Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya

ENGRAVED EPIC EARLY BENGAL PRINTS OF RAMAYANA

Curator's Note

This exhibition brings together a rare body of woodcut illustrations of the Ramayana, tracing a crucial moment in the visual and print culture of nineteenth-century Bengal. These images are not merely illustrations of an ancient epic; they are historical archives that reveal how technology, colonial encounter and craftsmanship converged in Calcutta to shape a new visual journey. The Bengali language assumed particular importance in this process. With the establishment of Bengali movable type in the late eighteenth century, most notably through the collaboration of Charles Wilkins and Panchanan Karmakar, printed Bengali texts became widely accessible for the first time. Manuscript culture gradually gave way to print, and with it emerged a growing readership eager for literature, religious texts, and visual material. The illustrated editions of the Ramayana displayed in this exhibition largely belong to the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when illustrated books enjoyed immense popularity in Bengal. Readers sought not only the sacred narrative but also visual representations that could bring its episodes vividly to life. Woodcut illustrations became the primary means of fulfilling this demand. This exhibition seeks to honour these works not simply as illustrations but as cultural artefacts that embody the intersection of devotion, craftsmanship, and modernity. Viewed together, the woodcuts narrate the epic journey of Rama while simultaneously telling another story of Bengal’s entry into the age of print and the visual imagination it unleashed.

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