Kalighat Pats

The Kalighat temple came up in Calcutta in 1809, drawing communities of traditional artisans who began to produce pats or paintings on religious and mythological themes, sold to the pilgrims as souvenirs.

Traditionally painted on cloth accompanied by vocal renditions of the illustrated, these pats were now produced by the largely anonymous pat makers, or patuas, on paper—cheap and easily accessible—in response to urban needs. They remained popular till the early decades of the twentieth century.

Beginning with religious themes and featuring epics, they soon began to depict social themes, taking their cue from the Company Paintings, especially social satire that was famously captured in the series on the Elokeshi trial in Calcutta.

The popularity of Kalighat pats increased in mid-nineteenth century when the expanding railway network connected Calcutta to cities such as Varanasi, Patna, Bombay, and Agra, and even to suburbs and interiors of Bengal, leading to an increased inflow of tourists, traders, and pilgrims to Calcutta.

By the early twentieth century, Kalighat pats began losing ground to increasingly accessible print technology products, their impact on the developing art trends was tremendous. Many Indian artists trained in Western academism but looking to create an indigenous vocabulary, such as Jamini Roy, were inspired by Kalighat pats. These were also the inspiration behind Gaganendranath Tagore’s caricatures lampooning the Westernised Bengali babu. An important collection of Kalighat pats is housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, gifted by the author Rudyard Kipling in August 1917.