The bazaar printmaking schools, engaged in making plates for book illustrations, soon started producing broadsides. These schools were influenced by classical and folk painting traditions from Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Mughal India. In terms of taste and technology, prints emerging from these schools were influenced undeniably by European culture. It is to these schools that the first indigenous evidence of printmaking activity, as we know it today, can be traced.

English-owned presses that had been established in the last quarter of the 18th century employed members of local artisan communities. Here, these artisans learnt to put their traditional skills to new uses and applications. The rudimentary training that they received at these printing and publishing outfits, however, was oriented to equip them with technical skills specific to requirements of the British presses; it did not assist in the development of printmaking as an art form. With new opportunities, these artisans developed techniques and aesthetic styles that were unique in the history of printmaking, the world over. While European artists had practically no role in effecting this change, British imperialism played the role of the prime mover in transforming traditional printmaking practices. Prints made during this time explored folk, religious, social, and political themes, and catered essentially to the semi-educated masses that thronged mofussil towns and suburbs. The most prolific of the 'schools' was the Bat-tala school that grew in the bazaars of North Calcutta. In the second half of the 19th century, many fresh art school graduates pursued careers as illustrators for Bengali books. Though many of them hailed from artisan communities, their education in art had been distinctly influenced by European academic sensibilities. They brought these influences to their illustrations: one can see this in the content, style, and technique of Bat-tala reliefs.

Almost as prolific, though nowhere near as sophisticated, were the Punjab lithographs that flourished in the bazaars of Amritsar and Lahore. Lithography was practised widely and was extensively popularised by the British. There is bound to have been a high degree of interaction between the British lithographers and the Punjabi artisans. However, it is likely that the Punjabi printmakers learnt more from observation and practice rather than from direct instruction, and given the naïvete of the Punjab prints, it is highly unlikely that they were the handiwork of trained art school graduates. The Tughra lithographs (from the Punjab school) that represent the earliest evidence of indigenous polychrome printing in north India, were produced, perhaps, in Lahore and/or Delhi. In Bombay too, there emerged an indigenous school of lithography by the late 19th century. Prints here drew from the classicism of Tanjore painting and the academicism of European art. The artists who executed them definitely had some exposure to the tenets of European academic drawing (including the production of perspective). Soon, with the advent of Raja Ravi Varma and Bamapada Banerjee in the last quarter of the 19th century, the European way of making art began gaining in popularity. Raja Ravi Varma and Bamapada Banerjee held sway over artistic tastes at the turn of the century, spawning innumerable clones countrywide. They constituted the new wave of 'Western-style' art that explored Indian themes. This brand of 'Indian' art found wide patronage among the rich and middle-class Indians, as also among European connoisseurs. Chromolithography and oleography were used to reproduce oil paintings of popular myths, legends, gods, and goddesses, thus making mass circulation possible. This marked the beginning of calendar art and the first instance of 'high' art intermingling with the 'popular'.