Cigarette smoking is injurious! It causes cancer.
In 1907, a brand called Kali Cigarettes destroyed the peace and sleep of British colonial government officials in Bengal.
That was due to this lithographic advertisement.
And it attracted interpretations of all sorts of dangerous meanings by British officials.
It was produced around 1885–1890.
Its creator was the Calcutta Art Studio, at 185 Bowbazar Street.
And the advertisement was for the East India Cigarette Manufacturing Company Limited, located at 131 Harrison Road.
Now, before we proceed, let’s understand this.
This print of Kali is not an artifact of sensationalism in the name of art.
Only those who understand the mysteries of the Devi Mahatmya and Kalika Tantra will understand the true provocation this print could create.
And, surely, this feature isn’t an endorsement of tobacco products.
Before people start raising a hue and cry, understand that this print has been housed by some of the most reputed museums in the world.
These include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the British Museum, London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata.
And this is what truly makes the print so important to Bengali and Indian culture.
Kali was a goddess much disliked by the British regime.
So, in the years following the Partition of Bengal in 1905, Kali was increasingly appropriated as an emblem of national awakening, resistance, inner resilience, and the destruction of foreign rule, by Indian nationalists.
As a consequence, Herbert Hope Risley, a senior colonial administrator, and his assistant, B. A. Gupte, collected popular prints in Calcutta and reported incriminating interpretations of this image.
Risley was convinced that the heads in Kali’s garland represented Europeans.
Perhaps, some of them did.
And he added that a severed head in the lower corner represented a British soldier.
So, the British government believed the image to be seditious.
Its circulation came under surveillance and censorship.
The advertisement described the cigarettes as bishuddha swadeshi, meaning purely indigenous.
And that simply massaged more salt on to injury.
Indian consumers, on the other hand, were thrilled.
They saw it as a symbol of domestic manufacture and the resurgence of the livelihood of poor Indian workers.
But to the British government, it signalled a strike at the very heart of the secular outlook of the colonial regime.
And how so?
Because, the advertisement appropriated one of the oldest imperial commodities, tobacco, that was advertised by both women and children in British society, as late as the twentieth century!
And it did so for the propagation of nationalist ideology, and that too in the name of a goddess that colonial missionaries so widely detested.
