Gods at the Gate of Modernity — Religious Arts in Colonial Calcutta
A Metropolitan Museum lecture on how 19th-century Calcutta artisans used chromolithography to make Hindu devotional imagery accessible across India.
Why we picked this
How mass reproduction turned the gods into popular imagery — the story of Indian chromolithography is really a story about the democratization of the sacred.
In 19th-century Calcutta, creative professionals working in a cosmopolitan colonial hub employed new mechanical reproduction techniques to make Hindu deities more accessible and affordable. They developed the chromolithographic religious print — a popular devotional format that would become the dominant visual vocabulary of 20th-century India.
This Met lecture examines how an emerging print industry transformed religious art from elite patronage objects into household items, and how that transformation shaped the visual culture of an entire subcontinent. A fascinating case study in what happens when technology meets the sacred.