Collage Art Prints

Collaged pictures were often displayed in the palatial homes of Vaishnava Aggarwal merchants of the Shekhavati region in Rajasthan and the nearby town of Bhiwani in Haryana. In these collages, imported prints of European landscapes or scenery painted by artists from Nathdwara in Rajasthan, which often mimicked the colonial mansions of their patrons, were used as a background over which figures cut out from popular prints depicting religious or nationalist subjects were superimposed, to serve cultural and national objectives.

A group of collages related to the freedom struggle, the nationalist movement and the communal identity. These collages served as vehicles for the appropriation of the nationalist movement to the Vaishnava fold. Two intermingling streams of imagery of Indianness / Hinduness flowed simultaneously – one exemplified by mass-produced and national circulated images, such as Ravi Varma’s Hindu mythological pictures and the other by regional / communal imagery such as the collages of Shekhavati.