Kolkata's Kalighat paintings find a new canvas in Anamika Khanna's couture

Kalighat painting is a style of Indian folk art that emerged in 19th-century Calcutta. Born in a marketplace, it took shape as patuas — scroll painters from Bengal's hereditary community of folk artists — gathered around the bustling Kalighat temple, producing quick watercolour paintings on paper for pilgrims who wanted something to take home. Defined by broad, sweeping brush lines and simplified forms, patuas painted gods and goddesses for the temple trade, but they also turned their brush on the city around them, sketching tigers, cats, and the much-mocked babu culture of colonial Calcutta. Kalighat painting was devotional art and street satire in the same hand, often in the same body of work.

Kalighat painting meets contemporary couture in Anamika Khanna’s Moonlit Palace

Opening Hyundai India Couture Week 2026, Anamika Khanna gave that art form a second life in her new collection, Moonlit Palace. The designer worked directly with artisans from the Kalighat school in Bengal, and it shows. The motifs on the runway weren't printed reproductions but painted by hand, brush to fabric, the same process patuas have always used, only now working on organza and silk instead of paper.

The collection features a sherwani-length coat in gold brocade that carries a painted cat curled along a branch, rendered with the same fat, confident outline and flat colour blocking that made Kalighat's animal studies so recognisable two centuries ago. There's also a cream kurta with a painted female figure — bangles, jewellery and all — down the front, held together with shell and sequin work rather than covered by it. The most striking piece was perhaps the organza column dress, which carries a painted figure across sheer fabric, finished with kardana embroidery and sculptural resin petals — a garment where the painting is doing as much structural work as the cut.

Moonlit Palace treats Kalighat with reverence, but reverence here doesn't mean repetition — the collection draws from the paintings' spirit rather than copying their imagery outright, translating silhouette, proportion, gesture and surface rather than lifting scenes wholesale. 

The collection also looks to Barmer in Rajasthan, bringing in textiles developed with women artisan communities through patchwork, natural dyeing, hand-painting, embroidery and gold foiling.

Email: anoushkakundu@newindianexpress.com

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