Pattachitra
ପଟ୍ଟଚିତ୍ର पट्टचित्र
Also Patachitra, Patua art, Talapattachitra.
Painting and drawing Odisha
What it is
Pattachitra is cloth painting from Odisha and Bengal, from patta, cloth, and chitra, picture. The Odisha form is a temple art: the painters of Raghurajpur serve the Jagannath temple and paint the deities, and when the images are closed for the Anasara fortnight it is their paintings that stand in for them. The Bengal form is a scroll unrolled by a singer, the patua, who sings the story panel by panel as it is shown, and is a performance as much as a picture.
How it is built
The Odisha patta is made by gluing two cloths with tamarind seed paste, coating with chalk and gum, and polishing with a stone until it is smooth as paper and stiff as board. Natural pigments: hingula red, haritala yellow, lamp black, conch white. Brushes of mouse or buffalo hair. The outline is drawn last, not first, which is the opposite of most traditions. Figures are flat, in profile or three quarter, with a decorated border on all four sides and no empty ground. The Bengal patua scroll is several feet long, painted in sequential panels, and rolled.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
In Raghurajpur, learnt from the father from about five, with years spent preparing cloth and grinding pigment before drawing. The outline, done last with a fine brush and no pencil underneath, is what takes longest to master. Ten years makes a chitrakar. Palm leaf engraving, talapattachitra, is learnt alongside. The Bengal patua learns the songs as well as the painting and must be able to hold a crowd, so the training is in two arts at once.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The Odisha chitrakars of Raghurajpur and Danda Sahi hold hereditary service at the Jagannath temple and have a Geographical Indication; their line is tied to the temple calendar and to the Nabakalebara. The Bengal patuas are a distinct community, many of them Muslim by name and Hindu in subject or the reverse, who have painted Hindu epics, Islamic stories, and in recent decades the tsunami, HIV and the September 11 attacks as new scrolls. That the Bengal tradition keeps absorbing current events is its defining feature and is not a modern innovation.
Worth knowing
Standing in for the god
When the Jagannath deities fall ill after the Snana Purnima bath and the temple closes for the Anasara fortnight, the images are out of sight and being repaired. What devotees see instead are three paintings, the Anasara Patti, made by the Raghurajpur chitrakars. For those two weeks the painting is the deity for darshan purposes. Few painting traditions anywhere have a function that formal, and it is why the families’ hereditary service is a temple office rather than a trade.
Scrolls about the news
A Bengal patua unrolls a scroll panel by panel and sings the story, and the repertoire has never been fixed to the epics. Patuas have painted and sung the Santhal rebellion, the Bengal famine, the tsunami, the Nandigram firings, HIV awareness commissioned by health departments, and the 2001 attacks in New York. The form is a news medium that happens to be very old, and the willingness to take a subject off the week’s events is the thing that has kept it alive while comparable traditions have become heritage.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Odisha
- Raghurajpur and Danda Sahi near Puri, with hereditary temple service, the Anasara Patti and a Geographical Indication.
- Bengal
- The patua scroll singers of Medinipur and Birbhum, who paint and sing and keep adding new subjects from the news.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Temples
Related arts