Mechanical reproduction and

the world of the colonial artist

Partha Mitter

The article analyses the revolutionary impact of the processes of mechanical reproduction
on artistic production and formation of modern identity in colonial India. Mechanical
reproduction, with endless repeatability as its chief characteristic, turned India into an
’iconic society’. It affected the elite as much as the underclass, as elite artists vied with
artisans to capture the greatly expanding market in cheap prints. Mechanical repro-
duction arrived in India in two basic forms: as a source for European masterpieces for
Indian artists to copy, and as inexpensive images available even to the poorest. Unlike
in the West, the printed image in India rivalled painting, thereby challenging its aura of
authenticity. As the pioneering printmaking firms, Calcutta Art and the Poona Chitra-
shala Press show, mechanical prints helped forge the Indian nation by creating a common
visual culture. However, the very nature of mass reproduction itself contributed to the
weakening and diluting of the monolithic character of elite nationalism.

Today, we are told that we are, thanks to digital technology, in the midst
of an information revolution. The revolution, coming to fruition at the
end of the 20th century, has dramatically altered the way we process
information and communicate, a global phenomenon that is considered

Partha Mitter is at the School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex,
Falmer, Brighton BNI 9QN, Sussex, UK.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions of the

participants at the Michigan conference, especially Sumathi Ramaswamy, Philip
Lutgendorf and Sandria Freitag, and to my workshop colleagues at the Getty Research
Institute, especially to Sarah Morris. The paper owes a great deal to the major collection
of Indian popular prints and David Jones’ catalogue of the prints at the Wellcome Institute
Library in London. I deeply appreciate in particular the help and courtesy I received
from Dr William Schupbach in the Library, and to the Wellcome Library for permission
to reproduce works in the collection. To the Art History Subject Group at Sussex my
thanks go for a generous subvention for the illustrations.

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to be unprecedented in its impact on our everyday existence and outlook

on life. India is no exception in participating in this global phenomenon;
it leads in exporting ’knowledge workers’ to Western countries, and espe-
cially to the Silicon Valley in California. Within India itself digital tech-
nology has transformed the pace and the nature of the way information
is processed and transmitted.
What lies at the heart of this late 20th century revolution? It is the
speed with which visual material, including writing, can be replicated,
multiplied and transmitted. But the digital revolution is only a staggeringly
faster version of the process that began with the invention of moveable
type in China in the llth century, followed by Johannes Gutenberg’s
printing press in the 15th, which allowed easy multiplication of data
(McMurtrie 1940). Second, the ubiquity and proliferation of visual images
has prompted the claim that the century is characterised by the ’hegemony
of vision’ (Levin 1993: 23; see also Ramaswamy, introduction). But let
us not forget that we are no less saturated with ’aural’ information, or

replicated sound, which plays an overwhelming role in our everyday

existence (see also Taylor, this volume). The unique feature of modem-
ity, I would contend, is neither simply or entirely the dominance of vision,
nor the dominance of sound, but the endless ’repeatability’ of information,
and the technology available to replicate infinitely, about which Walter
Benjamin wrote so eloquently (Benjamin 1970: 219-53).

I
Print technology, colonial rule and nationalism

The speed with which information can be transmitted across vast distances
blinds us to the fact that there have been other information revolutions
throughout history. In India, perhaps the most powerful information
revolution was the arrival of print technology in the colonial period,
often used by Christian missionaries for proselytisation purposes.2 One

1
The information revolution ranges from the development and spread of alphabetic
scripts across the Euro-Asian landmass, to printing in China, to the establishment of
broadsides as a cheap means of transmitting information and propaganda in 16th century
Europe, especially during the Reformation, and finally to the rise of postal services and
the telegraph in the 19th century.
2
In Empire and information (1996), C.A. Bayly discusses the communication
explosion of the colonial period. The Raj used the revolutionary technology to maintain
control over the subcontinent, but the same technology was used by Indian nationalists
to forge new ’communities’ and norms.

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aspect of this colonial phenomenon was the rise of mechanically-

reproduced prints which created a new ’iconic’ society, the main thrust
of my-article. The most remarkable aspect of iconic culture is the proli-
feration of visual images through mechanical reproduction, their ubiquity
and universal accessibility. The new visual culture, which transcended
the local and the regional and affected the elite and the ordinary people
equally, helped create a new sense of nationhood. Printing, which was
introduced in India by the Portuguese in Goa in 1556 to aid the Jesuits in
their proselytisation, soon spread to Tamil Nadu, leading to the publi-
cation of Tamil texts. Subsequently other European missionaries set up
printing presses with the intention of publishing Biblical and Catechist
literature cheaply in the vernacular and making it readily available to
the Indian population in order to facilitate their conversion (Kesavan
1985-97: I, 1-158).
To take possibly the earliest example of vernacular printing which
had implications for nationalism in India: in the late 18th century English
and Scottish missionaries in Calcutta (present Kolkata) made use of local
patuas or scroll painters for setting up their presses and for typesetting.
This was accompanied by the reform of the Bengali language and
standardisation of the Bengali script for easy printing. In the end, mission-
ary efforts served less in the spread of the gospel than in inadvertently
helping to create modem Bengali literature. The first book of Bengali
literature, Annada mangal, was published by Gangakishore Bhattacharya
in 1816 with engravings by Rupchand Roy, while the first Bengali weekly,
the Samachar darpan, appeared in 1818.3 In the 19th century, a whole
neighbourhood of north Calcutta, called Bat-tala, was populated by publi-
shers of cheap printed books, which were considered to be the Bengali
equivalent of Victorian ’penny dreadfuls’. In fairness to Bat-tala, its high
quality of printing provided inexpensive reading material to a wide range
of social classes (Kesavan 1985-97: I, 271-96; Paul 1983; Bandopadhaya
1981; Mitter 1994; Guha-Thakurta 1992).

3
While printing presses had been in operation in Tamil Nadu for several centuries,
the first Tamil journal appeared in 1831, a little after Samachar darpan. This was also
around the time when Tamil and Sanskrit classics were being translated. Both documents
contributed to the growth of Tamil nationalism. While Devanagari letters occur in Samuel
Purchas Hakluytus Posthumus or Puchas His Pilgrimes (one of the most famous travel
compendiums published from London in 1625), Marathi and Hindi works are of the
19th century. For the most comprehensive account of printing and publishing in India,
see Kesavan 1985-97, vols. II and III.

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One cannot of course speak of universal literacy in the case of colonial

India. Even today literacy is low in India,’ and certainly in the 19th century
it was extremely limited. But compared with the pre-colonial period,
when literacy was restricted to men of the elite strata, namely, Brahmins,
Muslim divines and court officials as well as clerks and accountants,
colonial India saw a substantial widening of literacy among the urban
elite in the maritime cities of Calcutta (present Kolkata), Bombay (present
Mumbai) and Madras (present Chennai) (Sarkar 1985; Basu 1974). The
constant flow of cheap printed books from Bat-tala suggests the spread
of reading even among the less affluent Bhadralok [Bengali elite]. Indeed
the great flowering of modem Bengali literature could not have been
possible without the availability of printed books and literary magazines
throughout Bengal. These developments began to take place also in other
parts of the subcontinent, notably Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra and
North India in the 19th century. Some of the leading signposts in this
may be mentioned: in 1812 the first Tamil classic appeared in print;
Aesop’s fables was translated into Marathi in the same period; the first
Hindi periodical appeared in 1826 from Calcutta, while the great period
of Hindi literature commenced with the emergence of the poet, intellectual
and journalist, Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-85) in the late 19th
century; in Kerala the influential Malayala manorama was founded in
1890.5
An aspect of this ’colonial’ information revolution was the growth of
newspaper journalism. It thrived from the late 19th century as more and
more newspapers published in English as well as in different Indian
languages made their appearance (Dasgupta 1977). Vernacular news-
papers brought linguistic groups together, while the rise of an India-
wide English readership, created through the spread of English
newspapers, magazines and books, helped forge a common political
vocabulary. The emergence of an India-wide English readership had
already received a boost in 1835 when support for education in the English
medium became the official policy of the British Raj with endorsements
of Rammohun Roy and other Indian leaders (Roy 1958: 40-43; Macaulay
1958: 44-49). The emergence of common cultural and political discourses

4
The 1991 Census gives 64.10 per cent literacy rate for men and 39.30 per cent for
women with the male/female ratio at 1.63.
5
See Kesavan (1985-97) for a detailed account of developments in publishing and
journalism in Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Kerala, Maharashtra and the Hindi and Urdu speaking
parts of India in the 19th century.

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in English fed into political debates, leading to the founding of the Indian
National Congress in 1885.
Print technology provided the impetus for pan-Indian nationalism by
contributing to an ’imaginary community’ that sought to transcend castes,
regions, religions and languages. However, recent critics have sought to
modify Anderson’s theory of print culture cementing nationalist senti-
ment. Such a centralising process of imposing unity on a heterogeneous
group of people led by the English-educated elite was achieved at the
cost of suppressing individual differences. Thus the ’coherent’ discourse
of nationalism would always remain fragile with deep fault lines running
through the national fabric. There were alternative modes of popular re-
sistance to colonial rule, which often forced the centre to shift its position
(Anderson 1983; Seal 1968; Guha-Thakurta 1992; Greeley 2000; Pinney
1997, 1999).
The impact of print technology on modem Indian nationalism has re-
ceived the attention of a number of scholars (Dasgupta 1977; Bagal 1964;
Ray 1979; Seal 1968). Less known until recently is the role of visual
imagery in forging this common culture-‘an imagined community’ that
shared a common and easily understood visual language which affirmed
common values and aspirations (Mitter 1994). This was sensed by the

pioneering nationalist journalist, Ramananda Chatterjee (1865-1943),

who was searching for a common bonding agent in a country dominated
by a plethora of languages. He was convinced that the universal language
of art provided that essential ingredient for creating the ’imagined com-
munity’ lacking in nationalist literary efforts. In 1899, warmly praising
the sculptor Ganpatrao Mhatre for contributing to nation building, he
wrote:

Hence, as a factor silently making for national unity, we should

welcome a revival of artistic activity, as much as, if not more than, a

revival of literary activity (Chatterjee 1899).

Ramananda was conscious of the significance of the emerging India-

wide iconic culture centred on Victorian naturalism. What he was less
aware of is that it was mass prints, more than painting and sculpture, that
succeeded in disseminating the new visual culture across the subcontinent
within a short space of time. There was an explosion of mechanically-
reproduced images in the late 19th century which can be attributed partly
to the ease of reproduction and partly to the new modes of transport. The
railways carried bundles of popular prints across the subcontinent

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speedily, inexpensively and efficiently.6 Even poorer Indians, living far

away from their production sites, were able to afford them. The primary
impact of processes of mechanical reproduction such as engraving and
lithography was to spread Western illusionist art in India. But when print-
makers were able to create a market for cheap prints of Hindu religious
subjects, they were contributing to the rise of a visual culture that fed
into the burgeoning nationalism at the end of the 19th century.’7
Before we turn to the creation of an ’iconic’ culture by late 19th century
printmakers, it would be interesting to consider a significant aspect of
mechanical reproduction: the impact of imported prints of European art
in colonial India. Widely circulated among the Western-educated in
colonial cities, these prints were routinely used by Indian artists, trained
in European academic naturalism whose roots lay in the Italian Re-
naissance. One of the fascinating problems in art history is the migration
of artistic motifs and styles across cultures. Colonial art historians have
viewed such transmissions, or ’artistic borrowings’, in terms of power
relations between the coloniser and the colonised; the use of Western art
by Indian artists is frequently described in terms of slavish imitation and
a sign of inferiority. But arguably a more fruitful subject would be the
actual mode and nature of transmission across cultural boundaries
(Wittkower 1983). In other words, when Western illusionist art was intro-
duced in India in the 19th century, how did the actual transfer take place?
We know of course the pro-active Raj policy of ’inculcating good taste’
in its Indian subjects through art schools, art societies and art exhibitions
(Mitter 1994; see also Jain, Pinney, this volume). By the middle of the
century, as Victorian taste tightened its grip on India, a lucrative market
in European illustrated books, magazines and art reproductions opened
up. The English-literate artist in India now had access to all this visual
material, which radically altered her/his work methods as well as the
perception of art itself.
II
Mechanical reproduction and the spread of Western art
It is a significant fact of colonial art history that artists constructed their
artistic style and iconography on the basis of reproductions of European

6
Bayly (1996: 335) discusses the effect of modem technology in the quick and
efficient dissemination of information during the colonial period.
7
See the dissenting views on this of Guha-Thakurta (1992: 23) and Pinney (1999).

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 7

art, available to them in

books and magazines (Mitter 1994: 187). My
own experience is limited to India, but I am convinced that this holds
true of all colonial societies which are in essence peripheral to the metro-
politan culture with its canonical art as a measure of perfection. This
phenomenon has major implications for colonial art, as a new set of
meanings and rules is generated that distances the Western source from
its colonial reproduction. Transmission of cultural commodities, it has
been argued, raises interesting problems of the effect of ’cultural bound-
aries’. Art objects and all forms of material culture undergo significant
changes of meaning and function as they migrate from one society to
another, in other words, as they pass through the metaphorical ’bound-
aries’ that divide cultures (Miller 1997). Witness, for instance, the
changing functions of the reproductions of European art exported to India.
In the West, such reproductions often acted as temporary expedients
simply because the possibility of viewing the original existed in theory
if not always in reality. Since the European artist was expected to engage
with original works of art, reproductions simply helped to reinforce the
’aura’ of the original. On the other hand, for the colonial artist, his artistic
source was not normally an original European painting or sculpture but

its black-and-white or colour reproduction. This is because the colonial

artist, living in the peripheries, could not have direct access to the art of
the metropolis. But the significant fact is that even when original works
were available to Indian artists, they preferred to learn from reproductions.
The work methods of the most famous 19th century Indian artist, Ravi
Varma (1848-1906), are instructive in this respect. A minor aristocrat,
he imbibed the techniques of Western art by watching a visiting painter,
Theodore Jensen, at work. Apart from this brief encounter, he was largely
self-taught. In the 1870s, Varma was hailed as the leading portrait painter
of India as much by the British Raj as by the Indian nobility (Mitter
1994: 180-98). An Austrian scholar, Erwin Neumayer, who made a care-
ful inventory of the objects in Ravi Varma’s studio in Killimanur in Kerala,
has documented the books and pictures belonging to the artist. We thus
know that the artist and his brother Raja Varma, who collaborated with
him on painting commissions, possessed European prints and art books
presented to them by a German associate. Among these, two photographic
books on the nude, Le nu aesthetique and DerAkt, are of particular interest
to us.’ Knowledge of the nude is a sine qua non of Western academic art,

8
I am deeply in debt to Erwin Neumayer for providing me a copy of his findings,
which are as yet unpublished.

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and a prerequisite for producing compositions with human figures. Ravi

Varma’s knowledge of human anatomy was based entirely on such works
published in Europe (ibid.).
Later in life, Varma became the celebrated history painter of Victorian
India, who imagined the nation’s past through a series of paintings exe-
cuted as nationalist projects. In the 18th century, history painting, or
paintings inspired by history and classical mythology, came to be regarded
as the highest attainment in the art of painting because of the moral lessons

it imparted. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, believed that history paint-
ing enabled us to recognise our true and universal nature and lifted art
above manual dexterity (Barrell 1986). What is remarkable about Ravi
Varma is that his complex narratives were devised by means of careful
studies of the annual publications of the Royal Academy and other Euro-
pean art books in his possession. After faithfully examining a particular
reproduction, he would stamp it with his name to remind himself that he
had absorbed its lessons. In short, Varma ’intemalised’ the language of
Victorian painting from art plates. The outcome of this ’decontextualised’
exercise was a hybrid style that was closer to the Indian environment
than to Western art, a style that made him the most famous artist of colonial
India. Later in life, Varma had an opportunity to copy the French Oriental-
ist artist, J.J. Benjamin-Constant’s painting, Judith, in the Maharaja of
Baroda’s collection. This copy made by him as an exercise in competence
made no substantial difference to his already-perfected artistic vocabulary
based on reproductions (Mitter 1994).
Let me take another example from the 1930s, of a different kind of
art, which marked the advance of European modernism in India. The
great poet Rabindranath Tagore took up pen-and-wash drawing late in
life and became celebrated in Britain, France and above all, Germany,
for his expressionist works. Essentially an untutored artist, he began to
develop complex designs by combining texts and images, based on the
erasures and corrections that he made in his manuscripts. Among his

interesting creations are drawings inspired by European graphic designs

reproduced in books and magazines. He was fascinated with ’Jugendstil’
and ’Art Deco’ graphic design which had already inspired Bengali book
illustrators. There are many examples of Tagore’s interest in Art Deco,
especially the angular buildings and spiky forms that he often employed
in his work. He had particular affinities with two graphic artists of Middle
Europe: with Adolf H61zel, who used texts for decoration, and with Otto

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Eckmann who revelled in Art Nouveau volutes and arabesques. In short,

the impact of reproductions of European art on the work methods of
Indian artists in colonial India has been considerable.9
I now come to the core of my paper: the phenomenal development of
printed images in colonial India, contributing to the iconic culture. The
transformation of Indian society, in which illusionist imagery, or imagery
inspired by European representational art, came to be part of everyday
life took place on two levels, elite and popular. 10 Let me first examine
the elite. By the end of the 19th century, pictorial journalism helped to
create a climate that encouraged debates on cultural nationalism. The
pioneering journalist was Ramananda Chatterjee, whose twin passions
were art and nationalism. Ramananda’s illustrated English journal,
Modem review, provided an intellectual forum for the intelligentsia across
India, while his Bengali monthly, Prabasi, moulded the taste of the
Bengali Bhadralok. Elite women, who were denied access to English
education and to public exhibitions of art, had initiation in art in Bengali
illustrated magazines. The persuasive power of these periodicals rested
on the quality of their art plates (Mitter 1994: 120-26).

Ramananda’s journalistic resources enabled him to establish Ravi

Varma as a national hero, even as he persuaded his readers to enjoy
Victorian art as the epitome of artistic achievement. He treated his readers
to a wide variety of European art that naturally included Renaissance
masterpieces. But significantly, Ramananda filled his publications with
works of 19th century and early 20th century academic artists.ll These
European artists, who are hardly remembered today, are a clear index of
the Victorian taste of late 19th-century India (Mitter 1994: Chapters 4
and 9). Another genre that became a staple feature of print culture was
the cartoon. From the 1870s, comic magazines in India, inspired by the
conservative English magazine Punch, became a forum for anti-colonial
resistance. There were a number of offshoots of Punch in India but

9
I summarise here my research on Tagore’s art, which will form part of my volume
on modernism and the Indian artist. See also Mitter (1972).
10
Illusionist art is a phrase used by E.H. Gombrich and other art historians to describe
European naturalist or representational art based on scientific perspective, chiaroscuro
and other technical devices. The use of the term ’illusionist’ is to stress its ’constructed’
character, a feature which is not brought out in the term ’naturalism’.
11
Academic art, also known as salon art, refers to 19th century, naturalist art endorsed
most notably by the French and British academies. The foundations of academic art
were laid in the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century.

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because of the diversity of languages, the English language comic

magazine, Hindi punch, enjoyed the greatest success. 12
However, it was on the popular level that the impact of mechanical re-
productions was the most profound. In order to grasp the full implications
of this revolution in the popular arts, we must once again turn to Walter
Benjamin’s classic paper, ’The work of art in the age of mechanical repro-
duction’ (1970). He tells us that reproductions pose a threat to the aura
of a work of art, its originality, its authenticity and its singularity. Could
Benjamin’s dictum be relevant to a non-Western culture like India, which
traditionally shared neither the European reverence for an artistic genius
nor for the work of art produced by him? Yet if we concentrate solely on

Benjamin’s view of an original work of art, we would miss his other

insight: his insistence that mechanical reproduction as part of a wider
print culture, was an essential facet of modernity. It is this aspect, the
age of mechanical ’reproduceability’, that I now focus on for its relevance
to colonial India (Benjamin 1970).

III
Uses of visual imagery in pre-colonial India
To put it in a nutshell, mechanical reproduction, which arrived in India
as part of nascent modernity, was at the heart of an information revolution.

Replications on a mass scale were able to transmit pictorial information

to a widely dispersed population throughout India as never before. In
order to understand the scale and significance of this revolution, we need
to compare it with the situation in pre-colonial India. As we have noted
at the outset, there have been many information revolutions throughout
history. Art or the visual image has often been the vehicle of such revo-
lutions, deployed by great religions or powerful empires to communicate
with and hold together large and often disparate populations, offering
them a clearly articulated ideology and a cultural cohesion. Let me illustrate
with an example from ancient Indian art, for Indian sacred art has been a
major carrier of cultural information. In an age of limited literacy, the
precepts of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism were transmitted to their
devotees through sculptural reliefs on sacred monuments, such as the
Great Buddhist. Stupa at Sanchi, dating from the second century BCE.
Among these ’pedagogic’ reliefs, none is more striking than the famous
12
For a fuller account of the rise of comic magazines in India, see my Art and national-
ism (1994: Chapter 4).

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narrative panel based on the Vessantara jataka, which taught Buddhist

lay worshippers the spiritual significance 01 dane or giving. The ambitious
quality of the work, conceived and produced by a master artist, and its
prominent placing on the northern gateway, leave us in no doubt that the
monastic organisation at Sanchi wished to emphasise the central import-
ance of the doctrine of dana to the lay community. The visual impact of
this panel on the faithful comes across undiminished despite the gap of
many centuries (Marshall and Foucher n.d.; Mitter 2001: 15-17).
A very different use of the visual medium was made in the Mughal
court in the 16th century to convey a very different message. In a Mughal
history painting in the Akbarnama, entitled ’Akbar brings the elephant
Hawai under control as courtiers anxiously watch him’, produced by
Basawan and Chatar during the reign of Akbar (1556-1603), the emperor
is shown trying to bring an unruly elephant to order with a combination
of will power, physical prowess and a large dose of charisma. The repre-
sentation of the sovereign as the chief actor in this historical spectacle is
a subtle and powerful use of pictorial imagery for the purposes of political

legitimisation (Mitter 2001: 117-21). However, access to such visual

material was confined mainly to the courtiers and the high officials of
the realm. I choose these two cases to suggest the limited and regional
nature of the visual information transmitted in pre-colonial India. There
were also folk and popular art forms in India but their impact was also
limited to regions.
So what was different about the transmission of visual information
during the colonial period? As Walter Benjamin reminds us, in ’principle
a work of art has always been reproducible .... Mechanical reproduction

of a work of art, however, represents something new’ (Benjamin 1970:

220). In many ways the most interesting aspect of ’the age of mechanical
reproduction’ in India is the great ubiquity of popular prints, an essen-
tially colonial-urban art form. Second, in the context of Hindu India,
Benjamin’s characterisation of the relationship between the ’cult value’
and ’exhibition value’ of art objects is relevant. The mechanical repro-
ductions of Hindu deities usher in entirely new functions of these images
(ibid.: 224-28) not previously envisaged in the case of temple sculptures
or painted icons in temples (as for instance at Nathdvara in Rajasthan),

which were earlier confined to their regions in temples, pilgrim sites or

homes as sacred icons, but not widely sold as commodities. Another im-
portant aspect of this is the mobility of these cult images: devotees do
not now need to visit temples in order to view (darshan) them (see Jain,
this volume). Their circulation right across the subcontinent helped to

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spread illusionist art inspired by Western naturalism at all levels of Indian

society. As a form of mass communication, they equally affected the
elite and the ordinary people, cutting across classes, communities and
regions (Mitter 1994; Guha-Thakurta 1988). The great poet Rabindranath
Tagore, for instance, attests in his memoirs to the vogue for reproductions
in the Bengali Bhadralok household: ’In my childhood, when Ravi
Varma’s age arrived in Bengal, reproductions of European paintings on
the walls were promptly replaced with oleographs of his works’
(Chaudhury 1973: 81).

IV
Origins of printmaking in India
I offer here a reconstruction of the world of print culture in late 19th-
century India: the origins of printmaking in India; the names of artists
and printing firms; the chronology of print production and its main pro-
duction centres. Finally, an analysis of the subject matter and iconography
of popular prints may offer us some insights into the kind of demand to
which these prints catered.l3 In traditional India, replication on a large
scale was associated with block-printed textiles of Gujarat, exported
around the globe. The Indian technique of miniature painting going back
to the Mughal period also made use of a replication process but on a
small scale. As the foundation for a painting, a stencilled drawing was
prepared which was then transferred onto the paper. By the 19th century,
Ragamala paintings were multiplied by this method, with finishing
touches given individually by artists. There was a demand for these mini-
atures among merchants and other middle income groups (Robinson
1969; Irwin and Hall 1971 ). Processes of mechanical reproduction, such
as wood and metal engravings, were the first to arrive in India along
with European painting and sculpture. A later innovation, lithography,
improved upon engravings by providing the subtle gradations of shading
13
Works by me (1992), Guha-Thakurta (1988, 1992) and Jyotindra Jain (1999) have
already offered us histories of print culture. Nonetheless, not a great deal of the history
of the Poona Chitrashala Press and other presses is known. The analysis that follows is
based in the Wellcome Library Iconographic Collections, whose extent and range enabled
me to reconstruct more fully the milieu of the late 19th century Indian printmaker, particu-

larly in Maharashtra. This is a pioneering survey which will need to be supplemented,

revised and modified as more research is done on the topic. I have in the following
pages given the catalogue numbers of the prints mentioned, which I hope will be helpful
to those wishing to use the Collection.

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essential for emulating illusionist art. However, its limitation was its
monochrome quality, even though printmakers sought to overcome this
by hand-painting the prints in watercolours. The situation changed dra-
matically when colour lithographs made their appearance. Chromo-
lithographs not only offered bright colours but were able to render light
and shade more effectively. Finally, a variant of chromolithography
known as oleography, which sought to recreate the effect of oil painting,
became the most popular print form in colonial India.l4
Some of the earliest mechanically-replicated images were wood-block
engravings accompanying texts, produced by artisans in Bengal in the
1830s, and line engravings produced in north India around 1840s, based
on Islamic subjects. 15 Mechanically-reproduced prints began to be turned
out in large numbers from the second half of the 19th century in urban
centres: Bombay and Pune followed the Raj capital, Calcutta, the three
of them emerging as the main centres whose products enjoyed an India-
wide circulation. In Calcutta the background to the popularity of prints
was the urban demand for inexpensive pictures of Hindu gods and god-
desses. Village scroll painters (patua) were the first to respond to the de-
mand with alacrity, emigrating to Calcutta (Kolkata) as that city became
the pivot of British power. They adapted their skills to provide cheap
pictures for the pilgrims to the temple of the goddess Kali in Kalighat on
the outskirts of Calcutta. As the volume of demand swelled, the master
artists employed women to colour the pictures on a large scale. Kalighat
artists, who were exposed to Western prints circulating in Calcutta, created
a new hybrid iconography for Hindu deities with Western illusionist de-
vices. Sensing the changing social priorities, they introduced secular
subjects, which included satirical portrayals of the nouveaux riches
Calcutta babus, and a sensational trial involving adultery, corruption
and murder (Jain 1999; Archer 1953; Konizkova 1975).

14
There different printmaking techniques. The earliest known is the woodcut
are

technique (and the related technique of wood-engraving), which consists of images cut
in wood with metal tools. Ink is poured on the image and then multiple impressions are
made, generally on paper. Engraving consists of images cut with steel tools (burin),
generally onto a copperplate; special ink is then poured into the incised parts. Afterwards,
multiple impressions are made on paper by a press for printing engravings. Lithography,
or multiple prints made from designs incised on plain-surfaced stone, is based on chem-

icals that create ink-accepting and ink-rejecting areas. The technique was invented in
the 1790s by J.N.F. Alcis Senefelder, but actual commercial and artistic lithography
took off from the 1850s. The oleograph was a specialist lithograph that sought to repro-
duce the appearance of oil painting.
15Wellcome Iconographic Collection catalogue nos 46953 and 46955 on Islamic
calligraphy and a durbar scene(?).

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14 /

Kalighat scroll painters (patua) chose to multiply images by hand in

order to cater to the urban demand (Figure 1). Other artisans in Calcutta,
who had assisted European artists in producing mechanically-replicated
images, saw the potentials of print technology for producing pictures on
a large scale. The first prints were woodcuts, followed by metal en-

gravings, produced in the Chitpur region of central Calcutta. Apart from

independent prints, Chitpur engravers also illustrated books published
by the neighbouring Bat-tala presses. We know the names of some of the
artisans who signed their works: Rupchand Roy, Kartic Chandra Basak,
Nrityalal Datta and Gobinda Chandra Roy. The printmakers swiftly ap-
propriated the new iconography and subject matter readily available in
Kalighat paintings (Paul 1983). For instance, one of the interesting topics
treated by them was Durga Puja, an annual cultural event celebrated
with great pomp by the leading Bhadralok families, which reflected the
growing importance of this seasonal worship of the goddess in Calcutta.
One of the limitations of woodcuts and metal engravings, we have
seen, was their inability to capture the tonal quality of an illusionist picture
that was offered by lithography. Although European artists had introduced
lithography in India as early as 1821, it did not catch on among Indian

Figure 1: Krishna Lila (Krishna dancing with Gopinis), coloured woodcut by Kartik
Chandra Basak. (From A. Paul, Woodcut prints of nineteenth century Calcutta,
Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1983, p. 56, by courtesy of Seagull Books.)

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 15

artisans until the 1870s. The adoption of this process went hand in hand
with the deeper penetration of illusionist painting in popular con-
sciousness, which in turn gave rise to a larger market. The Royal Litho-
graphic Press was one among a number of early Bengali presses.’6 A
typical example of an artisan adopting the new process is Kristo Hurry
Doss, who illustrated S.M. Tagore’s treatise on Indian classical music,
Six principal ragas with a view of Hindu music, in 1877 (Mitter 1994:
14-17). Undated black-and-white prints from other parts of India, in the
collection of the Wellcome Institute in London, may well belong to the
same period (Figure 2).1’
v
Calcutta Art Studio and Poona C’hitrashala Press

The turning point in the production of popular prints was the 1880s,
when chromolithographs overtook earlier processes. As I mentioned,
their bright and large range of colours, strong clean lines, subtle shading
and high finish were a dramatic improvement on black-and-white litho-
graphs. Indigenous entrepreneurs were probably spurred on by foreign
competition to adopt the new process. The lure of huge profits had at-
tracted German entrepreneurs to India who began flooding the market
with popular prints of European subjects, not least erotic ones. The in-
scription on the reverse of a chromolithograph from Maharashtra suggests
this atmosphere of competition: ’German print to compare with native-
Shapoorji Dorabji [,] Picture Frame Maker’ . 18 Picture frame makers, such
as Dorabji, who acted as agents for printmakers, kept abreast of the com-

petition in popular prints. This was when three urban areas, Calcutta in
Bengal, and Poona and Bombay in Maharashtra, emerged as the
main centres of production. The printmaker’s eye on the India-wide
market is suggested by the multilingual captions provided for the
chromolithographs.

16
Information provided by the present owners of the Calcutta Art Studio Press.
17
Wellcome catalogue no. 45548 is a transfer lithograph of a Tanjore religious paint-
ing ; no. 45550, ’Raja on horseback’, in block print process, is from Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
However, no. 45551 of a Ras Lila scene illustrating Prem sagar, the prose version of the
Bhagavata purana by Lallulal, seems to be stylistically of a later date, probably 20th
century. (I am grateful to Philip Lutgendorf for the information on Lallulal.)
18
Wellcome catalogue no. 45697.

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16

Figure 2:Raga Panchama, lithograph by Kristo Hurry Doss. (From S.M. Tagore, Six
principal ragas, Calcutta Central Press Company, Calcutta, 1877.)

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 17

In Bengal, the Calcutta Art Studio, set up in 1878 by five former stu-
dents of the Government Art School-Annada Bagchi, Nabakumar
Biswas, Phanibhusan Sen, Krishna Chandra Pal and Jagannath Mukho-
padhaya-dominated the production of popular lithographs. Bagchi and
his partners owed their success to their art school training, which included
a competence in Western illusionist art as well as the graphic arts. This
was a decided advantage over other printmakers. The pictorial language
of their rival, such as the Chorbagan Art Studio in Lower Chitpur Road,
owned by the artist P.C. Biswas, remained more conventional, based on
the Hindu iconography of Bengal prevalent before the advent of Western
- naturalism. The Studio started with monochrome lithographic portraits
of eminent Bengalis, landscapes and book illustrations, but their most
successful ventures were chromolithographs based on Hindu epics and
mythology. The process of naturalism had commenced with Kalighat,
but the Calcutta Art Studio iconography based on European academic
art triumphantly replaced previous ones. Seeking inspiration for Hindu
gods in muscular Greek figures rather than in the slender Bengali male,
these prints became object lessons in artistic anatomy learned at the
art school. Similarly, Classical drapery for goddesses and epic heroines
often served as a surrogate for the Bengal sari (Mitter 1994: 173-78)
(Figure 3).
The colourful chromolithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio specialised
in the Bengali versions of Hindu gods and goddesses and religious stories
(Figure 4). Among its prints, a set of 10 Tantric images of the Goddess,
the 10 mahavidyas, which included the enigmatic Chinnamasta, treated
a popular subject. In the latter, the goddess holds in her hand her own
severed head as blood gushes out of her neck. The image had a particular
resonance in Bengal, where Tantric practices were part of the cultural

fabric, while the mother goddess was enshrined in Hindu nationalist ideo-
logy from the late 19th century through Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s
political novel, Ananda Math. During the colonial period, the greatest
sacrifice to the mother was for men to remain celibate until the land was
rid of the foreign rulers. This was the underlying idea behind the secret
revolutionary societies in early 20th century Bengal, notably Aurobindo
Ghosh’s Bhawani Mandir (Chatterji 1992; Hobsbawm 1965; Chirol 1910).
A print of the goddess Kali, advertising Swadeshi cigarettes, recasts trad-
itional iconography in the light of revolutionary Hindu ideology (Mitter
1994: 178 and Plate XII; Pinney 1999). Other icons published by the
Studio included the Bengali favourite, the goddess Annapuma, the divine
nurturing mother and bestower of prosperity; Siva and his family; Krishna

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18

Figure 3: Sri Sri Mahadev (Siva), chromolithograph, Calcutta Art Studio

(courtesy present owners).

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 19

Figure 4: Chinnamasta (one of the Ten Tantric Mahavidyas), chromolithograph,

Calcutta Art Studio (courtesy present owners).

and Radha and stories from the Bhagavatpyrana. The lush background
to the icon of Lakshmi and Vishnu holding court, sports elaborate pillars
in the vein of Orientalist paintings. In the 1870s, the Calcutta Art Studio
also illustrated a particularly popular tale in Bengal: the faithful Savitri,
whose steadfast loyalty to her husband enables her to bring him back
from the realm of Yama, the god of the dead. The image of Sati or the
steadfastly loyal wife came to stand in nationalist thought for perennial
Hindu values.
Elsewhere I have discussed the evolution of history painting in India
and its uses in constructing national identity.l9 Bengal was an early home
of Swadeshi cultural nationalism, led by Rabindranath Tagore, E.B.
Havell, Sister Nivedita, Annie Besant and Ananda Coomaraswamy, which
contributed the rise of a powerful Hindu ideology (Mitter 1994). A series
of Calcutta Art Studio black-and-white lithographs, titled ’Hindu Sacred
Pictures’, are of particular interest to us in this context. They are the
19
See my Art and nationalism in colonial India (1994), where I discuss this in some
detail. Since working on that book, I have studied in greater detail the Wellcome Institute
prints, which illustrate and supplement my main arguments.

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20 /

’print’ equivalents of history painting but are independent creations rather

than reproductions of existing academic paintings. These lithographs
recreate the past by means of elaborate illusionist compositions illus-
trating favourite scenes from the epics. The scenes inspired by the
Ramayana included: Rama breaking Siva’s bow, and Rama, Lakshmana
and Sita in the forest deceived by the magic deer. The choice of Sakuntala
from the Mahabharata in the ’Hindu Sacred Pictures’ series is interesting.
Although she is best known from Kalidasa’s secular classic, she is in-
cluded among the sacred images of Hinduism by the Calcutta Art Studio.
The growing power of Swadeshi ideology is also evident in the choice
of a particular historical scene: the Rajput queen Padmini mounts the
funeral pyre rather than enter the harem of the conquering Muslim Sultan,
Alauddin Khilji. The stories of resistance to Muslim rule by the Rajputs
became a nationalist surrogate for resistance to British rule (Figure 5). 20
By the 1880s-90s, Bombay and Pune emerge as the two centres for
the production of lithography on the west coast. In general, the print-
makers specialised in conventional pre-naturalist icons of deities, which
were obviously much in demand. A number of presses had sprung up in
the region: the Chitra Prakash Press, Chitta Priya(?) Prakash Press, the
Bombay City Press, Bombay New Press and above all, the Poona Chitra-
shala Press. We know that two artists, Ganpat Panduranga Kelasakana
and Jayarama Dhiudasheta Musuraka, who produced coloured transfer
lithographs, were retained by the Bombay City Press. We also know of
Anand Rao Raghunath, probably an independent printmaker, who issued
a transfer print of the goddess Mahalakshmi in 1897. 21
The Poona Chitrashala Press, founded by V.K. Chiplonkar, was the
most successful, and its chromolithographs the best known in the region
(Heimsath 1964: 108; Pinney 1997: 836). The Press occasionally released
genre scenes, such as ’Woman on a Cushion’, but sacred icons dominated
its output. Chapakhanyamta Chapeyle, an artist at the Press, had a pen-
chant for combing European prints for inspiration. The background to
Vishnu as ’Narasimha’ consists of a garden path lined with flower pots
emanating from an Italian building (Mitter 1994: 174, and Figure 113),
while the setting for Radha and Krishna embracing in open air (1882)
appears to be a South German countryside (Figure 6).22 An elaborate

20
These prints belong to the Calcutta Art Studio. Sakuntala, based on Kalidasa’s
classic play, was one of the major themes developed by Ravi Varma both in his history
paintings and in his oleographs. The romanticisation of Rajput valour faced with Muslim
conquest, inspired by James Tod, became an ingredient of Hindu nationalism.
21
My description is based on an analysis of the holdings of the Wellcome Collection.
22
See Wellcome no. 45065.

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 / 21

Figure 5: Sarojini (or Padmini, the Rajput queen committing self-immolation),

chromolithograph, Calcutta Art Studio ((courtesy present owners).

architectural backdrop is used in a chromolithograph ’The gopis com-

plaining to Yasoda, Krishna’s mother, about his pranks’ .21 There is indeed
an abundance of Krishna themes: Krishna combing Radha’s hair; Krishna

playing his flute to Radha (1897); Krishna playing flute to gopis; Yashoda,
Krishna’s foster mother, giving her breast to infant Krishna; Yashoda,
milking a cow; and Krishna stealing the gopis’ clothes. More conventional
pre-naturalistic iconic arrangements of Vishnu and Laksmi on the throne
with Garuda (1883), Vishnu resting on the ocean, and a Maharashtran
version of Vishnu with Hanuman and Garuda, drawn by the artist Subra-
mani( ?), also exist.24 Themes dealing with Siva’s family include Durga
slaying the Buffalo Demon by Dholkar Ali (1883); Siva on Nandi helping
Parvati to mount; a Bhil huntress approaching Siva; the Bhasmasura
legend; and Siva spoiling Daksha’s sacrifice. Other gods, notably Ganesha
with his wives and the Maratha favourite, Dattatraya, are also depicted.21

23
Wellcome no. 45052.
24
See for instance, Wellcome nos 44931, 45664 and 45693.
25
Wellcome no. 45048.

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22/

Figure 6: Radha and Krishna embrace in the

countryside, chromolithograph, Poona
Chitrashala Press, 1882 (courtesy Wellcome
.

Library).

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 23

However, as with the Calcutta Art Studio, it is the prints of India’s

past in the vein of history painting, inspired by the epics Ramayan and
Mahabharata, that are the most interesting products of the Poona Chitra-
shala Press. The publication of these prints in Pune in the late 19th century
coincided with the powerful Hindu nationalist movement in Maharashtra
led by the charismatic Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who himself was influenced
by these prints (Pinney 1997: 836; Keer 1959; Reisner and Goldberg
1966). Pune, which was the centre of political unrest in Maharashtra,
was also the former capital of the Peshwas, ministers to the great Maratha

king Shivaji, and the last Maratha rulers to resist British expansion. In
1888, the press issued two hand-tinted lithographs celebrating the
Peshwas: Narain Rao (1755-73), and Dhakate Bajirao Saheb (1774-
1851), the last independent Peshwa (Figure 7). Similarly politically motiv-
ated was the Poona Chitrashala Press’s prints of the Maratha ruler, Malhar
Rao Holkar and of his widowed daughter-in-law, Ahalyabai, consciously
invoking the period of Maratha independence. 16
In this context, a series of black-and-white lithographs, originating
in Pune and Bombay in 1880s-90s, are particularly interesting for their
aggressive nationalist themes. They are sometimes in pairs, black line
drawings on yellowish paper. Produced at a time when chromolitho-
graphs had captured the market and illusionist art was on the ascendant,
their archaic two-dimensional style, without a trace of illusionism, and
their archaic iconography are interesting. One possible explanation
for their co-existence with the more accomplished but costly chromo-
lithographs is that the destination of these prints was the lower end of
the market. Or was it a conscious decision on the part of the printmakers
to eschew ’foreign’ illusionism in a bid for the Hindu nationalist market?
The ’terrorist’ D. Chapekar, hanged for the murder of the plague commis-
sioner Rand in the late 19th century, belonged to this explosive environ-
ment in Pune (Chapekar 1964).
While these monochrome prints deal with religion, they single out
heroic themes, recalling the Maratha military tradition (Figure 8). The
printmakers, Bhagvan Singh and Ananda Singh, chose two scenes of
heroism from the Mahabharata: Queen Pramila’s horse sacrifice, a ritual
performed by Kshatriyas, the ancient warrior caste; and the great battle
scene with the Kshatriya hero, Arjuna. These prints also depict the god
Siva as Khandoba, or his incarnation as a Maratha warrior on horseback.
In a print published by the artist, Kusha Buvra Ramji from the Bombay

26
Wellcome nos 45545, 45653, 45682.

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24

Figure 7: Narain Rao Peshwa with a

Manservant, coloured lithograph, Poona
Chitrashala Press, 1888 (courtesy Wellcome
Library).

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 25

Figure 8: Khandoba (Siva) as mantri avatar with a female figure spearing the demon
Malla Daitya,transfer lithograph by Kusha Buvra Ramji, Bombay New Press, 1890
(courtesy Wellcome Library).

New Press in 1890, the god is portrayed as the Mantri Avatar. (Does this
incarnation of a king’s minister refer to the Peshwas, ministers to the
Maratha hero, Shivaji?). 27
Let me now recapitulate some of the main points with regard to the
rise of popular prints. The decades 1880s-1900s were the key period in
the development of popular prints dominated by chromolithography,
mainly in the two provinces of Bengal and Maharashtra. Although the
main demand was for illusionist religious icons, there were significant
developments. Hindu religious themes became enmeshed in exhuming
the nation’s past, a phenomenon seen both in painting and in popular
prints. It is interesting to observe that Maharashtra and Bengal, the centres
for the development of mechanically-reproduced prints, were also the
two flashpoints of early revolutionary Hindu nationalism (Chirol 1910).
Second, many of the prints, as we have seen, addressed political issues, al-
beit in the language of religion
(Pinney 1997). Third, these mechanically-
reproduced prints were strikingly different from European prints, which

27
Wellcome nos 45537, 45541, 45542.

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26 /

were generally reproductions of original masterpieces by famous artists.

Unlike in the West, in Indian society, there was no special ’aura’ attached
to an ’original’ work of art produced by an artistic genius, even though
colonial culture had wrought some changes in India. Hence an original
painting was often no more important than the mechanically-reproduced
print. The Indian prints were ’autonomous’ products intended for the
popular market. Many of these prints were based on what we may term
’prototypes’, templates, or what John Frow calls ’blueprints’, intended
for mass replication (Frow n.d.). The printmakers’ eye was on their
commercial value, and they were quite indifferent to the originality of
these images, drawn on the lithographic stone, often conveniently appro-
priating them from a wide variety of sources. All they had in mind was
how these lithographs could capture the vastly expanding market for
cheap prints.

VI
Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press

Had I ended here, the story would have had a certain symmetry and sim-
plicity. Yet the paradox of the Indian colonial situation is that the best
loved mass-produced prints from this period were in fact reproductions
of famous paintings, thereby reinforcing Benjamin’s dictum about the
’original’ and its ’copy’. They were the work of Ravi Varma (1846-
1906), the man who transformed the whole print culture by introducing
a striking illusionist iconography for religious themes and insisting on
the high quality of his reproductions. While all colonial printmakers as-
pired to naturalism, his were the most convincing and complex. Varma
entered the market in order to make his paintings accessible to the people.
These paintings, as we know, had imagined the nation’s past. In 1894 he
set up the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press in Lonavla near
Bombay (Mumbai), from where with the help of a German technical as-
sistant, he issued prints not only of nationalist leaders and figures from
Hindu mythology but, more importantly, reproductions of his own mytho-
logical paintings. He engaged agents in Bombay, where he spent most
of the working year, to market his prints: Ananta Shivaji Desai in
Motibazar and A.K. Joshi on Kalbadevi Road. Varma’s oleographs were
of a much better standard than those of his rivals and sought to bring out
the quality of his oil paintings. His treatment of epic themes gave evidence
of sound knowledge (Figure 9). For instance, when Varma chose the
theme of Sakuntala, he developed a consistent series that covered all the

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 27

major scenes from Kalidasa’s great play. Ravi Varma’s prints created
modem Hindu religious icons with an India-wide circulation, thus contrib-
uting to the ’imagined community’, the emergent nation. No Indian artist
has ever matched his reputation, an artist who inspired the first films
based on epics in India and who continued to inspire calendar, film and
other forms of popular art (Mitter 1994: 208-15; see also Pinney, this
volume).
The Renaissance hierarchy of the arts and the separation of elite artists
and artisans made less sense in pre-colonial India, where decorative arts
were not viewed as inferior to painting and sculpture (Mitter 1994: Part

Two; Beach and Koch 1997).28 Ravi Varma belonged to the new gener-
ation of ’gentlemen artists’ who saw themselves as very different from
the traditional artists of low status who often depended on court patronage.
Yet this separation between artists and artisans broke down with regard
to mechanically-reproduced prints. The Bengali painter, Bamapada
Bandopadhaya, had his paintings reproduced in Germany to be circulated
in India in competition with the local printmakers (Mitter 1994: 177).
Ravi Varma actively competed with artisans in this lucrative business,
seeking to overturn the monopoly of print concerns like the Poona Chitra-
shala Press. Here I would like to suggest an interesting contradiction in
the colonial constructions of art history. No one was more conscious
than Ravi Varma of the value of original masterpieces produced by a
genius, an essential expression of artistic individualism. Yet, by turning
his paintings into prints for mass consumption, he was undermining the
very ’aura’ of his own works. Benjamin speaks of the ’universal equality
of things’ in connection with mass prints; it is this phenomenon that
seriously challenged Ravi Varma’s artistic reputation and the authenticity
of his work (Benjamin 1970: 225). Widespread piracy of his works under-
mined further their claims to authenticity. He failed in his attempts to
prevent plagiarism of his works, even with the help of legislation. In
fact, not only his works, but a large number of prints by other presses
bore copyright warnings with little or no effect. Varma had to sell off his
lithographic firm after disastrous losses. The press continued to produce
prints under his name while many others simply appropriated his name
to market their products (Mitter 1994: 214-15).

28
In Western Europe from the Renaissance onwards there was a growing tendency to
separate sculpture and painting from the other arts, though earlier on even Michelangelo
had to assert that he was not a mere sculptor but an intellectual. However, the only
reputed artist who also did metalwork was Benvenuto Cellini, but his salt cellar, for
instance, was not treated in the same way as his bronze sculptures.

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28

Figure 9: Rama breaking Siva’s

bow, chromolithograph by Ravi
Fine Art Lithographic Press
Varma, Ravi Varma
(courtesy
Wellcome Library).

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 29

After Varma’s death, his agent Desai won the right to continue to repro-
duce Varma’s paintings. I have chosen here one of the prints issued by
Desai, ’The Holy Cow personified as World Mother with Sanskrit verses
inscribed on her body’, which is interesting for several reasons (Colour
Plate 1).29 First of all, its rather flat style does not bear any resemblance
to Varma’s work, and it was probably produced after the artist’s death.
Second, the theme is politically significant in view of the growing Hindu
nationalist agitations in favour of cow protection, an indirect attack on
the Muslim diet of beef. As Pinney shows, ’in numerous lithographs the
cow becomes the proto-nation, a space which embodies a Hindu cos-

mology .... One can see in the history of these images a trajectory that
parallels the increasingly communalising nature of the agitation.’30 The
cow’s body is divided into sections containing holy men, deities, and the
elements. A farmer standing below the cow is giving milk to Hindus,
Parsis and Englishmen, a gesture that underlines its nourishing character
for all communities except the Muslim. Varma failed to profit from his
oleographs which flooded the market and continued to grow in popularity.
Because of widespread piracy, their authorship was reduced to anonymity.
The prints ultimately attained the status of ’reproductions without origin-
als’, as gradually the original history paintings of Ravi Varma, produced
for the aristocracy, faded from national memory.&dquo;
So what are the characteristics of the iconic society which emerged
during the colonial period as an integral part of modernity?32 Its chief
characteristics are the endless proliferation, replication and reproduction
of visual images, their ubiquity and accessibility, a product of modem
technology, associated with the advent of the machine. The iconic society
in Indian created a new visual culture, which transcended the local and
the regional. Rapid means of transport conferred an unprecedented mobil-
ity to sacred images; henceforth devotees could acquire them locally
29
Wellcome no. 45751. As Hindu nationalism started gathering force from the late
19th century, it took agitation against cow slaughter as one plank of its anti-Muslim
agenda, causing periodic riots.
30
See Pinney (1997: 841-44), who has an extensive discussion on this. Interestingly
he has an illustration that includes a Muslim receiving nourishment from the nation-
cow (see also Uberoi, this volume).
31
Varma’s prints have had an astonishing longevity as the iconography created by
him reappears endlessly in calendars, prints, posters and films. Yet, the history paintings,
which inspired many of his oleographs and which Varma executed for the courts of
Baroda and Mysore, were hardly known in India until recently. I recall the difficulty I
had when I tried to track them down for my research on art and nationalism in India.
32
See also Mitter (1994: especially Chapter 4).

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30 /

and no longer needed to travel distances to have a glimpse of them (see

Jain, this volume). Above all, the particular visual language developed
by the printmakers, inspired by European naturalism, offered a new sense
of cultural unity that contributed to the construction of national identity.
There were of course limitations to such a ’ubiquitous’ visual culture.
The ’imagined community’ created by print culture, which expressed
the centralising tendency of elite nationalism, was considerably frag-
mented and fissured, as alternative popular forms of visual culture proved
resistant to its hegemonic forms. Nonetheless, this new iconic society,
affecting both the elite and the people, had come to stay as an essential
aspect of modernity. Finally, as a coda, we might remind ourselves of
one of the central problems of an iconic society driven by the processes
of mechanical reproduction: the complex relationship between an original
work of art and its endless reproduction. As poignantly demonstrated by
the case of Ravi Varma, while he had enormous success in disseminating
his paintings through oleographs, their massive replication inevitably
led to the destruction of their aura as well as his reputation.

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