The age-old myths and their manifestations do exist in this
era of rationality and technical gluttony. Some months ago, I got a chance to
walk on the soil where the painters of a forgotten genre are still fighting for
their due recognition. They are the humble painters of myths and folklores.
Armed with the natural dyes, they are painting colourful
stories told by the folks of the yesteryears. Their bold fingers are incessantly
creating finer details on the canvas of their choice – a simple cloth bound “sheets of paper sewn together and sometimes
stuck on canvas. Their widths can go from 4 to 14 inches and their length;
often 3 feet can exceed 15 feet.” (https://www.deccanfootprints.com/collections/patua-scroll-paintings)
They are simply going on creating under the sun for the love of the art without
knowing their goals. Well, that’s not true. They know their goal which is to
earn a handful at the end of the day so that they can buy food to fill their stomachs
and a bottle of local liquor to fill their hearts.
When I visited their village
nested in a corner of West Medinipur district of West Bengal, India, a feeling
of awe shrouded me all over. People do sketch and paint in their childhood, draw
two triangular mountain peaks and a semi-circular rising sun or maybe a rose
with a long stem and leaves, but who would have ever thought about revere an
art form and make it a religion? I wouldn’t have known about this form of
veneration if I didn’t make a visit there. The majority being Muslim by faith,
they decided to shun the compartmentalization by taking up stories of hindu mythology
and paint them accurately. They have also dropped their ancestral surnames and
picked up the surname of ‘Chitrakar’ meaning painter in Bengali, their mother
tongue.
They start their days
with decorating the walls of their humble mud houses. When enquired, they put
the brightest of their smiles and said that when there are left-over colours,
we use them to paint on the walls. While strolling through the kuccha lanes and
observing their exhibits, I looked above. The azure sky, green trees, red
gravelly soil and the colourful paintings all seemed to be smiling in unison as
they were victorious to incite a peaceful riot of colours.
The day melted away to
evening. A black drape was put over on all their exhibits by the tip-toing
night. We were called for dinner in Bahadur Chitrakar’s house. The house which
we saw in the day time was no less than an established, famed art museum.
Bahadur himself had painstakingly collected the souvenirs on display in his
house by bartering away his own scroll paintings (known as Patachitra in
Bengali) to those painters. His semi-permanent house proudly displayed the
papyrus paintings, Egyptian artefacts, palm leaf scrolls known as “tala
pattachitra” (http://gaatha.com/palm-leaf-pattachitra/)
from the neighbouring painters of Odisha, mirror works from Rajasthan and many
more such jewels lost in the sands of time. The Government wants to buy his collections,
repair his house and make a museum near the village to display those
collections. This offer has put Bahadur in a fix. He cannot decide what to do.
He asked our opinion saying that he was illiterate; he did not know what would
be good for him. His intoxicated voice had such a pain that we could not share
our opinion with him. Now, when I think about that day, I can still feel the
pained voice. This was the pain of illiteracy, indecisiveness, poverty and the
pain of the father who did not wanted to bid farewell to his married daughter
but had to do so under social compulsion.
Another incident happened
in Bahadur’s house after we had our dinner. I want to include that incident as
a concluding note. After we were done with our dinner, the painter wanted to
gift us a ‘patachitra’ each. He asked our names one by one and
went on creating beautiful paintings with them. He was being verbally assisted
by his daughter, so that he ensured that the spellings of our names went right.
His daughter faltered while spelling out my name in Bengali. The brush which he
held on so firmly even in his inebriated condition got twitched. He looked up
and mildly rebuked his daughter by saying that he had done everything to
educate her and she failed in this minor test. His daughter went visibly embarrassed.
Not embarrassed for her father’s scolding in front of the outsiders but because
of her failure. Her and her father’s defeated faces continued to haunt me for a
long time.
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