Bengali patas

Last Thursday, my husband and I went to an extraordinarily well-attended talk on and exhibit of Bengali patas at the Gandhi Memorial Center in Washington, DC. Patas, a Bengali folk art form, are hand-painted scrolls that illustrate stories.

Patuas roam from village to village to tell stories as they unroll the scrolls vertically (story panels go from top to bottom). Sadly, they are too often regarded as beggars (to understand, read this analogous story about kalamkari artists). The art of pata is local to the districts of Midnapore and Birbhum.

For us, no trip to India is complete without a visit to Birbhum, the home of Tagore's Shantinekitan, but this was our first exposure to pata. We are more accustomed to seeing batiks and terracotta objects in the stalls on the road between Shantiketan and Bolpur, the nearest train station.


Panel of a Bengali pat
Jetayu tells Ram about Sita's abduction

Many of the traditional Bengali patas cover episodes from the Ramayana. Natural disasters, such as floods, cyclones, and even the freak tornado are also covered. More recently, pats address social issues such as the status of women and AIDS: in fact, NGOs have commissioned patuas to create patas on social issues.

The pats that were exhibited at the Gandhi Memorial Center belong to Dr. Geraldine Forbes, a professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. Dr. Forbes has traveled through Bengali villages collecting patas for 30 years.