I have a small problem. Every time I learn something about anything remotely related to history, lore or textile, I become insufferable about it for at least three weeks. I will bring it up in conversation unprompted. I will steer dinner table talks toward it with frightening efficiency. I will explain it to people who did not ask. My friends know this about me and they suffer quietly.
Pattachitra is my latest affliction. It’s been a week so I am still coming to terms with the worthy words that will narrate its story.
Pata is Sanskrit for cloth. Chitra is a picture. So literally: cloth painting. But it is essentially a scroll. A long, sometimes absurdly long scroll. Three feet on a good day, twenty-five feet if the story demands it. Painted in frames, like a comic strip, except each frame is dense with bold black outlines and colours that the artists make themselves from whatever is around them.
In Medinipur, red comes from teak leaves and betel leaf. Blue from the blue pea flower. Green from ivy gourd leaves. Black from soot. In the Santhal tradition, orange comes from a stone called Kamala Pathar. Purple from Pui Metuli leaves. Pink from banyan buds. The colour is itself part of the knowledge, and that knowledge is passed down within families, generation to generation.
The scroll is not just a painting. Patua, the artist, composes a song before painting begins. The song sets the story. Then they paint it. And when they perform, they unroll the scroll frame by frame, singing the story as they go. The song has three formal stages - the Kahini (the story), the Mahatmya (the glory of it), and the Bhanita, where the artist introduces themselves within the telling. It is, in structure, closer to a raga than a painting.
The range of what gets told this way has been all encompassing. Folk stories, Social messages, Sufi Tradition, Mythology, Gods, Biographies and many contemporary topics. Ramayana. Mahabharata. Manasa Mangal. The life of Rabindranath Tagore. The Santhal origin myth. A story about Durga and Ganga having an argument. And… the French Revolution. There is a Patachitra scroll about Louis XIV and the guillotine, sung in Bengali, painted in frames. The tradition has always absorbed what it sees. It has always been that malleable.
That malleability is probably why it survived. Pingla in Paschim Medinipur is the most concentrated hub of this art with over 300 artists in the block, many of them in the village of Naya. They formed a collective called Chitrataru in 2011, applied for the GI tag in March 2018, and received it.
The collective organizes the annual three-day Patachitra festival, Pot Maya, in Naya, Pingla. The festival, which began in 2010, features exhibitions, workshops on natural color making, and performances of Pater Gaan (song-based storytelling).
The Chitrakar surname is itself a whole story. The Patua community, largely Muslim, adopted it as a way of identifying with the historic Chitrakar caste of folk painters, which gave them both a lineage and some standing in a predominantly Hindu patronage world. They paid little attention to the boundaries of faith while looking for patronage, and the art reflects that. A Sufi saint sits beside Krishna. Manasa Mangal is painted by Muslim hands. The scroll on communal harmony or Samprodayik Sampriti is part of their performance repertoire. The sacred and the everyday have always overlapped in Pattachitra.
I have not been to Naya yet. This is a fact about myself that I intend to correct.
Pattachitra is a performance tradition. It is a music tradition. It is a colour science tradition. It is a community's entire way of knowing and transmitting the world. The scroll does not exist without the song. The song does not exist without the painter. The painter does not exist without the knowledge of which stone makes saffron and which leaf makes green. Pull one thread and the whole thing unravels.
The Patua used to walk to you. Scroll on their back, song already in their throat, story ready to unfurl at your door. You don't have to wait for them anymore. You can add to cart, check out in two clicks, and receive the painting in four to five business days, bubble wrapped, no song included.