Kalighat Painting and the Changing Notions of Nationalism: A Case Study of the Folk Painters of 19th Century Calcutta

Abstract

This research paper will seek to understand the multiple experiences of the emerging ideas of India through the medium of subaltern paintings. It primarily seeks to focus on the Kalighat and Tribal Paintings of Colonial Bengal. The depiction of the ‘Nation’ and its very manifestations in painting is a prominent feature of Nationalist agenda during those days. However, as it turned out , there are many alternative ways of imagining a nation as can be discerned from the works of the painters from these ‘marginalized’ communities.

Secondly, as this research paper will show, expanding on the conceptual category of inner domain of Partha Chatterjee , it will argue that through the world of paintings and its multifaceted themes : it became a way by which these marginalized sections articulated their versions of ‘Nationhood’ or ridiculed those ‘nationalist models’ of  middle class intelligentsia.

Nationalist discourse therefore suffered from the tension between the National interest on the one hand, and the desperateness of various community class caste interests on the other hand.

The paper would be working with both the primary and secondary sources. By linking the idea of visual representation via the medium of paintings to the broader idea of nation making, it would argue that nation making project would always remain a contested idea. Paintings being one such medium where competing ideologies of their ‘imagined nationhood’ were full manifest, both in its rigour and vibrancy.