A family of four people, all wearing face masks, is dreaming of flying unfettered. In their dream they soar over highrises wearing huge angel wings and dressed in finery. Meanwhile, in the uncertain here and now, a surly, moustachioed coronavirus keeps a close watch, observing them pointedly. This is ‘Swapner Songshar’ (The Dream Family), one in a series of paintings made by Anwar Chitrakar in response to the pandemic — a nod to the common man’s hopes and desires, which are being crushed daily by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bizarre metamorphoses

Anwar is a patachitra artist from that hub of pata painting — Naya village in West Midnapur district of West Bengal. Belonging to a family of traditional patuas (pata painters) and trained in the art by his father, Anwar follows the Kalighat style of pata painting — all his figures have the distinctive almond-shaped eyes, which some would say are peculiarly Bengali. Kolkata’s Emami Art Gallery recently held a virtual exhibition titled ‘Ei Somoy-er Pata’ (Tales of our Times) of Anwar’s pandemic-inspired pata paintings.

Patachitra — literally ‘cloth-picture’ — is an ancient art form that

Parijayi Bondhu   | Photo Credit: Emami Art

combines painting, song and storytelling and has been practised in Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand for centuries. Artists would travel from village to village, and later, from villages to cities, unspooling vivid polychromatic scrolls, singing songs and telling tales in a curious form of proto-cinema. These days, patachitra can also be found immobilised on art gallery walls.

Anwar’s paintings have been displayed the world over, from galleries in Delhi to the V&A in London. (Anwar won the West Bengal State Award in 2002, National Award in 2006, followed by the President’s Award and Ojas Art Master Artist Award in 2018.) Pata artists have always been sensitive to the contemporary, weaving in scenes from their lived reality into the scrolls: recent patas depict the rough and tumble of cities, pollution, the burning Twin Towers. But even these have become the old normal when compared to the pandemic-afflicted present.

So these paintings from Anwar are of bizarre metamorphoses, of disorienting reversals of the public and the private, all rendered tongue in cheek. In ‘Kemon achen bondhu?’ (How are you, friend?), for instance, ennui-ridden human figures look out of birdcages as birds and animals return to reclaim some of the spaces they have been banished from — a reference to the reported rewilding of our cities in the early days of the global lockdown. It is now we who are in the zoo, as the fauna observes us.

“Pat-ey rodbodoler protha chhilo na,” Anwar says in Bengali over the phone — pata painting never really had a tradition of reversals. “But over time, as it started depicting social subjects, these reversals became common, especially in Kalighat pata.”

The Kalighat reversal

The Kalighat school of patuas, to which Anwar belongs, was deeply invested in a thinly veiled critique of colonial Indian society, parodying the Westernised urban babudom with glee. Anwar’s paintings

continue the tradition of satire and irreverence directed at the privileged while making common cause with the marginalised. In ‘Mukhor dhari’ (Masked), a human couple with oxen heads rides a scooter while cows with human heads lounge on the grass — the title is a play on the Bengali words for mask (mukhosh) and the net tied over the mouths of oxen (mukhor). “The net makes sure that cows don’t eat the crops when they are used for ploughing,” Anwar explains.

With our faces masked, we appear to have become bovine-like in our placid resignation. “We have become like cows. And they like us. Kalighat-er rodbodol, the Kalighat reversal, you see?” laughs Anwar.

In ‘Sanitizer Vaccine’, a Bengali babu, having learnt of alcohol-based sanitisers, dances with a bottle of wine on his head as his wife rushes to beat him with a broom. This is a portrait of the modern Bengali man as the debauched colonial babu; Anwar’s point being that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Moving on

Anwar says that the 13 paintings displayed in the exhibition took him about 20 days to complete. The images were

Anwar Chitrakar   | Photo Credit: Emami Art

first drawn, then coloured with organic pigments like lampblack, turmeric, terracotta dust, pigments from marigold, black plums, and the leaves of the hyacinth bean plant. The colour of burnt earth, characteristic of many pata paintings, is an inheritance from centuries ago, when patuas would sculpt clay figures in addition to painting patachitra. The colours are mixed in coconut shells with the sap of unripe wood apple, a binding agent. A piece of old cotton sari is stuck to the back of the paper once the painting’s over, and the patachitra shimmers into existence.

Anwar has tackled issues of environmental degradation, sexuality in his paintings, but the COVID-19 pandemic marks a unique moment of profound crisis. It has inspired not just Anwar but has galvanised all the patuas of Naya once again. “We have organised three teams of 12-13 patuas each who are performing in village squares,” he says. These performances function as awareness campaigns. “We did the same thing with HIV-related pata about 15 years ago,” he remembers. “We try to do good work and we move with the times,” Anwar says, before we hang up. “We are directionless now, but that doesn’t mean we are hopeless.”

The writer is assistant professor, department of English, Techno India University, Kolkata.