Osama replaces Kalighat myths in Bengal ‘pata chitra’

NEW DELHI - The traditional ‘pata chitras’ of Bengal, a narrative folk art tradition genre dating back to the 7th century, are moving on with time. The lores of the “babu-bibi of Kalighat”, “cat and the shrimp” and Hindu myths have been replaced by gun-toting Osama bin Laden, fearsome jihadis, floods and corruption.

The painted scrolls nowadays portray contemporary realities like terrorism, the devastating tsunami of 2004, quakes, floods, inoculation, HIV/AIDS campaigns, corruption and even the political turbulence in West Bengal’s Nandigram, said noted designer, collector and crafts activist Rajeev Sethi.

Sethi, who manages the culture forum called the Asian Heritage Foundation, has 5,000 Bengal ‘pata chitras’ - one of the single largest individual collections in the world.

“The best icon of Bengal ‘pata chitra’ movement is artist Jamini Roy, who was influenced by tradition. But the current generation of ‘pata’ artists in far-flung villages are creating new idioms,” Sethi told IANS.

This month, the spotlight turned on the ‘pata chitras’ of Bengal after the Victoria and Albert Museum of London announced a major exhibition of Bengal ‘pat’ paintings in 2011 as part of a new Indo-British culture pact.

“The Victoria and Albert Museum has a large collection of ‘patas’ - the bulk of which was purchased by John Lockwood Kipling, father of novelist Rudyard Kipling, from Kolkata. John Kipling was an arts and crafts teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Mumbai,” Mark Ellis Powell Jones, director of Victoria and Albert Museum, told IANS during a recent visit to the country.

The tradition of ‘pata chitra” has been re-inventing itself since the beginning of the 21st century.

Kalighat, the seat of the ‘pata’ tradition in Kolkata, witnessed an exodus in the mid-20th century. Hundreds of ‘patuas’ (artists), driven by hunger, slump in demand brought by the end of ‘babu culture’ (the well-off Indian employees of the East India Company) with the struggle for Independence, returned to their native villages in West Midnapore, Murshidabad, Purulia and Birbhum.

“As they took on day jobs to support their families, their ‘pats’ began to mirror their lives, environs and struggle,” folk art researcher and chronicler Ravi Kant Dwivedi of the Asian Heritage Foundation told IANS.

Anwar Chitrakar, a 35-year-old tailor from Naya village in West Midnapore, has been reviving the lost glory of the Bengal ‘pata chitra’ with modern sensibilities.

His colourful scrolls “depict the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11, its aftermath, a bearded Osama bin Laden with armed Al Qaeda activists confronting American president George Bush and his soldiers, the ensuing combat and Osama fleeing to an undisclosed mountain hideout astride a horse”, Dwivedi said,

Two other recurring motifs are of a gun-toting jihadi atop a camel and the “yam pat” - the scene in Yamraj’s court in its modern avatars.

Chandan Chitrakar comments on exploitation in society through his scroll of a “fish wedding”, in which all the marine guests at the wedding feast - shoals of smaller fishes - are eaten up by a big fish at the end.

Swarna Chitrakar, another artist, has painted “powerful women locked in identity struggle”, Dwivedi added.

Tapan Chitrakar, meanwhile, is still haunted by the tsunami is his black-and-white monochrome ‘patas’.

“Earlier the figures were flat and one-dimensional, but now they are shaded to give a 3-D look,” said Dwivedi, who has worked with the ‘patuas’ in Bengal.

“Bengal ‘patas’ are stepping stones to modernism in art,” Hugo Weihe, senior vice-president and international director of Asian Art at Christie’s, told IANS here.

Christie’s is auctioning 24 ‘Kalighat patas’ dating back to 1930s with Chinese motifs at its South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art Sale in New York Sep 15 sourced from an American collector.

The traditional ‘pata chitras’ of Bengal reached its golden age between 7th and 11th century AD and continued till the late 19th century and early 20th century.

“They were the earliest form of visual narratives in Bengal, predating the cinema,” Sethi said.

A “scandalous affair between a young housewife Elokeshi, spouse of a Bengali babu Nabinchandra Banerjee, and the chief priest of the Taraknath temple at Tarakesvara” became the most popular subject for ‘pata chitra’ artists in the 19th century, prompting a flood of paintings in the Kalighat style, he added.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)