The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Print-Making

The first notable landscape artist to arrive in India was William Hodges in 1780. For the next three years he travelled the length and breadth of the country and produced a large number of sketches which he printed using techniques like metal engraving and etching. Between 1785-88 he published a series of forty-eight aquatints titled Select Views in India. Hodges’ landscapes, unlike the uncle and nephew duo Thomas and William Daniell, were less realistic in nature, carrying an air of shock and unrest created by the stark contrast of light and shade. 

The first attempts at indigenous printmaking began with book illustrations. In 1816 Ramchaund Ray’s name appears below the metal engraved illustrations in Bharatchandra Ray’s Oonoodah Mangal. Ramchaund Roy was trained in the miniature tradition and developed a very distinct style of engraving and began illustrating a considerable number of books as the demand increased. In this image from Radhamohan Sen’s Sangit Taranga we observe two ragas—Deepak and Bhairavi visualised through a deft use of the aquatint. Annoda Prasad Bagchi, a student of the newly founded School of Industrial Art and trained in a wide array of printmaking techniques, made his living by illustrating posters, books and journals. Quitting his day job, he founded the Calcutta Art Studio in 1876, which soon became one of the most popular printmaking studios of the city.

Techniques of producing coloured prints led to further demand for printed pictures. According to a popular anecdote, the Calcutta Art Studio in Bowbazaar acquired a lithography press where prints could be directly taken in colour in the 1870s. But the colours turned out to be exaggerated and garish as the printers did not know how to balance them. This led to the emergence of a distinct popular iconography, setting the language of popular prints produced in the new studios which came up rapidly around the area. In these two oleographs of Kumada Sundari and Manada Sundari, derived from the popular tradition of courtesan paintings of Kalighat, the artist uses loud colours on female bodies to titillate the audience.

Gaganendranath Tagore is considered one of the first practitioners in India who used printmaking as a practice in its own right instead of merely using it as a medium of reproduction. In 1915, he purchased a lithographic handpress, later known as the Bichitra Press, where he began to print incisive political cartoons to lampoon the colonial authorities and orthodox Hindu society alike. Between 1915 and 1921 Gaganendranath published three lithographic cartoon albums—Adbhuth Lok (1915), Birup Bajra (1917) and Naba Hollud (1921), a first of its kind endeavour in the country. 

In the early 1920s, Nandalal Bose became the principal of Kala Bhavana and introduced graphic art to the curriculum. In 1924, his visit to China and Japan exposed him to monochrome and multicolour woodcut prints and he returned with a rich collection of Chinese rubbings. He was striving to develop a language of printmaking which would not be dictated by the demands of aesthetic realism. While his subjects remain realistic, their formal structure consciously veers away from perspectival depth, drawing generously from the hitherto unexplored vocabulary in Indian printmaking such as Calcutta woodcuts, bold clear divisions of Japanese woodcuts and others. 

Haren Das's work exemplifies the dilemma that Indian printmakers were faced with: whether to continue with their Western naturalistic art training and produce images with popular acceptability, or to experiment with composition and technique, as printmakers in Santiniketan were doing. Das appears to have opted for the former. With some of his contemporaries, like Shaffiuddin Ahmed, who pioneered the graphic art movement in Bangladesh, he remained true to his training, evoking nostalgia for a style that his contemporaries were outgrowing, creating exquisitely detailed scenes from everyday life.

Krishna Reddy used the technique of viscosity to craft a language of spiritual abstraction. Most printmakers of the modernist generation encountered Reddy and viscosity as a technique either at Atelier 17 in Paris or in the several workshops that he conducted across India in the 1980s.

In 1957, the Shilalekh group, including M.  F. Husain, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta and  V. S. Gaitonde, was established in Bombay. Emulating the highly successful example of Raja Ravi Varma, they began to make lithographs at Mohammedi Fine Arts in Bombay, attempting to sell original works to art lovers at affordable prices.

In 1960, the Society of Contemporary Artists was established in Calcutta by Sanat Kar, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Shyamal Dutta Ray and later, Amitabha Banerji. Arun Bose, resident in New York, was their mentor and friend. The Society did much to promote the cause of printmaking in India, consistently organising print exhibitions and workshops at different venues across the country from 1960 onwards. Some of these workshops represent significant landmarks in the history of modern printmaking in India.

By 1970, P. Gauri Shanker, Devraj Dakoji, K. Laxma Goud and D. L. N. Reddy were practising printmaking in Hyderabad. The latter three had together set up a press in a garage in Hyderabad. Devraj consequently moved to New Delhi where, for many years, he headed the printmaking department at Garhi Studios.