together, because the fight between Calcutta’s oil painters and its woodcut printmakers is really a fight about who gets to make images, for whom, and at what price.
Spoiler: the man under the tree loses the battle and wins the war, and then a third man shows up and wins everything.
The high-end pretenders
The oil painters came for the money, and they were refreshingly honest about it. The pioneer was Tilly Kettle, a London coach-painter’s son who became the first major British artist to chance the voyage, landing at Madras in 1769 and eventually basing himself in Calcutta. He painted Warren Hastings at least three times, charged something like four to five thousand rupees a portrait and sailed home in 1776 considerably richer than he’d arrived. His success was the tell. If Kettle could clean up, the thinking went, anyone could, and a small armada of portraitists followed: Johan Zoffany, George Chinnery, Robert Home, all of them elbowing for the same finite supply of wealthy sitters.
Zoffany is the one to watch, because Zoffany is the one who couldn’t help himself. A German-born painter with royal patrons back home. Queen Charlotte had once shipped him off to Florence on commission - he spent roughly six years in India in the 1780s and produced Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, a teeming, gossipy group portrait of a cockfight at the court of the Nawab of Awadh.
It was commissioned by Warren Hastings himself. Zoffany painted his own face into the crowd, sketchpad in hand, in case anyone forgot whose afternoon this was. The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, where a modern cleaning restored the original colours and clarified a detail the artist had rendered with what one can only call commitment: the Nawab, the central figure, appears to be visibly aroused by the proceedings. Eighteenth-century reportage did not get more on-the-nose.
What the oil portrait actually sold was not likeness. It was a worldview. The British in these pictures stand tall, flushed with silk and certainty, while Indian figures are folded into the shadows as servants and scenery, a hierarchy painted in light levels.
And here is the genuinely poignant part: the Indian nawabs bought in. Having lost real political power to the Company, men like Muhammad Ali Khan of Arcot commissioned grand European oil portraits of themselves and shipped them off to George III and the Company’s directors, the visual equivalent of updating your title on a letterhead after you’ve been quietly fired. The portrait couldn’t restore the throne. It could only insist, in expensive varnish, that the throne had mattered. Even the miniature painters of Murshidabad started absorbing European realism, picking up perspective, like a second language they hadn’t asked to learn.
Oil, in other words, was a technology of the few: slow, costly, singular, imported, and ideological. One painting, one patron, one flattering lie in a canvas.
Meanwhile, under the banyan tree
About a mile north, in the lanes around Chitpur and Shobhabazar, a completely different image economy was roaring along on a budget. The neighbourhood was called Battala which literally translated to “under the banyan tree” and it was the rowdy birthplace of Bengali print.
The first Battala press went up in 1818. By 1857 the district’s roughly four dozen Indian-run presses were turning out 322 Bengali titles a year, including, with great seriousness, nineteen almanacs. Battala printed everything the respectable world wished it wouldn’t: religious texts and folklore, yes, but also pulp romances, true-crime scandal sheets, satirical pamphlets, posters for the local jatra theatre, and a brisk trade in erotica. It was the supermarket tabloid, the paperback rack, and the parish newsletter all operating out of the same humid alley.
The illustrations were woodcuts, and they were made by exactly the people you’d want making them: the Karmakars and other hereditary metalworking castes , blacksmiths, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, who had spent generations chipping and engraving fine surfaces and now simply redirected those skills into printing blocks.
They carved bold, flat, two-dimensional figures in thick curving lines, filled the backgrounds with restless cross-hatching, and hand-coloured the results with quick splashes of red, yellow, blue, and green. One of their favourite subjects was the babu: the newly moneyed Bengal gentleman, lovingly skewered for his vanity, his mistresses, and his enthusiastic mismanagement of his own dignity.
Look closely at the deity prints and you catch the district’s sly genius. A goddess will be seated in perfect Bengali devotional form and then framed by a Victorian cusped arch on slender Ionic pillars, the cast-iron vocabulary of British Calcutta smuggled in as set dressing.
The Battala engraver stands out because he wasn’t resisting the colonial city. He was eating it, columns and all, and reselling it to his neighbours for pocket change. These prints were made by artisans of every caste, hawked into villages by travelling sellers, and signed - Govind Chandra Rai, Hiralal Karmakar, because even at a few paise a sheet, an artist wants his name on the work.
The class war was a technology war
Strip away the romance and the fight comes down to a single variable: reproduction.
The oil portrait was magnificent precisely because it could not be copied. Its value lived in its singularity - one canvas, one owner, an image you had to possess to see. The woodcut’s whole reason for existing was the opposite: carve the block once, print a thousand, sell to everyone. One was scarcity sold as prestige. The other was abundance sold as access. The European portrait told a small number of powerful people a flattering story about themselves. The Battala print told a vast number of ordinary people the stories they already loved, cheaply enough that owning a picture stopped being a privilege and started being a Tuesday.
So when people frame this as oil-versus-woodcut, or refined-versus-crude, they’re missing it. It was the unique object versus the multiple - and across the whole arc of modern visual culture, the multiple wins. Every single time.
Good artists steal, great artists reproduce.
Which brings us to the man who won the war by reading the room and he wasn’t in Calcutta at all.
Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) was a Travancore aristocrat; the “Raja” was honorific; he was no king who taught himself the full European academic oil technique and aimed it at a target no Calcutta portraitist had dared: the Hindu gods. He painted Lakshmi, Saraswati, Damayanti and a hundred mythological scenes with the soft skin, the wet eyes, the silk you could practically hear rustling. He gave the deities bodies. And then he did the thing that detonated the whole century-long argument.
In 1894, on a courtier’s advice, he set up a lithographic press near Bombay, stocked it with German machinery, and began printing his oil paintings as cheap, vividly coloured oleographs (prints engineered to mimic the look of a real oil canvas).
Gods that had lived in palaces and temples now arrived, by the thousand, in clerks’ flats and village shops. He had taken the *aesthetic* of the elite oil painters and married it to the *business model* of the Battala woodcutters, and the offspring conquered the subcontinent’s imagination so completely that when you close your eyes and picture Lakshmi today, you are very likely picturing Ravi Varma’s.
This was a quiet revolution in who was allowed to own a god. Caste rules about access to temples and sacred images suddenly mattered a great deal less when the image could be bought at a stall by anyone with a coin. The “high” and the “low” collapsed into the same lithographic sheet.
And the casualties? Both of our original fighters. The Battala woodcut, killed in the 1880s and ‘90s by the same mechanical reproduction it had pioneered, now done faster and glossier by colour lithography. And the singular oil portrait, which kept its prestige but lost the culture because the future did not belong to the thing on the wall of one rich man’s drawing room. It belonged to the thing on the wall of everyone’s.
Postscript, from the present
It is hard to read this story in the 2020s without a small, familiar chill. A revolutionary reproduction technology arrives. It makes images faster, cheaper, and infinitely copyable. Custodians of “real” art warn that something essential is being stripped out. And the new pictures flood every available surface anyway, beloved by the masses and sniffed at by the connoisseurs, until one day they simply are the culture, and nobody can remember being scandalised.
Battala had its banyan tree. Ravi Varma had his German press. We have the AI image generators. The technology keeps changing. The street fight is exactly the same one.
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