Project Description
There is an urgent need to document the performing art of a class of itinerant singing painters from rural West Bengal, India who sing about moral and mythological stories painted on scrolls playing the dual role of performers and social entertainers. These scroll painters (also called Patuas, Chitrakars, Patidars or Patikars) walk from village to village unfurling their scrolls to sing their songs, the lyrics and tunes of which are composed by themselves or passed down by oral tradition for generations. They paint on small rectangular pieces of paper (called "chauko pata") or long vertical sheets of paper glued together (called "jorano pata") which can sometimes be as long as 5-10 meters. The songs are usually written in Bengali with some infiltration of words from the local dialect. This folk art of rural Bengal has been around for a long time (at least since the late 13th century) and the patuas were the chief source of entertainment in the villages -- their art being a combination of story telling, singing and painting.
However, the increasing popularity of modern methods of entertainment (such as the television and electronic devices (Korom_17a) has been the primary cause of gradual decline of this art form, so that currently there are probably about 800 practicing patuas in the East and West Medinipur, Birbhum, Purulia, and Bankura divisions of West Bengal and its adjoining states including Bihar, Orissa, and Jharkhand, not all of whom adhere to the age old traditional art forms that have come down from generations and may/may not speak the language of their fore-fathers. Furthermore, to overcome poverty and severe economic hardships, the patuas have begun to supplement their income by making dolls and idols of deities or simply selling their painted scrolls (without the associated performance including story-telling and singing) to the urban elite. This transition from a primarily performing art to a visual one, though gradual, appears to blow the death knell for this art form. While some efforts have been made to conserve it, the emphasis has only been on the visual art (for e.g. selling scrolls to museums) thereby ensuring that the lyrics, melody, language of composition are sometimes lost forever. The objectives of this research are:
1.
Survey, Digitization, Transcription, and Transliteration:
The village of Naya in the district of West Medinipur has established itself as the seat of scroll painting (patachitra) and has been well studied by researchers in anthropology (Korom_book,Fruzzetti_Film,Forbes_02a). Very little is known, however, about the scroll painters in other
districts of Bengal and the adjoining states of Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand. Scant literature, media references, local gazettes, and word-of-mouth (Hadders_01a,Kumar_14a, Bhattacharya_00a, Dutta_39,Roycroft_96a) mention the towns of Raghunathpur (Purulia district), Bankura town (Bankura district), Suri (Birbhum district) as possibly having communities of patuas, but a systemic study of what they work on, what has come down to them as oral tradition, or even who still remains a practicing artist today, does not exist. This project aims to begin surveying neighborhoods mentioned in literature, establish their suitability for study (for e.g. the community should have at least ten or more performing artists) and document their work -- including digitization of the scrolls, video and audio recording of performances, followed by transcription and transliteration of lyrics of songs. The data collected will remain the copyright of the artists and song creators themselves -- the Institutional Repository located at the State University of New York at Buffalo (UBIR) will obtain permission and consent to archive and store the data.
2.
Construction of an art recommendation system for patachitras using advanced artificial intelligence techniques:
The multi-modal data (image, audio and text) will be used to construct an elaborate art recommendation system using state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques (such as deep learning (Zhang_17a). This recommendation system will be used by scholars, connoisseurs of art, museum authorities, and potential customers to keep track of the state-of-the-art and purchase art-work of interest thereby contributing to the economic development of the itinerant singers. This art recommendation system will solely be designed for academic studies and will be hosted from a website at SUNY, Buffalo.
This work has been supported by a joint fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities and The American Institute for India Studies.
