The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Household Gods: Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930, an exhibition of more than 100 chromolithographic prints drawn from the museum’s holdings. On view in four rotations beginning in January and running through June 27, 2027, the show foregrounds acquisitions from the past decade and pairs them with select earlier painting traditions.
Curated by John Guy, Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, and supported by the Florence and Herbert Irving Fund for Asian Art Exhibitions, this is billed as the first comprehensive presentation of chromolithographic devotional prints produced by pioneering studio presses in Calcutta (Kolkata), Poona (Pune), and Bombay (Mumbai). In total the installation includes roughly 120 works—prints alongside paintings and portable triptych shrines—offering a view of Indian devotional imagery at the threshold of modernity.
The exhibition traces how mass-produced prints became a vital medium for expressing religious identity as India moved toward independence. It documents the shift from household images made of clay or metal to inexpensive chromolithographs that brought brightly colored deity imagery within reach of modest homes. The museum also situates this transformation within broader technological changes: mid-19th-century photography disrupted elite painted devotional portraiture, and the adoption of lithographic printing from Europe in the 1880s enabled the mass production of devotional images for popular consumption.
Highlights include early hand-colored Battala woodblock prints from Calcutta, including a relief print celebrating Durga, and dramatic depictions of Kali as worshipped at the Kalighat temple. A notable group is a set of 10 Mahavidyas produced by the Calcutta Art Studio Press circa 1885–95, printed two to a sheet and inscribed in Bengali and English. The show also emphasizes the artistic quality of many press productions, with portrait-like depictions such as Kashi Vishvanatha (Shiva as Lord of the Universe in Benares).
Later chromolithographs from presses like the Ravi Varma Press are represented as well, for example a radiant six-headed Subramanian (Shri Shanmukha Subramania). The Met frames the exhibition as revealing a little-known final chapter of traditional Indian painting and its enduring role in popular worship.
Coinciding with the installation, The Met will host a March 20 lecture titled “Gods at the Gate of Modernity—Religious Arts in Colonial Calcutta,” delivered by Bard College Research Professor of Religion Richard Davis, with opening remarks by India’s Consul General in New York Binaya Pradhan. The lecture and exhibition together examine how 19th-century Calcutta’s artists and artisans adapted mechanical reproduction to make Hindu gods more accessible, creating a devotional visual language that became pervasive across twentieth-century India.
