Creating Tradition:
Folk Art and Nationalism in the 20th Century:
To understand the
conundrum of sustaining patachitra that is being puzzled over in the 21st
century, it is first necessary to understand why other folk arts, instead of patachitra,
flourished in the 20th century. Kalighat painting proved that with
the proper audience, patuas could adapt their work to new contexts. But
patachitra was not the kind of art that politicians and upper-class
intellectuals were looking for in the early 20th century. Up to this
point, beside Kalighat pats, rural patuas were in the habit of travelling and
presenting their work, not selling it. Therefore, within the self-sustaining
economy that was fundamental to the Swadeshi movement, there was no place for
patuas. However, the way in which the intellectual’s elite marketed other
handicrafts to public set up a model for the 21st century craft
market. In the meantime, patachitra slipped back into rural obscurity
amongst the general public. If there were not for Gurusaday Dutt, whose
collection of pats became a part of his Bengali folk art museum, and to a
lesser part modern artist, Jamini Roy, they might have been forgotten entirely
in the urban consciousness.
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| Ganesh Janani by Jamini Roy copyright: culturalindia.net |
Meanwhile, Mohandas
Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore were wholeheartedly promoting the popularity of
traditional Indian craft art to the entire population of India. In some ways it
is a blessing that patachitra was left out of the pre-independence
handicraft movement. Mass production and marketing of folk crafts diluted the
traditions upon which they were based. Adaptation is necessary but when folk
art loses sight of its origins entirely it risks becoming purely commercial.
Folk art at its core is made up of two elements, practical use and aesthetic
tradition, which implies a deeper meaning to the community in which it exists.
In the case of Kalighat painting patachitra changed to reflect a new
society, without losings its uniqueness, hanging on to the humorous folk idioms
and cultural values it already had. A balance must be struck between adaptation
and remaining true to precedence. The same people who were fighting for Indian
independence economically were inadvertently risking the loss of their cultural
uniqueness by using a Western production model to boost the insular Indian
craft market.
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| Jamini Roy copyright: theprint.in |
In 1921, Tagore
founded a university in Shantiniketan, which he called Visva-Bharati. Tagore
was worried about the loss of historical perspective in Indian universities to
British influence. In the mid-19th century, the top Indian artists
were trained at regional schools established in major cities: the Bombay
school, the Calcutta school, the Madras school. The styles taught at these
schools were based on the standard of linear perspective and realism imported from
the British Royal Academy. Visva-Bharati contained within it a school of fine
arts, the Kala Bhavana, which was the brainchild of Tagore and the school’s
director, Nandalal Bose. Their objective was to dissolve the barrier between
craftsman and fine artsist, instilling in their students an appreciation of
India’s artistic heritage.
Meanwhile on the Kala
Bhavana end, upper- and middle-class artists were retaining the aesthetic but
losing the history behind it. As a continued rebellion against strict European
painting, young artists in India, just like young artists in Europe, were
looking for a new “primitive” aesthetic for inspiration. But where Picasso and
his fellows found African masks, Indians began to uncover their own roots. This
is what essentially separates Indian modernism from its European counterpart.
Instead of reacting to the proverbial “other”, they were looking back in on
themselves. Jamini Roy, one of the most celebrated modern painters in India, is
a prime example of an urban artist who was able to use folk idioms for his own
artistic vision. Trained in European painting in Calcutta in the late 19th
century, he became bored with his work until he discovered Kalighat paintings
of subjects from both Christian and Hindu mythology. But again, his work has
been criticized for not having enough folk grounding beyond aesthetic appeal.
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| Kala Bhavana copyright: en wikipedia.org |
This is the economic
world into which Bengali patachitra made its reappearance in the 1970s.
when attention was finally paid to the folk painters of West Bengal again,
their art was in a dismal decline. Their lack of knowledge about their own
history was not unusual given the circumstances. With the influx of television
and movies into rural life, fewer and fewer people wanted to watch patuas
performing stories from the Hindu epics. Many families had given up their art
to move to more profitable profession. Clearly it was time for patachitra
to make another adaptive move to survive, with the risk of traveling down the
road to commercialization, like other folk arts before it.
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| Gurusaday Dutt Museum at Joka, Kolkata. copyright: holidayiq.net |
Re-adaptation and
future of patachitra:
In the last 40 years patachitra
has changed more than it had since the days of Kalighat. When looking at these
changes again it is important to keep the three tenants of folk art in mind:
practical use, aesthetic tradition and the livelihood of the artisan. With folk
art disappearing from India at an alarming rate in the past 30 years, the
number of recorded artisans dropping roughly 30% in that time, and with
globalization becoming a greater and greater cause of concern, the 20th
century anxiety of nationalism has morphed into a 21st century fight
for cultural preservation.
By Zavizah.
References:
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