Some of these periodicals began to carry illustrations from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. There was a concerted attempt by cultural and educational reformers to make the text more accessible and communicable. Illustrations served this unique purpose. People could now imagine the places, things and creatures they read about.

In the library’s collection we found Bibidartha Sangraha, a popular general knowledge periodical published by an organization that was founded by Mukhopadhyay—the Calcutta Vernacular Literature Society. This periodical was adapted from the Victorian penny magazine format, carrying instructive essays on history, nature and science, with full-plate illustrations of exotic animals and birds, people and places—printed with woodcuts imported from England. Within two decades of the first appearance of Pashwabali, the nature of illustrations in Bibidartha Sangraha singals a maturing taste for more detailed printed pictures.

The first few issues of Prabashi were entirely devoted to academic artists like Raja Ravi Varma, M. V. Dhurandhar and Bamapada Bannerjee. Though Ravi Varma was well established as a commercial artist—his works were on advertisements, calendars and other popular media, outside the realm of ‘fine art’—his iconography of Hindu deities was regarded as an improvement upon the cheap, garishly coloured chromolithographs published by popular art studios like Calcutta Art Studio. Ramananda Chattopadhyay reproduced almost all the famous Ravi Varma paintings to wean people away from ‘crude religious prints’. Some issues also contained paintings by the famous Bombay artist M.V. Dhurandhar, solely produced for the purpose of printing in Prabashi.

Even before Prabashi’s conscious shift towards the Bengal School, its very first 1901 issue anticipates emerging artistic developments. It features a detailed account of the cave paintings of Ajanta and Ellora with rich illustrations. The iconography of the Ajanta paintings played a very crucial role in shaping the sensibility of Abanindranath Tagore and his students. Five years later, the August 1906 issue carried a full-page illustration of Abanindranath Tagore’s painting of the new Swadeshi icon—titled simply ‘Matrimurti’—and Sister Nivedita’s entry on the work, which identified it as ‘Bharat Mata’ for the first time.

Bichitra's unique contribution lay in introducing an image series. The first few issues primarily carry photographic albums of foreign lands, such as Paris, Switzerland and Spain. Then the albums start reproducing photographs of Greek sculptures and old European masters often following them up with reproductions of contemporary European modernists like Degas, Renoir and Matisse. From the third year of its publication, it began reproducing albums of Indian artists like Manishi Dey, Sudhanshu Ray, Sudhir Khastgir and Nandalal Bose, to name a few, creating a compendium of past and present art practitioners of India. Giving its readers a sense of European and indigenous art, Bichitra consciously creates a truly globalist timeline of art history.

Bichitra’s pages unveil rare paintings and afford us a unique glimpse into unusual stylistic experiments of famous artists. Some such unique discoveries are Abanindranath Tagore's humorous wash painting of a malaria-carrying mosquito and Nandalal Bose's painting of Kali. We also come across female artists—from lesser-known names like Lila Mitra and Kiranbala Sen, to more well-known ones, such as Sukhalata Rao, among others.

Bichitra's pages set up unique experiments between texts and images. The most memorable are Nandalal Bose's illustrations of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nataraj Riturangashala, a magnificent poetic work, which devoted one verse to each season. Tagore's poems were often printed with exquisite pencil drawings, probably by Nandalal Bose. Here, Nandalal's illustrations clearly do much more than illustrate the text. The text simply become prompts for great imaginative flourishes.

Bichitra’s pages were replete with satirical sketches by the leading cartoonists of the time. Chanchalkumar Bandopadhyay takes digs at the ‘New Woman’ in a full plate spread while Jatindra Kumar Sen—an artist whose sharp imagination of portrait caricatures deeply inspired modernists like Paritosh Sen—illustrates Sukumar Ray’s topical satire Chalachittachanchari in Bichitra’s very first issue.

References

Samarpita Mitra, Periodicals, Readers and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture (Boston: Brill, 2020)

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art (CUP, 1992)

Abhijit Gupta, The Spread of Print in Colonial India: Into the Hinterlands (CUP, 2021)

Prabudhdha Chattopadhyay (ed), Ekti Alokprobaho: Unish theke Ekush Satak (Uttarpara: Uttarpara Jayakrishna Public Library, 2009)

Chittaranjan Bandopadhyay (ed), Bangla Mudran O Prakashan (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1981)