CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/19/2026

Rare Hindu prints by Bengali artists during colonial rule

Published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at MFA Boston, Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal is a book unlike any other on our list. Filled with eye-popping, now-rare but once mass-produced vernacular religious lithographs from 19th- and early 20th-century Kolkata—aka colonial Calcutta—it shows how Bengali artists insisted upon and represented their own religious traditions and icons, while incorporating new printing techniques from the west. Pictured here, “Hari Hara Milan (Union of Shiva and Vishnu),” produced around 1895–1910 by Chore Bagan Art Studio. It’s an example of the “rainbow roll” printmaking technique that became popular among local presses, where several colors of ink were blended on a roller to create a seamless, dynamic, almost psychedelic gradient behind traditional compositions. The print depicts “an encounter between Shiva and Vishnu, each riding an animal mount and accompanied by his consort,” according to curator Laura Weinstein. “The heads of Vishnu’s elephant and Shiva’s bull merge in a visual trick with roots in South Asian art over a millennium old. While the chromolithograph resembles an earlier version by Calcutta Art Studio, certain iconographic and stylistic changes are evident. Most notably, the blue-gray sky with puffy white clouds has been replaced by a candy-colored rainbow roll.”