Print making: Story and History - Contd...

Charles D'oyly an amateur painter, set-up his own lithography presses in Patna during 1828 to publish his own drawings. Between 1828 and 1830 he published five lithographic folios: Behar Amateur L Scrap Book (1828), The Feathered Game Of Hindostan 1828, birds drawn by Christopher Webb Smith), Indian Sports (1829), Oriental Ornithology (1829) and Costumes Of India (1830). The drawings and prints of the visiting foreign artists mentioned above are characterized by highly academic style and treatment reflecting naturalism.

However, the earliest example of printed illustration which proclaim the name of an Indian artist, could be seen in the Bengali book entitled Onoodah Mongal (Exhibiting the tales of Biddha and Soonder) of Bharat Chandra published by Ganga Kishore Bhattacheryee and printed at the press of Ferris and Company, Calcutta in 1816, which has two engraved illustrations bearing the declaration ‘Engraved by Ramachand Roy'. Out of six illustrations Ramchand Roy did two metal plate engravings while the rest are anonymous and printed in the relief process of wood cut. During this period we note that several illustrated printed books in Bengali language were published from Kolkata and the illustrations of woodcut, Indian artists executed wood engraving, etching and metal plate engraving.

With the growing demands for printed picture for books, almanacs, magazines, journals and single sheet display prints, several private art studios and lithographic presses flourished from 1870 onwards in different parts of India. From these presses lithographic and woodcut prints in high quality covering a wide variety of subjects from mythology to college education flooded the local market. Art and mass communication thus started in India by the growing demand and unprecedented popularity of those prints. Kolkata, Dacca, Bombay, Poona, Lahore, Lucknow, Delhi, Madras, Mysore, were the important cities from where popular prints were printed. 
           
The wood-cut prints of this period are generally monochromatic and stained in colour inks, while the lithographs are polychromatic. It is difficult to define their style to suggest one character, but keeping in view the traditional nature of Indian society at that time, they reveal a mixed stylistic expression based on the drawing of miniature and folk traditions on the one hand and the influence of western academism and realism on the other. Though naive in character they are often humorous and satirical. They show a keen awareness of the historical past and of the contemporary social milieu. One is fascinated by the wide range of themes and the simple- compact composition and direct reaction with the content of those prints. Bat-tala  a commercial name originating from a giant Banyan Tree in the Shovabazar and Chitpur area Calcutta where the printing and publication industry of Bengal began in the nineteenth century. Bat-tala is now the name of a police station in Kolkata. The printing and publication industry that developed in and around this banyan tree primarily met the demand of ordinary and semi-literate people. Numerous lanes and by-lanes around the banyan tree came to be generally known as bat-tala, and the books published from the place were derogatorily branded as bat-tala literature.
Though the rising literary gentry ridiculed it, bat-tala literature held its own in the publication industry of the country until the end of the nineteenth century. To cite a typical example, Bankimchandra Chattopadyaya in Durgeshnandini (1865) jocularly asked help from the goddess of bat-tala to enhance his creativity with practical wisdom, hinting that he wanted to make money out of writing. The bat-tala writers and publishers were realistic enough to publish only myths and legends, panchalis and panjikas because they were in great demand among uncritical readers. Until the mid-nineteenth century most books and pamphlets were published from bat-tala. But from the 1850s bat-tala began to lose its pre-eminence as a centre of printing and publication. Books of learning and higher taste began to be published outside the physical and intellectual orbit of bat-tala. Nevertheless, bat-tala retained its importance as a publication centre down to the end of the nineteenth century.

One of the major British policies towards India was to introduce their educational system. The purpose was to create new middle class elite who would, help them to infiltrate into the core of Indian mind, thought and culture. During this period the European educational system slowly replaced the Indian traditional. ‘Toll’ and ‘Madrasa’ education and the Indian social system started changing from the beginning of the nineteenth century. From this time onwards the altered approach allowed for the first time to set-up art colleges in India. In 1850 the art school in Madras was founded as private enterprise by Dr. Alexander Hunter, in 1854 The School of Industrial Arts was started in Kolkata. In 1857 the J. J. School of Arts (Elphinstone Institute) in Bombay. In 1866 Jeypore School of Industrial Art was started. In 1875 the Mayo School of Art in Lahore was founded.

The British attitude towards art education in the Indian context was to produce craft and design oriented artists who could fulfill the demand of Indian crafts for foreign countries. For this maximum' emphasis was given for copy work and craft teaching. The technique of printing was introduced in the teaching programme of those Schools from an early stage.  Durante was appointed as the Supervisor of the wood engraving section in the Madras School of Art. Mr. Wilkins Terry was in charge of the drawing and wood-engraving department of the J. J. School of Industrial Art. In the Calcutta School of Industrial Art, etching and lithographic section were under the supervision of T. E Fowler. Wood engraving and litho­graphy were introduced in the teaching programme in the Jeypore School of Industrial Art, the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and the Lucknow School of Industrial Art during 1870s. All the examples, cited above, fall under the aegis of commercial Graphics, and not Printmaking, as we know in the true sense today.
 Printmaking as a media for artistic expression, that we acknowledge today, began by the establishment of Kala Bhavan in 1919/21. Prior to the journey of creative prints in India from Kala Bhavan, the Tagore family of Kolkata established ‘Vichitra Club’ at their ancestral home of Jorasankho under the active leadership of Abanindranath Tagore. (For further details on the subject refer to Pranabranjan Ray’s article on ‘Printmaking in Santiniketan’ in the same publication).

Mukul Chandra Dey, a member of the club went to America in 1916 to learn the technique of etching under James Blinding Slone. He came back to India in 1917 and started doing etchings. Once again in 1920 he went to England and learnt the etching and engraving from Muorhead Bone and came back to India in 1926. He was the first Indian artist who went abroad to learn Graphic Art and established himself as full flagged print-maker. At the 'Vichitra Club' artist Gaganendranath Tagore took special interest in lithography. He set-up his own lithographic press in 1917 and published an album of his own social satirical pictures. Prior to Gaganendranath's idea of publishing Lithographic album based on his own drawings and paintings, Ravi Varma was the first Indian artist who deliberately explored the Graphic media to reach the masses. For this he set-up his own lithographic press known as 'Ravi Varma' Press at Ghatkapor in Bombay during the last part of the nineteenth century. From this press he published several glossy lithographic prints copied from his religious and secular paintings. It is to be retold that Ravi Varma and Gaganendranath's venture of publishing lithographic, prints was restricted under reproductive value. But none of them actually understood the idiom of lithography as a creative surface than a mere reproductive value.