However I note an error that has crept into the English translation of a Bengali excerpt. The passage quoting from the article of R.P. Gupta, a noted scholar in the field {Purano Kolkatar Kathkhodai Chhabi, in Bengali, inAmrita, Autumn Special, 1978), says'The woodcuts were printed on very light paper that looked like sandpaper". It was not sandpaper, but a kind of cheap paper manufactured at Bally a few miles from Calcutta. The confusion arose because in Bengali this is known as Ballir kagaz or paper made in Bally. In translation this became sandpaper because the word ball in Bengali means sand. The best essay, perhaps, is Calcutta Woodcuts: Aspects of a Popular Art by Nikhil Sarkar(who has, in his numerous writings, thrown a great deal of lighten the urban history of the city). This is the longest and most laboriously researched essay, covering the general history of the medium from ancient times to its development in the nineteenth century in Calcutta. He has treated in detail the impact of the European artists who had worked in Calcutta in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sarkar does not miss the connection between the technical skill of the woodcut printmakers and the first Bengali blockmakers employed by the growing number of printing establishments in Calcutta. The first one set up by an Indian started in 1807: Baburam, a Brahman, started his press in Kidderpore and brought out perhaps the first illustrated Bengali book in 1816, embellished with six cuts. The first Bengali almanac came out in 1818 with illustrations. Sarkar delineates the areas. Black Town of the natives and White Town of the Europeans, in Calcutta. In the White Town printing presses had already been working from the eighteenth century. He traces the genesis of the new urban mass-culture to the Battala area, which he describes as the 'cultural heart of the native town\ The truth of the description is borne out by the following figures he supplies : "An account from 1859 lists a total of 46 printing presses run by Indians. In 1857 a total of 322 titles in Bengali had appeared from these presses." But most significant are his references to William Archer's thesis {Kalighat Drawings, Bombay, 1962) that the British Influence on the Kalighat pats can be read in thepatuas use ofwatercolour instead of tempera, and in the blank background as seen in the British natural history paintings. That the Kalighat pats were deeply informed by the urban milieu is a fact, and their departure from the rural pictorial tradition cannot be denied. He also refers to Hana Knizkova's findings (The Drawings In Kalighat Style, Prague, 1975) that conventions of Indian miniature painting had been 'working in the Kalighat paintings', and that the influence of nineteenth century temple terracotta art and the Bengal bronze sculpture could also be traced in them. All these findings open new areas of research, and also prove that as with expressions of all other urban cultures the nineteenth century woodcuts arid Kalighat pats which were eclectic in their working, could not develop fully into native art-forms because there was not enough time. They were overwhelmed by alternative technologies and tastes by the turn of the century. Journal of Arts and Ideas 21