A confluence of ancient faith and modern printing technology makes ‘Divine Color’ at the MFA

The Hindu goddess Kali — cobalt-skinned, four-armed, and adorned with a necklace of severed human heads — raises a blood-soaked blade above her head, the tool of her particularly ferocious trade. Her killing spree — loosely, and depending on the source, era, and region — is usually read as a triumph over the demons that plague the faithful. Even so, her bloodlust has to be quelled. Her husband, the god Shiva, achieves that by lying prone in front of her so that she literally walks all over him.

If that doesn’t sound like typical wall-calendar fare – like, say, the soft, colorful squibs of Monet’s brush, or a sunny photo of a waterfall, then, like me, you’ve missed nearly a couple of centuries’ worth of popular Indian visual culture. The Museum of Fine Arts offers your best chance to catch up: “Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal” brings together the confluence of ancient faith and modern printing technology that helped bring the vivid exploits of Kali – and Shiva, and Vishnu, and a host of others — to the kitchens, living rooms, shop windows and the virtually anywhere else of the nation. The result, the show quietly infers, is a traditional culture preserved by advancing technology, a seductive paradox worth savoring. In an era when technology is producing nothing so much as a numbing sameness, there’s a message here for us, too.

But first, a little background. The MFA, by luck and happenstance, has one of the most substantial collections of Indian art in the country. That’s mostly because in 1917, Denman Waldo Ross, purchased hundreds of pieces from Ananda Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan collector. As part of the deal, Ross had Coomaraswamy installed as the museum’s first curator of Indian art, where he stayed for three decades. His collection reflected his decisively narrow view of genre: Anything made after the arrival of European colonialism was sullied, in his view, and not a pure expressiom of Indian culture.

"Krishna‑Kali," Calcutta Art Studio. About 1878-85. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMFA Boston

To be clear: “Divine Color” is not remotely that. Laura Weinstein, the museum’s Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, has instead put together an exhibition about cultural collision and the liberal borrowings that helped rebuild Hindu identity, refit and durable for the modern era. Most important, though, is the scale: What European colonists gave to India was the inadvertent gift to mass produce and distribute its culture at a scale never before possible. And with gods of all kinds available for pennies, their constant presence, even amid colonial occupation, made cultural survival all but assured.

There’s more to that story, but Weinstein’s is much broader, and starts with some necessary exposition. The Bengali city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) is its beginning, the seat of power during the British Raj and the center of the empire’s robust international trading enterprise. It made sense that the European innovation of lithography would land here first, and Indian artists put it to good use.

Household-sized effigies of various gods had been popular for generations for those who could afford it. But mass-printing technology meant every home could become a shrine, where faith and tradition was a constant presence to be passed from one generation to the next. The show opens with a welcome 101-style primer for what’s to come: A hand-painted Kali — the superstar of this show, to be sure — two-dimensional and decidedly lacking in the vividly bloody exploits that later become her hallmark.

"Shri Shri Kalika," Chore Bagan Art Studio, about 1895. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMFA Boston

Painted in the mid-1800s, it’s from before the era of mass printing, and an emblem of the limited presence such images could have in people’s daily lives: Singular and hand-made, a painting like this would be expensive and scarce, though demand for it would surely not have been. Around the time of this piece, the British would have just defeated the Indian Rebellion of 1857 as they advanced their stake in India from commercial to openly political, declaring British rule, an overt threat to Indian cultural sovereignty.

But the occupation also brought the full force of European modernity, and by the 1870s, a transformation, plain to see, had occurred. In Calcutta, printers had embraced lithography as a way to not only distribute Indian cultural icons at mass scale, but translate its age-old myths and literature to broadly popular aesthetics. On the walls at the MFA, distinctly western aesthetics are fused with Indian folklore. Gods and goddesses in theatrical, almost baroque scenes in leafy glades reminiscent of western Romanticism.

Nritya Lal Datta, "Kali," about 1850-1880 Relief print, hand painted. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MFA Boston

That fusion signalled not an infiltration and an indigenous culture on the wane, but instead a new avenue to distribute a vision of a modern India — changed, surely, but thriving. As the Indian print industry expanded rapidly, European printing houses tried to cash in: At the MFA, European copies of Indian-made prints sit strangely flat and alien looking next to the real thing. They help reinforce the idea that the printing industry in Bengal especially was not to churn out just product, but higher national and cultural purpose.

By the early 20th century, that’s born out: One of the most powerful images here is of Kali — who else — in her archetypal fury, a bloodied head grasped in one fist, sword raised in the other. But she’s the centerpiece of a poster advertising local cigarettes and other products, urging Indians to buy local as an act of resistance to colonial rule, with the goddess’s rebellion as the model.

"Shorhasi/Chinnamosta," Calcutta Art Studio, about 1885–95. Lithograph © Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMFA Boston

Indian culture had not only survived British rule, but it had blossomed, through mass distribution, into a unifying force. Other pieces here strike the tone: Chinnamasta, another warrior goddess, is routinely depicted as decapitated and carrying her own severed head as blood arcs fountain-like from her neck into the mouths of her attendants.

One of ten Mahavidyas — female deities symbolizing anger and violence — she, like Kali, came to mean something more in the anti-colonial period leading to Indian independence in 1947, that sacrifice was necessary and would nourish the next generation. All of the Mahavidyas were enlisted; their built-in rage became a rallying point for political purpose, and prints like the ones on view here were wildly popular.

The British caught on eventually. In 1910, the Raj passed the Press Act, censoring publications it saw as dissenting. By then, it was too late. Millions of prints had made their way to every home and business in the country, a pervasive symbol of a culture not stuck in the past but looking actively towards a future with its myths and icons intact — and out from under the British thumb.

"Kali," in an advertisement for cigarettes and other products in a call to promote Indian economic sovereignty. Calcutta Art Studio, about 1890-1900. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMFA Boston

In the long blossoming of Indian independence, even in the digital era, printing continues to thrive: A video in the show made just last year in Kolkata shows posters of the gods plastered on the wall in shops and homes; in one photograph, a shop displays them in stacks, bright and vivid, as popular as ever. To whatever degree mass-produced images still hang on to some designation as “art,” I can’t really say. But as “culture” — a kind of social glue that defies threats to dissolve it? The proof is right there on the page.

DIVINE COLOR: HINDU PRINTS FROM MODERN BENGAL

Through May 31. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue. 617-267-9300,www.mfa.org.

Murray Whyte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.