KOCHI: Remember the time when red-circled dates on calendars determined a lot of life’s major decisions? Silently hanging on our painted, often fading walls, these marked days announced travel, screamed examinations, turned into reminders of monthly bills to be paid and gas cylinders to be refilled. No matter how foreboding the date was, there was always one thing that offset the accompanying anxiety — an alluring visual next to these often threatening aides — memoire. Calendar art was a part of popular Indian visual culture until a few decades ago.
India had a plethora of regional calendars rooted in solar and lunar systems before independence. When a standardised calendar was adopted, it had to trickle down to the masses and calendar art came into being. The Indian calendar thus became a unifying factor to bridge populations.
As with everything else, the main subject in most calendars was the woman, as seen through the male gaze. From Goddesses to movie stars, they beckoned from the confines of those printed sheets. These framed women represented a visual history of the changing roles of Indian women.
Raja Ravi Varma, called the Father of Calendar art, pioneered the mass production of art, by setting up lithographic presses to print copies of his paintings. Soon, goddesses adorned the walls of ordinary households and companies used these images to embellish their yearly calendars. In keeping with India’s obsession with fair skin, the painted female deities were unde.