Bazaar painting from the Kalighat temple market in nineteenth-century Calcutta: watercolour on mill-made paper, one long sweep of the brush for the contour, limbs shaded dark at the edge and light in the middle, and a lot of empty ground. Deities for pilgrims, and satire of the new-rich babu.
Painter families worked assembly-line fast for a market crowd, which produced the economy of the style. The satirical pictures, the dandy with his oiled hair and the cat with the stolen prawn, are the easiest idiom to borrow. German and Bombay lithographs killed the trade by about 1930.
The paper and the cat are cached. The figure is filled in bright flat colour, then each limb is edge-shaded by a graded fill that stays light in the centre, then one continuous brush contour is dragged round the whole silhouette. A rose, a glossy quiff and a lacquered cane make him a babu.
Secular satire only. No Kali, no deity imagery, which is the sacred half of the tradition.