In a remarkable series of 39 watercolours, Alam Musawwir offers a vibrant and intimate portrayal of public life in 19th-century Dhaka—a period marked by social flux, colonial encounters, and the assertion of new civic identities. These paintings, now preserved as part of Bangladesh’s artistic heritage, stand not merely as decorative works, but as a rare visual archive that documents the ceremonial, religious, and quotidian dimensions of the city’s social fabric. This essay explores these paintings in detail—analysing their stylistic features, compositional structure, subject matter, historical significance, and how they relate to and diverge from other contemporaneous artistic traditions.

The Artist and His Medium

Alam Musawwir—whose name literally means “Alam the Painter”—emerges from the artisan milieu of colonial Bengal. While little is known about his personal life, the meticulousness of his paintings suggests training in both local miniature traditions and possibly some exposure to British pictorial norms, especially in terms of figure grouping and architectural rendering. He worked in gouache or watercolour on paper, using fine black outlines and restrained, earthy colour palettes dominated by ochres, reds, blues, and greens.

What distinguishes Musawwir’s work is its documentary clarity: each painting reads like a freeze-frame from a moving procession. His method is illustrative rather than symbolic, favouring dense frontal compositions with wide horizontal spans that create panoramic effects. The figures are rarely rendered in profile or foreshortened; instead, they are stylised in a flat, iconic manner that preserves recognisability and rhythm over realism.

A City on Display: Themes and Settings

The subject matter of the 39 paintings revolves almost entirely around public spectacles: processions, festivals, parades, religious observances, and marketplaces. The city of Dhaka appears as a stage, teeming with a complex cast of characters—nawabs on elephants, British officers on horseback, faqirs, beggars, drummers, torch-bearers, women observing from rooftops, and crowds of men in varying attire.

Several processions appear to celebrate Shi’a Muharram rituals, evident from the presence of tazias, alams, and chest-beating mourners. The presence of British soldiers and Union Jack flags in some panels situates the series firmly within the colonial era, suggesting that Musawwir was documenting Dhaka’s transformation under empire.

In nearly every scene, the viewer finds a strong awareness of architectural setting: arcades, temples, colonial buildings, rooftop spectators, and minarets. These are not generic backdrops but specific architectural vocabularies that reveal Dhaka’s evolving urban morphology—melding Mughal, indigenous, and colonial designs.

Visual Ethnography: Costumes, Hierarchies, and Performances

A defining feature of these paintings is their rich ethnographic detail. The artist meticulously records variations in turban styles, waistbands, footwear, musical instruments, umbrellas, and palanquins. Each figure appears to be part of a caste, occupation, or religious identity. Such attention serves two functions: first, to offer a kind of visual census of Dhaka’s plural society; and second, to encode the power hierarchies of the time.

There is a recurring compositional motif: the procession anchored by a figure of authority—either riding an elephant, seated in a palki, or mounted on horseback—followed by musicians, standard-bearers, and commoners. By consistently depicting elites in elevated positions and commoners on foot, Musawwir visualises social stratification with clarity but not critique.

What is particularly fascinating is how Alam Musawwir interweaves static spectatorship with dynamic movement. Onlookers stand or sit on rooftops and balconies, creating a visual separation between the event and the city’s everyday residents. These observational gazes mirror the viewer’s own, turning each painting into a mise-en-scène where the viewer is invited to participate as a distant yet engrossed witness.

Stylistic Influences and Comparisons

Musawwir’s visual language bears the marks of multiple traditions. His line work and facial typologies are reminiscent of the Kalighat pat school of Bengal, especially in their emphasis on outline and stylised expression. However, unlike Kalighat painters—whose work was often satirical and focused on domestic morality—Musawwir favours collective grandeur and ceremonial order. There is little caricature, no narrative ridicule, and almost no internal drama.

In comparison to Mughal miniatures, Musawwir’s work lacks illusionistic depth and intricate patterning, but shares the Mughals’ love for pageantry, documentation, and courtly themes. Yet unlike the imperial refinement of Mughal work, his style is grounded and folkish, prioritising repetition and inclusion over finesse. This aligns him more with the Company School of painting—a hybrid genre that emerged in late 18th- and 19th-century India under British patronage.

Company paintings, often created by Indian artists for European patrons, focused on ethnographic documentation, topography, and processional life. Alam Musawwir’s paintings share this documentary impulse but with one crucial difference: his gaze is inward-looking. Rather than producing work for a foreign patron, he appears to be chronicling his own world, for his own people, with a deep sense of belonging. This gives his paintings a sincerity and authenticity often absent in commercially-driven Company art.

Colour, Composition, and Visual Rhythm

Musawwir’s colour palette is restrained but effective. He uses earthy tones—ochres, reds, and browns—to evoke dust-laden cityscapes and sunlit parades. Blue appears sparingly but symbolically, often in turbans, draperies, or flags. The recurring use of red for uniforms and ceremonial cloth suggests a conscious attempt to highlight authority, festivity, or colonial presence.

Compositionally, his works are horizontal tapestries—often crowded, layered, and filled edge-to-edge with human figures. This density creates a visual rhythm, enhanced by repeated gestures: men holding flags, musicians playing drums, women waving from balconies. These repetitions offer viewers an almost cinematic sense of motion, as if watching a reel of 19th-century Dhaka unfold in episodic grandeur.

Unlike European perspectival art, there is no single vanishing point; space is flattened and organised into horizontal registers. This is consistent with indigenous narrative scroll traditions, such as the Patuas of Bengal or the Phad paintings of Rajasthan, where stories are told laterally in a sequence of visual frames.

Colonial Spectres and Cultural Continuities

The presence of British officers—often depicted with red jackets, epaulettes, or top hats—serves as a visual watermark of empire. But they never dominate the frame. They appear alongside Indian elites, coexisting but not central. This suggests that while the colonial state was present, Dhaka’s public life retained a distinct, indigenous rhythm. The British were watchers, occasionally participants, but not cultural orchestrators.

At the same time, the processions reflect a hybrid modernity: traditional tazias carried beside colonial cannons; religious devotees marching under Union Jack flags; or Indian women watching British-led military bands. These juxtapositions tell us more than written history ever could about how empire was negotiated not just in laws and institutions, but in rituals, spectacles, and the city’s performative spaces.

A Visual Archive of Dhaka’s Civic Imagination

Alam Musawwir’s paintings perform a crucial historiographic function: they restore visibility to ordinary people, overlooked rituals, and street-level city life. In the absence of photographs from early 19th-century Dhaka, these paintings stand as a unique archive—capturing what words fail to: sound, movement, colour, and social mood.

They also reveal a collective civic imagination. The very act of processing—whether for a wedding, religious rite, or political show—was a form of spatial claim-making. It transformed the streets into arenas of visibility, participation, and shared emotion. By repeatedly depicting processions, Musawwir gives us insight into what mattered in Dhaka’s public life: spectacle, belonging, hierarchy, and negotiation.

Legacy and Relevance

Today, as Bangladesh contends with questions of cultural memory, urban change, and historical erasure, Musawwir’s work demands renewed attention. These paintings are not merely quaint relics; they are blueprints for understanding how Dhaka imagined itself—through ritual, participation, and representation. They tell us that the past was not static but performative, and that history unfolded not just in palaces or battlefields, but in the rhythm of marching feet and the flutter of festival flags.

In an age of digital saturation and historical amnesia, Musawwir’s patient brushwork reminds us of the power of visual testimony. His paintings ask: What does it mean to belong to a city? Who gets to be seen? And how do we remember what once made us move together, in the streets, as a people?

Conclusion

Alam Musawwir’s 39 paintings are far more than aesthetic artefacts; they are acts of visual historiography. Through them, 19th-century Dhaka breathes again—not in silence, but in the clamour of processions, the elegance of elephants, the cries of vendors, and the gaze of onlookers. They invite us not just to look, but to see: a city, a society, and an artist who understood the politics of being seen.

In the interplay between folk memory and historical record, Alam Musawwir’s brush has left us with a rare gift—an archive of presence in a world fast disappearing.

Archival Note

The content on this page has been archived and curated by Shamsuddoza Sajen, Chief Archivist of Bangladesh on Record.

This article draws on information provided by Najma Khan Majlis, as cited in the user’s input, ensuring accuracy regarding Alam Musawwir’s contributions and context.