Pattachitra পটচিত্র

Pattachitra is a tradition of painting on scrolls and cloth, practised in West Bengal and Odisha (Impart, Patachitra). Pata means a scroll or canvas in Sanskrit, and in Bengal a patua is one who paints or shows the scrolls (Impart, Patua).

In Bengal

The patuas paint a story frame by frame along a long scroll and sing it as they unroll it (West Bengal Khadi and Village Industries Board, Pata chitra). The unrolling is known as pat khelano and the song as paater gaan (Impart, Patua). The scrolls are usually painted on paper and then fixed to reused cloth, so that they can be folded and unfolded. The Board names three kinds of pata, the dighal, the latai and the chouko, and gives the painters' colours as natural ones, drawn from vegetables, fruits and flowers (West Bengal Khadi and Village Industries Board, Pata chitra).

The stories come from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the mangalkavyas, and tales such as Behula and Lakhinder, and some kinds of scroll belong to one subject, such as the Manasa scrolls of the snake goddess. Patuas travelled from village to village with their scrolls, and the tradition is recorded especially in Midnapur, Murshidabad, Birbhum and Purulia. The oldest surviving scrolls date from the 18th century. From the 1970s, scrolls also took up family planning, literacy, campaigns against dowry and the environment (Impart, Patua).

In Paschim Medinipur, the record of Bengal Patachitra at Intellectual Property India gives Naya village, in Pingla block, as the address of its applicant and of most of the people it lists (Intellectual Property India, Bengal Patachitra).

In Odisha

In Odisha the tradition grew from the Jagannath Temple at Puri. During the anasara, a 15-day ritual period when the temple's idols were kept in isolation, paintings of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra stood in for them in worship (Impart, Patachitra).

The cloth is first coated with chalk and a glue made from tamarind seeds. The painter sketches straight on with the brush, lays in flat colours and finishes with fine black lines, and the painting is then held over a charcoal fire and sealed with lacquer. White comes from conch shell, red from geru and hingula, and black from burning lamps and coconut shells. Today the tradition is concentrated in the village of Raghurajpur (Impart, Patachitra).