GODS IN LIVING COLOR: 19TH-CENTURY DEVOTIONAL LITHOGRAPHS FROM CALCUTTA

For over two thousand years, artists in the Indian Subcontinent have depicted Hindu deities through a wide range of media, frequently innovating when new techniques and materials became available or in response to social or religious changes. One such moment occurred during the 19th century in the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), when new technologies of reproduction and systems of representation brought by the British Raj—and its allied systems of commerce and culture—opened up new representational possibilities. This lecture will address what happened when lithography and other depictive tools entered a local visual ecosystem already rich with indigenous forms of painted and printed devotional imagery. The new forms of sacred and mythological imagery that Bengali artists created during this moment of transformation were, until recently, mostly excluded from the art historical canon. Celebrating and exploring them not only broadens our view of the history of Indian art and religion but also helps us to understand the ever-expanding universe of sacred images that we see in home, shop and office shrines around the globe today.

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