Art 'Chor' - A 200 year old feud
Updated: Sep 24
In colonial Calcutta, the most expensive art and the cheapest art were created just 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 were making pictures. Both pretended the other did not exist.
The first artist worked in oil. He crossed an ocean, survived dysentery, and set up a studio. He charged a Bengali landlord or a newly wealthy East India Company official a small estate to be rendered in a velvet coat he wasn’t wearing. He posed against a column that wasn’t there, gazing into a middle distance that presumably held his portfolio.
The second artist worked under a tree. He carved into a block of wood with a tool he likely used for jewelry. He inked it, slapped it onto newsprint so cheap it wouldn’t survive the next monsoon, and sold the result for less than a cup of tea.
These two men were not competitors. That’s what makes them worth examining. The fight between Calcutta’s oil painters and woodcut printmakers is about who gets to make images, for whom, and at what price.
Spoiler: the man under the tree loses the battle but wins the war. Then a third man shows up and wins everything.
The High-End Pretenders
The oil painters came for money. They were refreshingly honest about it. The pioneer was Tilly Kettle, a London coach-painter’s son. He became the first major British artist to make the voyage, landing at Madras in 1769 and eventually settling in Calcutta. He painted Warren Hastings at least three times, charging around four to five thousand rupees per portrait. He sailed home in 1776 considerably richer than when he arrived. His success was telling. If Kettle could thrive, anyone could. A small armada of portraitists followed: Johan Zoffany, George Chinnery, Robert Home, all elbowing for the same limited supply of wealthy sitters.
Zoffany is the one to watch. He couldn’t help himself. A German-born painter with royal patrons back home, Queen Charlotte once commissioned him to Florence. He spent roughly six years in India during the 1780s, producing Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, a gossipy group portrait of a cockfight at the Nawab of Awadh's court.
Commissioned by Warren Hastings, Zoffany painted himself into the crowd, sketchpad in hand, in case anyone forgot whose afternoon it was. The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, where a modern cleaning restored the original colors and clarified a detail: the Nawab, the central figure, appears visibly aroused by the proceedings. Eighteenth-century reportage did not get more on-the-nose.
What the oil portrait sold was not likeness. It sold 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.
Here’s the 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. They shipped them off to George III and the Company’s directors, the visual equivalent of updating your title on a letterhead after being 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 began 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 on a canvas.
Meanwhile, Under the Banyan Tree
About a mile north, in the lanes around Chitpur and Shobhabazar, a completely different image economy was thriving on a budget. The neighborhood was called Battala, which literally translates to “under the banyan tree.” It was the rowdy birthplace of Bengali print.
The first Battala press opened in 1818. By 1857, the district’s roughly four dozen Indian-run presses were producing 322 Bengali titles annually, including nineteen almanacs. Battala printed everything the respectable world wished it wouldn’t: religious texts, folklore, pulp romances, true-crime scandal sheets, satirical pamphlets, posters for local jatra theatre, and a brisk trade in erotica. It was the supermarket tabloid, the paperback rack, and the parish newsletter all operating from the same humid alley.
The illustrations were woodcuts, made by the Karmakars and other hereditary metalworking castes: blacksmiths, goldsmiths, coppersmiths. They redirected their skills into printing blocks.
They carved bold, flat, two-dimensional figures in thick curving lines, filled backgrounds with restless cross-hatching, and hand-colored the results with quick splashes of red, yellow, blue, and green. One of their favorite subjects was the babu: the newly moneyed Bengal gentleman, lovingly skewered for his vanity, his mistresses, and his enthusiastic mismanagement of his 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, 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 neighbors for pocket change. These prints were made by artisans of every caste, hawked into villages by traveling sellers, and signed—Govind Chandra Rai, Hiralal Karmakar—because even at a few paise a sheet, an artist wants their 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
This brings us to the man who won the war by reading the room. He wasn’t in Calcutta at all.
Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) was a Travancore aristocrat; the “Raja” was honorific. He was no king. He 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 soft skin, wet eyes, and silk you could practically hear rustling. He gave the deities bodies. 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. He stocked it with German machinery and began printing his oil paintings as cheap, vividly colored oleographs (prints engineered to mimic the look of a real oil canvas).
Gods that had lived in palaces and temples now arrived, by the thousands, 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. 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 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 was killed in the 1880s and ‘90s by the same mechanical reproduction it had pioneered. Now done faster and glossier by color lithography. The singular oil portrait kept its prestige but lost the culture. 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 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. The new pictures flood every available surface anyway, beloved by the masses and sniffed at by connoisseurs, until one day they simply are the culture, and nobody can remember being scandalized.
Battala had its banyan tree. Ravi Varma had his German press. We have the AI image generators. The technology keeps changing. The street fight remains the same.
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