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.