Before slick agencies and professional art directors, Bengali newspapers carried something stranger and more human: hand-drawn advertisements for ringworm ointments, hair-growth tonics, and cures for madness, sketched by artists whose names nobody bothered to keep. A new essay by writer and editor Sandip Dasgupta digs into this forgotten corner of Bengali visual culture, asking a pointed question: why have these illustrators been written out of the history of Bengali art?
Dasgupta frames his search around a comparison that feels right. Just as historian Tudor Parfitt spent years hunting for the Lost Tribes of Israel, Dasgupta spent long hours in digital archives and yellowed newspaper collections hunting for the ghosts of Bengali advertising’s earliest illustrators. Most signed their work with only a tiny initial, if at all. Agency bosses, he notes, routinely erased even those small signatures to make it appear the agency itself had produced the work, not any individual artist.
The “Ugly” Art That Critics Dismissed
Art critics of the era were not kind. Figures like O.C. Ganguly called these advertisement drawings “mindless and indiscriminate simplification of art objects,” dismissing them as having neither grace nor form. Dasgupta pushes back. Looking at the same drawings, he finds humour, heartache, and a raw vitality that formal art history has been too snobbish to acknowledge.
One illustration that stays with him: a shackled madman, drawn in 1952 for a product called “ABD Pills” from the “Bengali Asylum” of Dutta Nagar, Dum Dum. The calligraphy is amateurish by any professional standard. But seeing the address “Jorasanko” in the ad sent Dasgupta’s mind straight to the Tagore family, and to a separate advertisement featuring a sketch of Rabindranath Tagore by artist Hemen Majumdar, used by an organisation called “Bengal Autotype” to sell prints of the poet’s portrait for one rupee each.
Hemen Majumdar and the Women Who Sold Products
Hemen Majumdar never drew advertisements himself. He was known for his paintings of women in wet clothes, modelled on photographs he took of his wife Sudharani in various poses after she bathed in the family pond. He would then paint a different face over hers. His technique was so widely admired that other advertising artists copied his poses and his style of depicting women, making him a kind of silent presence across Bengali advertising even without ever working in the field directly.
Hemen was far more than a painter of wet saris. He designed the gateway for King George V’s visit to India, painted Kashmir landscapes at the Maharaja’s invitation, served as Court Artist to the Maharaja of Patiala, and painted Mahatma Gandhi at the spinning wheel. His commercial afterlife, borrowed without credit by advertising illustrators, is one of the essay’s more striking ironies.
The Patuas and the Pattern of Forgetting
Dasgupta draws a second parallel, this time to writer Premendra Mitra’s essay about the Patuas of Kalighat, the traditional scroll painters who were pushed out of the city as printed photographs of deities replaced their hand-painted work. When someone eventually went looking for their descendants, most had become jute mill labourers. A few still painted the chalchitra canopies of festival idols, unable to fully abandon the craft in their blood. Their original scroll paintings were rotting in thatched huts, being eaten by insects.
The parallel to Bengali advertising’s forgotten illustrators is deliberate. Both groups were skilled, both were commercially useful in their time, and both were discarded when their moment passed. The Patua style later became fashionable in galleries, impressing even Pablo Picasso, while the Patuas themselves had long since vanished into poverty. Dasgupta wonders whether the advertising artists will follow the same arc: rediscovered and celebrated only after everyone who knew them is gone.
Advertising production in both Bengals before Partition was centred in Calcutta. Agencies like Paradise Advertising existed there as early as 1928. In what is now Bangladesh, agencies such as Bitopi, East Asiatic, and Interspan only emerged in the 1960s. The essay closes with a quiet demand: that these early illustrators, however “ugly” their work was judged to be, deserve at least a small corner in the history of Bengal’s visual arts.