BANGALORE: With his index finger pointing toward each frame of a painted handscroll, 52-year-old Muslim Bahar Chitrakar sings rhyming couplets to unfold the story of the September 11 attacks on the US.
Bahar, an illiterate hailing from Midnapore district of India’s West Bengal state, is a patua, or painter-minstrel, who travels from village to village singing stories from scrolls that he and his family paint with vegetable dyes.
At a time when India’s contemporary art can sell for millions of dollars in the global market, Bahar says he is worried about the future of his art form which originated about five centuries ago.
He says the painter-minstrels are trying to keep their art form alive by adapting to the “new world” — using themes such as the September 11 attacks, the Asian tsunami, Aids, education for girls and “equal rights for women”.
“In today’s world, we have got to keep up with the changing times,” Bahar, who came to the southern high-tech city of Bangalore to sell his paintings, tells AFP.
“As long as I’m alive I will carry forward this tradition,” says Bahar, clad in an Indian sarong and a brown shirt.
“I do not know about the future. My sons aren’t interested. It’s a dying art form,” he says. “Nobody buys our paintings in the villages. We have to come to urban centres to sell.”
The patuas explain global events in their own artistic form. They compose the couplets and later perform in public — at schools, markets, temples and homes. In return, they get rice and money.
It took almost a month for Bahar and his family to prepare the paper scroll depicting a confrontation between Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and US President George W. Bush.
“I saw his (Osama bin Laden’s) picture in newspapers and then got the gist of the story. In my story, Osama finally escapes in a horse after a war (with the United States),” a smiling Bahar says.
The length of the scroll varies and there is no fixed pattern. The paintings are made on paper or cloth. Most of the traditional paintings are based on stories from Hindu epics.
Rajyashree Dutt, who runs Rightlines Art Gallery, which promotes contemporary art as well as older artforms, says the patuas need urgent financial support for their survival.
“Education for them is a luxury,” says Dutt, who helped Bahar to sell his paintings at her Bangalore gallery.
“This form is slowly on its way out as the painters are finding it impossible to live on meagre earnings.”
“They are chroniclers of their times. If this ancient art bites the dust, then it will be a sad day for India. There are individual efforts to revive it but I do not know how far they will succeed,” she says.
Bright-coloured paintings hang on the gallery housed in a downtown district and Bahar sits amid a series of paintings thrown on the floor.
There are rewards for coming to the city for the travelling painter minstrels.
“Back in the village we earn about 50 rupees (1.10 dollars) a day by performing. In a city like Bangalore we manage to sell one scroll for 9,000 rupees,” says Bahar who makes two trips to cities a year. But he says accommodation costs are high and even by selling in cities, he says he and his family are still scraping by.
As buyers come in, he sings in his Bengali mother tongue and explains how he paints using extracts from vegetables and fruits.
About 60 patua families live in Naya village in Midnapore district from where he comes and all the family members, including the women, paint and depend on the art form for a living.—AFP
