This sheet is an advertisement. The panel at the bottom center carries the product name, Kali Cigarette, and the Bengali text in the margins and in the panels along the bottom sells cigarettes and a hair oil. In the middle of it all is one of the most striking images of the goddess Kali ever printed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates it to about 1885-95 and records that it was printed at the Calcutta Art Studio, 185 Bowbazar Street.
The image follows the fierce form of Kali as she is known in Bengal. She has blue-black skin, her tongue is out, and she wears a garland of severed heads. She raises a bloodied sword in one hand and stands on the body of Shiva, who lies on his back beneath her feet. Smoke and cloud fill the background, with small gods looking on from above and a crowd of figures struggling below. In Bengali devotion Kali is also the Divine Mother, and the terrifying image is understood as the goddess destroying evil and time itself.
What makes the sheet unusual is the sales pitch. It was printed in the years when the Swadeshi movement was urging Indians to buy goods made in India, and the red text appeals to Hindu readers to support national industry by smoking these cigarettes. Calcutta's commercial presses were making religious prints in huge numbers, and an advertiser could borrow an image people already loved. The Met holds the sheet today as a window into how devotional art, advertising and politics overlapped in colonial Calcutta.
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