Chitra katha means "picture story", and India has been telling them for a very long time — on painted scrolls unrolled to a sung narration, and in temple relief. What this article is about is the narrower, harder-edged thing that happened in the nineteenth century, when cheap paper and cheap presses reached Calcutta and the picture story became a mass commodity: a sheet you bought outside a temple, or a book you bought in a market street, for a few paise.
Everything that follows is shaped by that price.
Kalighat: a painting finished in minutes
Around the Kali temple in south Calcutta, from about 1830, a community of patuas — hereditary scroll-painters who had migrated in from rural Bengal — gave up the long narrative scroll for a single-sheet souvenir painted at speed on cheap mill paper and sold to pilgrims.
The economics dictated the style completely. A sheet had to be finished in minutes, so the method reduced to almost nothing: one swelling brush contour laid down in a single pass, large unmodulated colour fields dropped inside it, a closed set of cheap pigments, and no background at all. A Kalighat rider sits on a horse that stands on nothing; more than half the sheet is unbroken flat area, much of it the bare paper the painter simply left as ground, and the silhouette carries the whole read.
Two other things about the school matter more than its technique. It was fast enough to be topical: alongside Krishna and Ganga, the Kalighat painters produced satires of the Calcutta babu and pictures of contemporary scandals, among them the Tarakeshwar affair and the imprisonment it ended in. And it was reductive in a way that modern Indian painting went back to: its line was admired by, and influenced, Jamini Roy.
Battala: the black line first
In the same decades, the printing district of Battala in north Calcutta was producing cheap illustrated books and single-sheet prints from relief woodblocks, on paper stock originally imported for missionary Bible printing.
Battala is where the order of operations comes from, and the order is the whole inheritance. The block carries the black line, and the black line carries the entire drawing — a Battala battle scene can hold forty figures with nearly half the sheet given over to printed line, and no soft modelling anywhere on it. Colour comes second, brushed on by hand in two or three thin flat inks that visibly overrun the line in some places and fall short of it in others. The page still reads, because the drawing was never in the colour. Where a European engraver would build a value with tone, the Battala cutter builds it with line density.
Museum albums sometimes bind an uncoloured page beside a hand-coloured one from the same shop, and a single scan of that opening photographs the entire system. Below, the left-hand sheet is an uncoloured woodcut of the giant bird Jatayu beneath a chariot canopy; the right-hand sheet is a hand-coloured Kurukshetra battle from the same album. They are two different pictures, not two states of one — what they show side by side is what the key plate carries on its own, and what a page from the same shop becomes once three flat hand-inks are dropped inside the line.
Shri Gobinda Chandra Roy, Jatayu Hinders Ravana's Chariot (uncoloured, 2003.111.a) and Battle Scene at Kurukshetra (hand-coloured, 2003.111.b), from a Kalighat album (c. 1890). The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.
Ravi Varma: the faces everyone now sees
Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) trained in European academic oil painting and turned it on Hindu mythological subjects. In 1894 he founded a lithographic press to sell those images as oleographs — chromolithographs varnished and textured to imitate oil paint — at a price that put a picture of a deity into an ordinary household.
His effect is hard to overstate and is not really disputed: Ravi Varma standardised what Hindu gods and epic heroes look like for the whole subcontinent, and every later Indian popular image works inside the template he set. Three full-length figures staged frontally across a shallow foreground, like actors at a proscenium, the whole sheet pitched in a warm chord of vermilion, saffron and emerald: that is his composition, and it is still the default. The chord is a property of the sheet rather than of the costume — in the Shakuntala oleograph reproduced further down this page, two of the three women wear vermilion and saffron-ochre, the third wears white, and the emerald is the landscape.
His rendering, though, is oil painting — modelled cheeks and noses, a sheen on the hair, blue-grey atmospheric hills, a graded sky. It is a continuous, open range of colour, built by blending rather than out of a fixed set of inks. A cheap comic page a century later could not print any of it, which is why the printed idiom kept his faces and left his surfaces behind.
The Calcutta bazaar presses
Between the oleograph and the comic album sit the Calcutta Art Studio on Bowbazar Street and the Chore Bagan Art Studio, whose chromolithographs of the 1880s and 90s are among the most widely circulated Indian images of their century. They are often assumed to be the step where Ravi Varma's figure got flattened into printable colour. They are not: their figures are modelled as thoroughly as his, by lithographic stipple instead of by varnished oil, and a Chore Bagan sheet measured beside the two Ravi Varma oleographs needed more distinct printed colours than either of them.
What they did flatten is the ground and the page. A Calcutta Art Studio sky is a mechanical even stipple with no gradient and no horizon — the lithographic answer to a sky, printed flat behind a tableau whose figures are not flat at all. And the studio's Ten Mahavidyas sheet divides ten narrative scenes into a five-by-two grid with thin black rules, pale gutters and a printed Bengali name label to each cell. That is a comics page, in India, eighty years before the album.
Amar Chitra Katha: the album, from 1967
Amar Chitra Katha — "immortal picture stories" — was founded in 1967 by Anant Pai at India Book House. The format settled quickly and barely changed for a generation: a 32-page saddle-stitched album, offset-printed in four colours on cheap coated stock, hand-lettered, sold at a newsstand price. Roughly 450 titles followed, including Dilip Kadam's 42-volume Mahabharata of 1985–91.
Its house illustrators — Ram Waeerkar, who drew the first title and set the house face, along with Pratap Mulick, Kadam, C. M. Vitankar, Souren Roy, Yusuf Bangalorewala and Chandrakant Rane — drew with an academic competence that Kalighat deliberately refused: correct anatomy, controlled line-weight hierarchy, cinematic staging. That last quality came from a fourth stream. Indrajal Comics, the Indian reprints of Phantom and Mandrake, was being published from the same building; the American adventure strip is where the panel grid, the yellow caption box, the upper-case balloon and the moving camera entered the Indian picture story.
The albums themselves remain in copyright, and no page of one appears on this site. Their public-domain ancestors, which do not, are what the pictures above show.
Where this leads
This article is the background reading. The public-domain half of that lineage — Kalighat paintings and Battala woodcuts from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ravi Varma Press oleographs, and Wellcome Collection bazaar lithographs — is what our Chitrakatha comic style is built and tested against, rule by rule: key line first, one flat per area, and a palette that closes. If you want to see how a tradition becomes a set of testable rules, read the method.
