Published in Akhyan: A Celebration of Masks, Puppets and Picture Showmen Traditions of India, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, October to November 2010, pp. 15-27
If some illustrations of a text are extreme reductions of a complex narrative - a mere emblem of the story, others enlarge the text, adding details, figures, and a setting not given in the written source. The style as a distinctive habitual system of artistic forms is an expressive vehicle and can modify the often scantily literal sense in the very process of translating the text into an image. - Meyer Schapiro [1]
Tulasidasa, the celebrated sixteenth-century author of Ramacharitamanasa, while elaborating on the perplexity felt by a female companion of Sita in verbally describing the beauty of Rama, of which she had merely caught a glimpse, makes her utter: "Gira anayana, nayana bin bani" ["The speech does not have (the faculty of) vision and the vision is bereft of speech"]. This brief statement in a way gives an insight into the conceptual difference that may exist between the verbal and visual narratives. Though in all cultures verbal (textual or oral) narrative can exist independently of the visual (pictorial) narrative, the art of the "picture showman" [2] endeavours to complement the word with the visual image and vice versa. In many cases, the composite narrative of the word and the painted image is amplified by the performance - facial and bodily gestures and postures, singing with or without the accompaniment of musical instruments, dance, theatrical rendering of scenes, and even audience participation.
Indian traditions of storytelling, often accompanied by painted panels or scrolls, can be traced back through literary evidence to at least the second century BC and are known to have existed almost all over the subcontinent. Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina literature contains abundant references to the art of painted scrolls (pata chitras) which were exhibited in ancient times to educate and entertain the people. Classical Sanskrit literature has several references to yama patas.
Narrative scroll paintings are still produced in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal, and Bihar, and a few Deccani scroll paintings are known as well. Some of the oldest and the most interesting references to picture showmen are contained in early Jaina literature. Bhagavati Sutra, a canonical text (circa 3rd century AD) refers to the life of Mankhali Gosala, the greatest of the Ajivika teachers. [3] There it is said that Mankhali Gosala was the son of a mankha (picture showman) named Mankhali. Abhayadeva (circa eleventh century), commenting upon the word mankha in the Bhagavati Sutra, says that it refers to a special type of mendicant "whose hands were occupied with a picture board.” [4] Aupapatika Sutra (circa 3rd to 5th century AD) also mentions a mankha along with other performers. In its description of the Purnabhadra Chaitya, the Aupapatika Sutra states that the shrine was always visited by dancers, actors, rope-dancers, wrestlers, jumpers, mimes, storytellers, rasa dancers, fortune-tellers, acrobats, picture storytellers (mankha), instrumentalists, attendants, and bards (magaha). [5] Hemachandra, in his Abhidhana Chintamani, [6] explains the word mankha as magaha or bard, but it is interesting to note that the above reference in the Aupapatika Sutra mentions both mankha and magaha and, therefore, these were perhaps two different kinds of performers.
In Buddhist literature there are references to charana chitta or mobile painting. The commentary on Samyutta-Nikaya [7] mentions charanam nama chittan and explains it as: "There are Brahman heretics who, having prepared a canvas booth (pata kotthaka) and painting (lekhapitva) therein presentations of all kinds of happiness and misery connected with existence in heavens or hell, take this picture and travel about (vicharanti), pointing out: 'If you do this you will get this'...." [8] It is clear that charana chitta was a mobile painting or a painted booth having illustrations of punishments in hell.According to Ananda Coomaraswamy charana chitta was the Buddhist equivalent of the better known term yama pata.[9] He believes that the Lakkhana Sutra, which deals with karma and punishments, and Devaduta Sutra (Dulva text), which is actually a description of the kingdom of Yama, the god of death, were illustrated on the picture boards and picture booths of the itinerant storytellers. [10]
Kuvalayamala [11] (circa eighth century), a Jaina text, refers to a wandering teacher (upadhyaya) who showed a Jaina monk a painted panel of samsarachakra, the cycle of the universe, which contained depictions of the pains and pleasures of the human world, the heavenly regions, the involvement with various karmas and the different punishments in hell.
Comparable to the reference to samsarachakra chitra pata are the descriptions of the yama patas of classical Sanskrit literature. In Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, there is a reference to a spy who disguised himself as a yama pattika (picture showman) and carried along with him the painted scrolls of punishments in hell. He would habitually enter the houses of his patrons, where he would display his yama-cloth and sing songs, presumably of a religious type. [12] Bana's Harsha- charitam [13] also mentions the yama pattika and explains that they showed pictures and gave sermons on vice and virtue, reward and punishment.In Vaddaradhane , [14] a tenth-century Kannada collection of stories from a Jaina classic, there is an interesting reference to a picture showman performing in the marketplace of a town. The story of Sukumarasvami, in this collection, contains the description of a Brahmin minister and his daughter who, in order to perform the ritual of fulfillment of the latter's vows, are going to a Jaina monk. On the way they see a man being taken to the gallows by the king's guards. It is revealed upon enquiry that the person accused is a picture showman whose accomplices steal paddy from the bags of paddy merchants while they are kept engrossed in the picture performance by the picture showmen.
Tarikh-i-Feroz Shahi mentions an interesting incident of how a Brahmin who was in possession of a wooden tablet (muhrak) covered within and without with paintings of "demons" and other objects was burnt alive on the orders of Sultan Feroz Shah. It says that astheBrahminrefused to be converted to Islam he was "tied (in) hand and foot and cast into (a pile of faggots); the (painted) tablet was thrown on top and the pile was lighted... the tablet of the Brahmin was lighted in two places, at his head and at his feet...." [15]
From all these references in literature dating from the third century, it is evident that the tradition of wandering teachers-cum-picture storytellers was widely popular in ancient times. Even today there are wandering picture storytellers who carry painted scrolls showing the punishments of hell as well as popular religious stories. We already know about the tradition of the Chitrakathi paintings of Maharashtra [16] and the related performance of narrative singing; the Rajasthani "reading" of the painted phad of Pabuji (figures 1 to 3) and the other heroes to the accompaniment of music and dance; and the jadu patua 'magic scroll narrators' of Bengal and Bihar .
Both Vishakhadatta and Bana mention a type of picture showman known as yama pattika which literally means the "carrier of Yama-board", and refers to people who conventionally earned their livelihood by exhibiting painted panels of punishments rendered in hell. It is interesting that even today in Bengal one finds narrative scroll paintings of storytellers with depictions of scenes from hell known as jam pot, which is clearly the vernacularization of the Sanskrit yama pata. The Garoda tradition of Gujarat too has at least three panels dealing with Yama and the rewards and punishments of heaven and hell. This is one of the most striking examples of the continuity of an ancient Indian cultural feature in contemporary times.
Beliefs, practices, and terminologies associated with the ritual context of some of the painted panels and scrolls of storytellers, reveal that these not only serve as visual aids to stories narrated but have the status of a sacred object or shrine as well. The custom of consecration of sacred images, shrines or paintings has been common among the Hindus and the Jainas as well as among some of the tribal communities of India. The Shilpashastras, the Hindu canons of art, iconography, and architecture, contain elaborate prescriptions for the consecration of shrines and images. It is interesting to note that the tribal Rathwas of central-eastern Gujarat and the Bhilalas of western Madhya Pradesh make elaborate narrative paintings based on their myth of creation on the walls of their huts and consecrate them by a ceremony of spirit invocation wherein some of the characters of the painted myth are invoked to descend into the wall and reside there till the paintings last. [17] The badvo or 'chief ritual practitioner' gets possessed by a deity and narrates, image by image, the painted myth, pointing out at the same time the errors, if any, committed by the painters. The painted walls, thus consecrated, become living shrines.
Narrative scrolls of storytellers' paintings related to the legends of the deified folk hero Pabuji and the neo-Vaishnava incarnation Dev Narayan are reportedly treated as the shrines of these deities. After the scroll paintings are completed, they are ritually consecrated by a ceremony of invocation of deities and when the scrolls are to be discarded, for any reason, the deities present in the scrolls are invoked and requested to leave them by a ritual of deconsecration as described a little later in this introduction. A similar custom was commonly observed also in the Telangana region, where old and tattered scrolls that could not be used any more were ritually cremated and immersed in a river, like a dead body.
Significantly, the Garoda picture showmen (see figure 5)of Gujarat refer to their ambulatory scroll-reading tours as jatra (yatra) or 'pilgrimage'. In the popular sense, the word yatra means 'a visit to a place of pilgrimage'. Another form of yatra is rathayatra or 'ambulating of the ratha or chariot' (which carries the sacred image and is a form of mobile shrine). The Garodas treat their picture scroll as a mobile temple (its topmost portion being painted in the form of a shikhara or temple spire) and therefore designate their scroll reading tours as yatra.
From these few examples it would become amply clear that the act of narrating paintings as well as that of listening and watching the performance (participation by the audience) bear a strong ritual significance.
Narrative Pictorial Devices in the Storyteller’s Paintings
The form, shape, and size of the painted panels and scrolls and intended type and extent of the pictorial narration are intrinsically interconnected and as such are important determinants of the pictorial schema of these paintings.
Most of the Bengal pats of the patuas, the Santhal jadu patua scrolls, and all the Telangana (Andhra) scrolls contain a single story in which the episodes are sequentially arranged in a linear fashion for a linear narrative, leading to a climactic scene, either where the scroll ends or which is then followed by a couple of didactic panels, usually of punishments in hell, or deification of the main character (for instance, the Manasa scrolls of the patuas), or creation of a particular caste or caste hero (as in the Bhavana Rishi scrolls of Andhra Pradesh). In single-story scrolls, comparatively more pictorial space is available to the artist to recreate, elaborate or improvise upon the oral narrative and translate it into a series of pictures, as can be seen in the Murshidabad pats.
In contrast, the Garoda storytellers of Gujarat used a narrow vertical scroll having nineteen compartments, of which the last three had scenes of reward and punishment in heaven and hell, whereas the rest were related either to deities such as Lakshmi, Ganesha, and Shiva or to selected episodes from the Ramayana or the local legends of Gujarat (figures 6 & 7). In these scrolls only one panel was devoted to each legend or episode and therefore the painter had to compress important events into a limited space, usually by employing continuous narrative, or had to choose only the climactic episode (often a tear-jerker) for depiction. The narrator usually resorted to oral narrative of the concerned legend till he reached the climactic episode (which was pictorially illustrated in the scroll) and on reaching this point he usually got up to collect alms from the audience which was by then spellbound and emotionally charged enough to donate charitably. Each panel of these scrolls is highly abridged - an "extreme reduction of a complex narrative".
The Chitrakathis of Maharashtra (figure 10) did not use a running scroll in which the narrative sequence was so rigidlypredetermined.Here, theentire story, or its selected episodes, was divided into several pictorial situations and then each such situation would be depicted on a handy rectangular panel, as illustrated in the article by Anna Dallapiccola (1980).
The narrator followed the general storyline and strung these panels, one after the other, in the running thread of the narrative. According to a performer, [18] "If one or two pictures were missing here and there, it did not matter; the narrator still verbally pursued the storyline, and continued the picture show." In this situation the painter and the narrator were not so rigidly bound by the linear sequence of episodes as long as they were broadly pursuing the plot of the legend. The narrator also had the facility to re-use the same picture in another context if the narrative so required - a possibility not available to the narrator of running scrolls mentioned above. [19]
The most elaborate and complex structure of pictorial devices ever utilized for a storyteller's painting is to be found in the large Rajasthani scrolls dedicated to the legends of Pabuji and Dev Narayan, and as such would deserve a reference here. [20] It may be clarified that what is presented is only a brief account of these traditions and may by no means be treated as detailed or complete. Since the present volume does not include a full-fledged article on these traditions, they are described here at some length.
The life stories of Pabuji, a deified folk hero, and that of Dev Narayan, a neo-Vaishnava incarnation, are even today painted on cloth by painters of the Joshi clan living in such areas as Shahpura, Bhilwara, Chittorgarh, and Udaipur in Rajasthan, for their bhopa clients who are priests-cum-narrator-singer/musicians of these deities. The bhopas commission these elaborately painted panels, consecrate them on their acquisition, treat them as living shrines, and hold performances in front of audiences of devotees, in which a part of the legend of these deities is related in prose and verse by them and their helpers with the accompaniment of musical instruments and choreographic movements. When such a scroll has outlived its life or has proved to be inauspicious, the bhopa and the painter are said to take it to Pushkar Lake on an auspicious day, invoke the main deity by ritual offerings combined with recitation of sacred stanzas and request him to leave the scroll-shrine, which when so deserted by the spirits, can be immersed in the lake in the same fashion as the charred bones of a dead person.
The cloth panels of Pabuji (approximately 1.5 by 5 to 8 metres) and those of Dev Narayan, of about the same dimensions, are traditionally painted in earth and mineral colours. The complete legend of Pabuji is pictorially conceptualized in approximately sixty episodes (see figures 1 and 2). Briefly, Pabuji who belonged to the Rathor clan of Rajputs, was incarnated somewhere in the fourteenth century in Kolumund. It is said that he was born of a union between his father Dhandhal, a ruler of the clan and an apsara, 'a nymph' who from time to time converted herself into a tigress or lioness and as such breast-fed the infant Pabuji. After the death of Pabuji's parents, his stepbrother Budoji came to the throne and his stepsister Premalde was married to Khichi. When Pabuji attained adulthood, he was gifted the divine mare Kesar Kalmi by Dewal, a Charan woman, on the promise that he would always protect her. For many years Pabuji remained occupied in battles against Baghels, Sumras, Dodas, and others. He married a Sodha Rajput princess but soon after his marriage received news that Khichi had attacked the cows of his protégée Dewal who had gifted him the divine mare. He fought with Khichi and then forgave him after restoring the cows to Dewal. Subsequently, Pabuji died in battle and attained divine status. [21]
Dev Narayan, a neo-Hindu incarnation of Vishnu, is one of the most popular deities of the Gujar community. He was born to Sadhu Mata, the wife of Sawai Bhoj, who was the eldest of the twenty-four brothers of the Bagrawat clan. According to legend, a young widow Leela Sevdi saw a man called Hariram Rawat carrying a lion's head in his hands. Through this vision, she bore a lion-headed child called Bagh Rawat. He married twelve women who gave birth to the twenty-four Bagrawat brothers. Once in a drinking spree, the Bagrawats poured a large amount of drink on the ground, which reached the netherworld, offending the serpent Basag who complained to Vishnu about this. Vishnu descended on earth to destroy Sawai Bhoj. Sawai Bhoj's wife Sadhu, who was then preparing for a bath, came out to venerate Vishnu in her nudity. Vishnu was so pleased with her reverence that he promised to be incarnated as her son. Many battles were fought between the Bagrawats and their adversaries. Subsequently, a divine stream of water issued from the rocks of the Malasari hills and Dev Narayan appeared in a lotus floating in the stream.
The legends of Pabuji and Dev Narayan assume epic roportions by involving the life stories of several generations of families and extended families of the important characters and the saga of innumerable battles fought, won and lost. The pictorialization of these epics is on a grand scale involving complex schematic strategies.
In linear sequencing, as in Bengal or Telangana scrolls, the episodes of a story are organized in chronological order, one closely following the other. In the case of the Pabuji and Dev Narayan panels, the chronological sequencing is not followed by the artist in the process of painting or in the placement of episodes. Single or a few episodes are scattered all over the panel (the basis of this schema is discussed below) but as the bhopa and his partners narrate the story, they resort to chronological sequencing and while doing so point at the relevant painted episode at the definite moment when a reference to it becomes imminent in the oral narrative. Often two sequentially interconnected painted episodes are at quite a distance from one another. As the narrator-performer endeavours to interconnect and weave these scattered illustrations into his narrative, he has to make his way dancing from one point to another and thus in that duration he gets an opportunity to improvise his song and music. In other words, the pictorial schema of these panels is so designed that it allows scope for a composite performance of oral narration in prose and verse as well as dance and music. An oral narrative cannot but follow a temporally organized sequence wherein episodes can be narrated only in a linear fashion, one after the other. But in the case of Pabuji and Dev Narayan scrolls the sequencing of the temporal narrative and that of the pictorial does not dovetail in a linear fashion. As in true epics, the oral and painted versions of the Pabuji and Dev Narayan legends incorporate inthem manytemporalities andspatialities which keep converging into and diverging from each other. The painter, as he pictorializes the legends, broadly works from left to right in rhythmic progression comparable to that of a scrolling creeper moving in a definite direction while its offshoots zigzag here and there. As he paints, his greatest concern is to make sure that each episode is placed in its right spatial context - a schema conventionally known to the bhopa and which serves as the basis of (the bhopa's) sequencing of episodes, in terms of both oral and pictorial narrative. To attain this, the painter continuously earmarks spaces, by means of rough sketching, to accommodate each definite character and the details of each episode. Then he proceeds to finalize the drawing and fill up the colours. Handling cluster after cluster in this manner, the painter completes the entire scroll.
An analysis of the distribution of painted episodes in these scrolls reveals an interesting pattern. If one were to imagine dividing the horizontal scroll into four approximately equal divisions, it would become apparent that the episodes related to the hero's personal life, his paternal and maternal homes, his inlaws' town, his relatives and friends, his enemy's attack on his land and so on would be shown in the first and second divisions on the left. The hero's place of birth, palaces, stables, court, royal paraphernalia, harems, and parks and gardens would occupy the second and third divisions from the left. The fourth division would be primarily reserved for the enemy camp - the hero's attack on the enemy, the enemy's palaces, stables, harems, gardens, etc. [22] Though this may be the broad pictorial scheme, one may not find watertight compartments here. Shrilal Joshi, the scroll painter of Bhilwara has, time and again, drawn the attention of scholars to a certain correspondence that may exist between the placement of some kingdoms referred to in the legends and shown in the scrolls, and the actual geographical location of those places. [23]
It is remarkable how a whole chain of episodes that takes place in a large region comprising territories of allies and enemies is, at one level, compacted in the pictorial space of the scroll - a kind of "reductive imagery", and at another level the same episodes are immensely amplified to make them appear much more magnificent than life - an outcome of the rich use of hyperbole and metaphor which is the true language of epics and legends.
In the present context it would also be important to bring into focus some of the peculiar features of the pictorial narrative vocabulary created by the artists of various narrative scrolls. In addition to using ornate borders, creepers, trees, rivers and buildings as scene dividers, they frequently make use of positions and postures of human figures to divide a scene. In such cases, the figure on the left is shown in profile, looking to the right and the figure on the right, again in profile, looks to the left. In this arrangement the bordering figures of the consecutive scenes are set back to back. These compositional devices make each scene appear self-contained and at the same time dramatically intensify the involvement of characters, giving them the sense of participation and action so necessary in narrative painting.
In the context of scene dividers another narrative device of "opening windows" as used by the Garoda storytellers of Gujarat must be mentioned. In the pictorialization of the stories of Harishchandra and Taramati, Shravana and his blind parents, and in the depiction of hell, the artist places chosen episodes in square or rectangular frames within the broad panel devoted to the concerned story - as if opening windows on certain selected scenes - thereby creating space within space.
One ancient and universally employed narrative technique comprises reusing the same picture to illustrate different subjects. In old printed Bibles it often happened that the picture of Jacob's birth was repeated for the birth of Joseph and other scriptural figures and a battle scene was serviceable for illustrating several such encounters. [24] This device is commonly used in the narration of Rajasthani scrolls. For example, the scene of Nevaji (brother of Sawai Bhoj) playing chaupar (a dice game) with his sister-in-law and listening to her arguments against her husband marrying Jaimati is repeated for the episode of solemnization of the marriage between Sawai Bhoj and Jaimati, and later on the same scene is used when Jaimati approaches Sawai Bhoj to inform him about his brothers having been killed. Similarly, the scene of Naulakha Bag where the twenty-four Bagrawat brothers were on a drinking spree is subsequently repeated for the one in which the Bagrawat brothers go to abduct Jaimati. The scene of Sawai Bhoj's brother Nevaji frequenting the ritual fire of Rupnath between all his battles to magically heal his wounds, is made to serve also as the illustration for Nevaji's wife Netu visiting Rupnath to hand over her baby to him before becoming sati. Several such examples show that this technique was highly popular among the scroll painters and narrators of Rajasthan.
While dealing with the variety of narrative devices used by the painters of the storytellers' scrolls, it would be important to recognize two models of spatial presentation: (a) in which the perspectivization occurs through the consciousness of the participant characters and (b) where it occurs through that of the viewer. Occasionally the two are combined. Though most episodes in the storytellers' paintings seem to follow the first model there are occasional examples of a combination of the two models. Let us take, for instance, the episode of Indrajit, Ravana's son, as depicted in Paithan painting, who in his invisible form shoots innumerable arrows at Rama's army. Here the situation is such that in the lower half of the painting Rama's army is shown fighting, where the first type of perspectivization occurs. But in the upper half of the painting Indrajit, half-emerging from the cloud, is shown shooting arrows - being invisible to Rama's army he is depicted only from the onlooker's viewpoint. Here the characters of the lower half of the panel are not aware of the presence of that of the upper half but the onlooker is able to see both situations at one visual level. The same situation occurs again in Paithan painting in the depiction of Hanuman in a tree, dropping Rama's ring into Sita's lap - Sita is unaware of Hanuman's presence in Ashoka Vatika but the viewer is able to see the complete scene. In the Garoda scrolls of Gujarat when Dasharatha shoots an arrow in the direction of a well where Shravana is drawing water (Dasharatha mistaking him for an animal), the two participants are oblivious of each other's presence but the onlooker is able to see both of them simultaneously. [25]
Related tothe twomentioned models ofperspectivization are the respective situations of the profile and the frontal. The profile face is detached from the viewer and belongs to the body in action in a space shared with other profiles. [26] In most storytellers' paintings this profile-facing-profile situation is employed but when the images of deities are to be shown (as in the scrolls of Pabuji or Dev Narayan, in Garoda scrolls or in Bengal scrolls) usually the frontal posture is chosen because the deities are supposed to be giving darshan to the devotees (the audience) who are outside the painting - in front of them, face-to-face, and not as participant characters of the story.
Many of these pictorial devices combined with the more familiar ones of continuous narrative, multiple vantage points, or typecasting of certain characters are often used simultaneously in a single genre, providing it with a kind of narrative rhythm rather than using them as diverse elements.
Negotiating Contemporaneity
The second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th coincide with Bengal's "age of mechanical reproduction" and its immediate aftermath: woodcuts, lithography, oleography, printing, photography and cinema. For the first time the common man had access to a range of images through printed pictures of gods, goddesses and renowned personalities of the time through postcards, calendars and product labels; through photographs, newspapers, and textbooks. Grappling with this mass proliferation of reproduced imagery with its reduced or enlarged scales and proportions, realistic but frozen gestures and postures, and severely edited and fragmented figures, the first generation audiences of the age of mechanical replication had to decipher the new "pictorial" script, eventually to be able to "read" it and communicate through it. Bengal's response to this new vocabulary was twofold - on the one hand resisting the change often with sarcastic ridicule and on the other adopting many of its features in professional practice, even using it as a tool for more effective expression and a wider outreach. While savouring the transition, the urban middle-class and rural Bengal were developing a taste for the new visual culture. The bazaar painters of Kalighat, the rural patua scroll painters and storytellers and the village women embroiderers of the kantha quilts imbibed and appropriated these changes in the pictorial conceptualization of their images. In this context I examine how the rural storytellers, scroll painters and embroiderers confronted the media and the media-based imagery, how they saw in the process of transformation the essence of expression and how as image makers they recalibrated their pictorial language after their exposure to the replicated pictures proliferating at that time.
For them the transition from their inherited tradition to absorption of new elements - both in terms of materials and techniques as well as exploration of new possibilities of expression - was smooth and natural. When in most parts of rural India comparatively closed and repetitive artistic conventions had brought about a certain degree of stagnancy and decadence in pictorial expression, for historical reasons in Bengal, by and large, there was more openness about the adoption and the articulation of a new media-based imagery. For the folk artists the absorption of modernity did not mean degeneration of tradition but its consolidation.
Let me take a few examples to illustrate how the rural Bengali artists responded to the new media and appropriated contemporary social events and imagery, side by side with their conventional art practice.
A Narrative Scroll from Medinipur “After Independence”
This mid-20 century scroll titled "After Independence" depicts, with a tinge of sarcasm, the family tensions, social conflicts and agony that arose from the breakdown of existing moral values and economic structures, the effect of modernization around the time of India's independence. The scroll is a response to the so-called degenerative effect of cinema on the youth of the time. The opening scene of the narrative depicts a young girl crying in the kitchen over her unfortunate economic circumstances, she does not have new clothes to wear. Below her is a queue of people waiting with ration cards to obtain their quota of rice. In contrast, young men and women wearing new and fancy clothes and shoes are shown going to a cinema hall. The next three panels are devoted to portraying people going to the cinema in motorcars, cycle rickshaws and bullock carts. The old and the physically handicapped too are shown rushing to see a movie. The "bad" impact of cinema is represented by images of "modern" men and women standing in queue at a court with their applications for a court marriage, as a judge drives up to the court in a car. In one panel a newly married "modern" couple is shown approaching their illiterate and uneducated parents and addressing them in English "Hallo dear", etc. The climactic scene shows the father-in-law falling at the daughter-in-law's feet sarcastically addressing her as "Mother Chandi", the destroyer of demons. (These interpretations are based on the narrative songs of the patua.)
The scroll is in line with the Bengali patua tradition of responding in their art to contemporary social and religious scandals, satirizing politicians, the bhadralok class, the ejuraj (educated rajas), babus and fashionable dandies, as also profusely depicted in Kalighat painting. It is an interesting phenomenon that when folk artists of India, even today, are busy mechanically churning out the umpteenth version of their past artistic the conventions, their counterparts in the late 19 and the early 20 century Bengal had begun to respond to the contemporary social and political conflicts as well as family tensions in their works.
“Indira Gandhi Murder” - Another Scroll from Medinipur
Mythologizing reality, turning it into a fable or an allegory comes easily to the patuas of Bengal. Whether they pictorialize the mythological stories of Rama, Krishna or the goddess Durga or incidents from real life such as Elokeshi's murder (a scandalous event of 1873 in which Nabin Banerjee killed his wife Elokeshi for allegedly being involved in an adulterous relationship with a temple priest) or narir hate driver khun ("driver murdered by a woman", an incident of a newlywed woman stabbing a bus driver who attempted to rob her of her gold ornaments), they equally work with “reductive imagery” - two pillars indicating a building, a tree signifying a landscape, etc. This technique effectively transforms the locale from real to fictitious, from material to symbolic. Patuas were used to portrayingdivinepersonages such as Rama,Lakshmana, Sita or Durga in the image of ordinary people - Rama would be shown as a member of the bhadralok of Calcutta, wearing Mughal court costumes, and his palace would be one of the Victorian buildings of the city. Sita or Durga would be no different from middle-class Bengali brides. On the other hand, while narrativizing contemporary events from real life which reach them through the media, the patuas fall back upon the pre-existing model of depiction of mythological characters and locales and thereby transcend reality. The day-to-day images of contemporary life - cinema houses, cars and buses, palatial mansions of Calcutta, helicopters and aircrafts - are images from another world which come to patuas through the media: newspapers, photographs, cinema and so on. They come to them already sensationalized, fantasized and therefore mythologized. As they use a mythological locale and the iconography of Hindu deities to depict contemporary scandals, they once again mythologize "reality". The painted contemporary images thereby undergo an immediate metamorphosis to become legends. This essentially formal pictorial device of easy transformations mastered by the patuas also facilitated the conversion of national heroes into deities, a process that has gained popularity in the last fifteen years, especially with the wider outreach of the media in rural Bengal. Against this background let us examine a patua's scroll depicting the murder of Indira Gandhi. It was painted in 1989 by Bahar Chitrakar of Noya village in Medinipur district.
Just as any conventional scroll devoted to the goddess Sarasvati, Kali, Durga or Manasa would start with a representation of the respective goddess invoked at the beginning of its narration, this scroll starts with a photographic portrait of Indira Gandhi taken from an election poster. As Sarasvati would be depicted with the vina, her attribute, Indira Gandhi is shown with a microphone in front of her. The conventional representation of any of the goddesses in the opening panel would be in the form of a cultic image - frontal and facing the devotee. This cultic image for worship would be in sharp contrast to the rest of the scenes depicting the goddess in action in various participatory episodes. As the patua seeks to iconize Indira Gandhi and literally give her the position accorded to a deity in the scroll, he needs to find a device by which the icon can be marked off from her mortal life. The patua attains this crucial differentiation by using for her deified representation a photographic portrait placed in a frame within a frame, while in narrativizing her mortal life he paints various episodes with watercolour and brush. As the patua opens the scroll, he first displays the photographic portrait and invokes the "goddess" through laudatory verses and then proceeds to narrate the episodes: Indira Gandhi seated in her office in Delhi, flanked by her guards, a bus from Medinipur heading for Calcutta carrying villagers to her rally; two guards saluting her as she steps out; guards shooting her; Sonia Gandhi with the wounded Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi addressing an election meeting in Medinipur; Indira Gandhi brought to hospital; Rajiv Gandhi piloting a "special helicopter" to Delhi; Indira Gandhi's body lying in state for public homage, a Delhi jail where the guards are imprisoned; Indira Gandhi's body being brought to the crematorium accompanied by a helicopter overhead; her ashes being scattered over the Himalaya from an aircraft.
The choice of episodes and the moulding of characters by the patua are in line with the news and images broadcast to the nation by the media at the time of Indira Gandhi's death - both retain an equilibrium between myth and modernity. The images, as they appear in the scroll, create in the minds of the patua's audience an imaginary faraway setting, as remote as the "land" of Rama or Durga.
Here, ironically the present, the modern and the real is translated into the past, the distant and the mythic by conversion of images into metaphors. This attribute of the language of the patua's art provides him with the facility to imbibe modern media-based images and enrich his orbit of expression. Indeed he was aware of the magical properties of the artist's power of attaining transformations - of one image into another, of time present into time past, of space profane into space sacred, and vice versa.
Today the patua painters of Bengal create narrative scrolls based on catastrophic events of the contemporary world, such as 9/11 or the 2004 tsunami, often deriving quotes not only from the contemporary image world around them, but also from the works of other patuas, which has started to become a shared tradition over time. The quotes move freely across contexts, building up a freer and wider language of intervisuality.
On account of the issues of land rights, land grabbing by absentee landlords, control of natural resources by outside manipulators and exploitation by moneylenders, several tribal and peasant communities have suffered immense injustices. In some of the Santal scrolls depicting their myths of creation one finds reference to such insurrectionary encounters with modes of control and governance. For example, in one of these scrolls one finds, Yama, the god of death depicted as a uniformed policeman with bullet belt. In another scroll Shiva is shown moving around escorted by policemen carrying rifles. Non-conventional themes such as the life of Khudiram Bose have become a part of the Santal scroll tradition.
The choice for the folk and tribal artists is between mass-producing, repetitive and lifeless replicas of their inherited traditional themes for a souvenir market and interior decoration or to reflect upon their contemporary social and political situation and articulate these in their work. The work of the latter category is definitely more innovative, vigorous and lively.
Notes
[1] Shapiro, Meyer. 1973. Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text. The Hague, p. 12.[2] The term was first used by A.K. Coomaraswamy in an article entitled "Picture Showmen", published in Indian Historical Quarterly, V, 2 (June 1929). Though it is understood that such a term could have its own limitations and problems, it is used here once again as it is familiar to scholars.
[3] Bhagavati Sutra, with commentary by Abhayadeva, 3 vols. 1918- 21. Bombay, XV, sutra 540, folio 659f.
[4] Basham, A.L. 1951. History and Doctrine of the Ajivikas, a Vanished Indian Religion. London, p. 35.[5] Aupapatika Sutra.1959. Ghasilalji Maharaj (ed.). Rajkot, sutra 2, p. 24.[6] Abhidhana ChintamanibyHemachandra. 1847. O. Bohtlingk andR. Roth (ed.s). St Petersburg.
[7] Samyutta-Nikaya, Pali text edition by Leon Feer, chapter III, pp. 151-52, trans, by F.L. Woodward, The Book of the Kindred Sayings, Pali Text Society, 1 3, Oxford University Press (London 1924).
[8] Coomaraswamy, A.K. 1981. "An Early Passage on Indian Painting". Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought. New Delhi, p. 210.
[9] Coomaraswamy. 1929. "Picture Showmen". op. cit, pp. 182-87.
[10] Coomaraswamy. 1981. op. cit., , p. 211, fn. 2.
[11] Kuvalayamala. 1965. Hemasagarasuri (ed.). Bombay, chapter 19, pp. 291-95.
[12] Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa quoted in Basham, op. cit.
[13] Harsacharita. 1958. J. Pathak (ed. and trans.). Benaras, chapter 5, p. 257.
[14] Khadabadi, B.K. 1979. Vaddaradhane. Dharwad, pp. 23-26.
[15] Elliot, H.M. and J. Dowson. 1877. "History of India as told by its own Historians", Tarikh-i-Feroz Shahi. London, p. 365.
[16] Dallapiccola, A.L. 1980. Die 'Paithan'-Malerei. Wiesbaden; Jain- Neubauer Jutta. 1978. "The Chitrakathi Paintings of Maharashtra". Treasures of Everyday Art: Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum, Bombay: Marg Publications; and Ray Eva. 1979. "Documentation for Paithan Painting". Artibus Asiae, Vol. XL. Ascona.
[17] Jain, Jyotindra. 1982. Painted Myths of Creation. Art and Ritual of an Indian Tribe. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi.[18] Parshuram Vishram from Pingulirana, Maharashtra.
[19] This information is again from Parshuram Vishram.
[20] The information about these scrolls has been obtained from Shrilal Joshi of Bhilwara, Rajasthan.
[21] According to popular belief, Pabuji, being a divine incarnation, could not have succumbed to ordinary death and therefore did not die but attained divine status.
[22] According to Shrilal Joshi.
[23] Singh, Kavita. 1995. "The Painted Epic: Narrative in the Rajasthani Phad". Indian Painting: Essays in Honour of Karl J. Khandalavala. B.N. Goswamy (ed.). New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, pp. 409-35.
[24] Shapiro, op. cit., p. 9.
[25] This situation is typical of Sanskrit drama where characters on the stage act as though they are oblivious of one another, while the audience can see both.
[26] Shapiro, op. cit., p. 38.
Published in Akhyan: A Celebration of Masks, Puppets and Picture Showmen Traditions of India, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, October to November 2010, pp. 15-27