ABSTRACT
A wide-eyed goddess with ten arms, bright yellow in color, flanked by her children on both sides, with a white horse-like lion at her feet lightly biting the arm of a sap-green colored “demon”—this was the traditional Durga murti (image) in the early twentieth century in Bengal. The traditional caste-based craftsmen of Bengal—Sutradhars (carpenters), Patuas (scroll-painters) and Kumbhakars (pot-makers)—modeled the goddess’s face in the shape of a betel leaf, her eyes like bamboo leaves, a hooked nose like the beak of a parrot, and a small red mouth. From the nineteenth century, however, there was a growing taste for Western objects and styles among the native elite. With colonial patronage and the institution of colonial art academies in Calcutta, traditional craftsmen received education in Western art (particularly naturalism) and some of them even traveled to parts of Europe to demonstrate their craft in the great colonial exhibitions and learn classical sculpture in European academies. The education and enthusiasm in Western naturalism soon began to affect the making of god images all over Bengal.
