Page 208 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

GRAPHIC DESIGN 205

The first monthly magazine Digdarshan (April 1918) and weekly Samachar Darpan
in the same year were published from Serampore Press. In the meantime, Calcutta
School Book Society had been established in 1817. In 1822, John Lawson, a member
of this Society published the first illustrated Bengali monthly Pashvabali. The
illustrations published in this monthly was drawn and engraved by him. In every issue
of this magazine, the description of an animal was published and a wood engraving of
the same animal was printed on the first page. 29
In the second or third decade of the 19th century, the famous press of Bat-tala in
Calcutta began its journey. Sukumar Sen commented that around 1831 the prints of
Bat-tala made their appearance. The principal feature of Bat-tala books are that they
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were printed on cheap paper and the subject matter ranged from everything from holy
books to children’s texts, books on medicine to language, drama-novels to how to
write love letters, panjika to panchali. The cover of Bat-tala books were quite
naturally printed on cheap paper as well. Sometimes wood-engraved prints were used
as covers. Some covers only had the title, the writers’ and the publishers’ name. One
of the characteristics of Bat-tala book cover was its selection of colors. Even though
it was printed with a single color, be it black, dark blue or brown, the cover page was
always different from the book. In most cases, red or pink paper was used for the
cover. In this way an attempt was made to give the impression of two colors in Bat-
tala books, which is significant in the context of that age.
In the huge number of publication from Bat-tala a large number of wood-engraving
artists were involved. Though not all their names can be known, a number of them are.
We have already mentioned Ramchand Ray. Kashinath Mistri, Harihar Bandapadhaya,
Ramdhan Swarnakar, Madhab Chandra Das, Rupchand Acharya, Biswamvar Acharya,
Ramsagar Chakrabarty, Kartik Chandra Basak, Hiramoni Karmakar, Hiralal
Karmakar, Gopal Chandra Karmakar, Kartik Chandra Karmakar, Nrityalal Datta,
Panchanan Karmakar and others are among the important ones. The years between
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1840 and 1865 are known as the golden age of Bat-tala publication. But its glory
lasted till the end of the 19th century. It is not that this trend has become extinct. It is
surviving in a different form and style.
The publications of Bat-tala were for common people. Their popularity among the
mass was tremendous. The book cover and illustration artists of Bat-tala are important
as they were not institutionally trained artists. Despite that, the kind of skill and
creativity they have shown is amazing. Especially, illustrating characters with
reference to literature (for example, Vidya and Sundar) and to make it comprehensible
to common people is not an easy task (fig. 3.2). The engraving artists of Bat-tala did
it successfully in most cases with book covers and illustrations.
In the later half of the 19th century, a book-market (Ketabpatti) similar to Bat-tala grew
in the Chawkbazar area of Dhaka. It was a large center for the composition and
publication of books for the Muslim community. In both Dhaka’s Ketabpatti and
Kolkata’s Bat-tala - Muslim books were printed the same way as Arabic and Persian