Babu in the Bazaar: Popular Culture, Satire and Social Identity in Kalighat Paintings

Abstract

Kalighat painting offers a distinctive visual record of the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the growth of nineteenth-century Kolkata. Produced within an urban environment shaped by pilgrimage, commerce and changing patterns of consumption, these paintings transformed familiar people, practices and social types into vivid images of everyday life. This paper places Kalighat painting at the centre of its enquiry, focusing particularly on the representation of the babu and the mannerisms through which his social identity was constructed. His dress, bodily gestures, posture, leisure practices, consumption habits and interactions with women and other social figures become important visual devices through which Kalighat artists observed and commented upon contemporary society. Rather than reading these characteristics simply as comic embellishments, the paper interprets them as a visual vocabulary of social commentary. The exaggerated gestures and behavioural traits associated with the babu reveal tensions surrounding class mobility, Westernisation, masculinity, morality and the performance of modernity in colonial Bengal. Kalighat’s accessible and commercially circulated images therefore emerge as more than popular souvenirs, they function as a form of visual satire that rendered social anxieties intelligible through humour, exaggeration and recognisable urban characters. By tracing the babu’s representation within this visual tradition and considering its reception and continuing presence in contemporary popular culture, the paper argues that Kalighat painting provides an important lens for understanding how nineteenth-century Bengali society negotiated changing identities and cultural values. The babu, through his mannerisms, ultimately becomes both the subject of the painting and a mirror of its society.