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Smith Poster Archive
The Smith Poster Archive housed in Special
Collections at Syracuse University contains some 3500 design
specimens of popular chromolithographs (a.k.a. “oleographs”,
“calendar art”, “popular bazaar prints” or “god posters”)
widely disseminated in 20th century Indian homes, shrines,
schools, public halls, and workplaces. While such pictures
include topics ranging from animals to sports figures to
images related to India’s Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh
and Christian populations, the Smith Poster Archives includes
only prints depicting Hindu gods, goddesses, saints and
sacred sites and produced from the early 1950s through the
early 1980s, with a small sampling of prints from earlier
decades, including the 1890s
Click
on any of the thumbnails below to see the poster and its
description
The only other comparable collections known
today are found at the Museum of Anthropology, University
of British Columbia, and the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Hamburg,
Germany. The Smith Poster Archive provided most of the prints
for the exhibition, “Changing Myths and Images: Twentieth-Century
Popular Art in India,” at Indiana University in the fall
of 1997.
The collection contains (1) a core collection
of some 3500 design specimens; (2) a 3" x 5” card inventory
file; (3) a repository of 2" x 2” color slides reproducing
a majority of the specimens in the Archive, each slide coordinated
with the inventory file entries and the original broadside
of each design; and (4) a very modest number of books, Xeroxed
articles, and other media relevant to “god posters” research.
The work of a prolific generation of poster
artists is found here, including that of Kartick Das (b.
1929), S. Murugakani (b. 1939), S. M. Pandit (b. 1916),
Ramchandra, M.U. Ramalingkam (b. 1933), Yogendra Rastogi
(b. 1933), Indra Sarma (b. 1923), K. P. Sivan (b. 1928)
and T. S. Subbiah (b. 1920), among others.
The
collection contains images from publishers and distributors
in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras and Sivakasi, as well
as some smaller regional presses. The collection also contains
packets representing the entire inventories of 14” x 10”
prints in stock on particular dates in May 1983 at two of
Bombay’s most influential wholesale distributors, S. S.
Brijbasi & Sons and Sharma Picture Publication.
