Kalighat Patua (Bengal)

Kalighat painting is the 19th-century Bengali Patua tradition that became Asia's first mass-market vernacular painting. Between 1840 and 1930, village potua scroll-painters near the Kalighat Kali temple in Calcutta abandoned long pat scrolls and began producing single-sheet watercolors on machine-made British paper, sold cheap to pilgrims.

The visual language is uncompromising: one figure on blank cream ground, no background, a swift calligraphic contour-line loaded with cadmium-yellow, vermilion, indigo, emerald. Hindu gods sit alongside satirical caricatures of corrupt babus and Englishmen — both registers rendered in the same fluid three-minute hand.

卡利加特画派（Kalighat Patua）是十九世纪印度孟加拉加尔各答兴起的民间画派，被认为是亚洲第一个真正的"大众画"。约一百年间，加尔各答卡利女神庙旁的世袭画工放下了原本几米长的叙事卷轴，改用英国机制纸快速绘制单张水彩画，卖给前来朝圣的香客与城里的市井百姓。

这种画风毫不含糊：一张奶白纸上只画一两个人物，绝无背景，轮廓线一笔挥就、饱满流畅，色块平涂——明黄、朱红、靛蓝、翠绿，绝不叠色不分明暗。题材一半是迦梨女神、杜尔伽、克里希纳等神祇，一半是讽刺当时贪婪的"巴布"、英国老爷、交际花。神圣与市井并置，是它最迷人也最叛逆的地方。