Sri Sri Durga

Here, the goddess Durga, wielding an array of weapons in her ten arms, slays the demon Mahisha, his human form emerging from the slain buffalo at her feet. She is attended by the goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati while the god Shiva’s children, Skanda and Ganesha, look on. The ensemble is framed by an arch and columns with acanthus-leaf capitals, a reference to architectural decoration found in Victorian-era academic paintings. In this image, Hindu deities replace the genre’s typical Greek and Roman subjects. Depictions of Durga are wildly popular in Kolkata; this early and extremely rare monochromatic lithograph echoes contemporaneous versions in other mediums—woodcut prints from the Battala neighborhood and paintings from the temple district of Kalighat. A decade later, the city’s many print studios began producing color versions that employed the newly arrived chromolithographic technology.