Patachitra: Bengal's Narrative Scroll Painting Tradition

The Word and What It Carries

The Sanskrit word 'Pattachitra' is made up of two expressions. The word 'Patta' means 'cloth', and 'Chitra' stands for 'picture'. Therefore, Pattachitra is both a cloth-based painting and a unique tradition of visual storytelling accompanied by a song.

The most important thing to understand about Pattachitra before you encounter it is that it is a compound definition, consisting of cloth painting and performed song, and that these elements are inseparable. A Patachitra scroll displayed in a frame on a wall, without its song, is like a film with the sound turned off: technically present but fundamentally incomplete.

Patachitra is considered one of the oldest Bengali forms of audio-visual storytelling. Patuas serve as an intersecting node between visual representation and oral narrative, performing an audio-visual storytelling tradition known as 'pater gan.' While performing, the patuas slowly unroll the pats and unfold the corresponding stories, in which the two wings of audio and visual are merged into one body of art better described as one discursive tradition of knowledge.

The artists who make and perform Patachitra are called 'Patuas', and are also known as 'Chitrakars'. Known variously as Patu, Pota and Putua, and Islamic by faith, the Patua artists represent a unique and secular art tradition, earning their livelihood by telling stories from Hindu mythology, local folklore, Sufi tradition and contemporary themes through paintings and song.

This is one of the most striking facts about Bengal's Patachitra community: the artists are predominantly Muslim by faith, and the stories they have painted and sung for centuries are predominantly from Hindu mythology. Men and women who prayed five times a day made the scroll paintings depicting Durga, Krishna, Kali, and scenes from the Ramayana. This phenomenon is not a contradiction; it is Bengal, where religious identity and artistic practice have never mapped neatly onto each other.

A History Written in Ink and Migration

The history of patuas is untraceable since it was a performance tradition that lacked written records. Presumed to be dating from as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries, the oldest surviving evidence of the scroll comes from the eighteenth century.

The earliest surviving physical evidence of Bengal Patachitra dates from the 1700s, but references to Patua performers appear in texts far older than that. Charanachitras, Mankhas, and Yamapatas were ancient forms of paintings executed on textile scrolls and dealt with themes of a narrative-didactic nature of storytelling, which finds mentions in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist texts.

The Patua community's relationship with religion mirrors the history of Bengal itself. It is clear that during the advent of Brahmanism, they embraced Hinduism; again, at some point in the advancement of Buddhism, they embraced Buddhism. All over again, at some stage in the invasion of Bakhtiyar Khilji and the Mughals, they embraced Islam.

During the Buddhist period, people spread the scroll paintings, or Jarano patas, across Tibet, Java, and Berlin.

This religious fluidity was not opportunism; it was a survival strategy, and it produced a tradition uniquely capable of serving diverse audiences. A Patua arriving in a Hindu village could unroll scrolls depicting Krishna or Durga. In a Muslim village, he could sing stories from the Sufi tradition or the tale of Satyapir, a syncretic figure combining elements of Hindu and Islamic devotion. The tradition was designed, from its very origins, to cross religious lines.

The Patuas who migrated to Kolkata in the 18th and 19th centuries observed a society in the throes of colonial rule. The artists began to portray the rising Babu culture among Anglophiles in the form of Babu Pata and the cruelty and callousness of colonisers in the form of Sahib Pata.

The Patuas were not passive recorders of tradition; they were active commentators on their present. When colonialism changed Bengal, the scrolls changed to document it. When new social problems emerged, the songs described them. When the world beyond Bengal broke through through trade routes, colonial officers, and newspaper headlines, it appeared in the painted panels.

The Varieties: Not One Tradition But Many

Bengal Patachitra is not a single unified form. It encompasses several distinct regional and stylistic traditions, each with its own visual language and cultural context.

The Bengal Patachitra is divided into several different aspects, such as Durga Pat, Chalchitra, Tribal Patachitra, Medinipur Patachitra, and Kalighat Patachitra.

Jadano Pat, also called Dighal or Latai Pata, are long, rolled-up scrolls that can be 10 to 40 feet long. This is the most traditional form: narrative scrolls designed to be unrolled panel by panel as the story is sung. A single Jadano Pat can contain twelve, fifteen, or twenty distinct scenes, each corresponding to a verse of the accompanying song.

Chalchitra is a tradition of decorative backdrop painting for the Durga Puja idol. 'Chalchitra' referred to the Debi Chal or Durga chala, the background of the Durga Pratima, or idol. 300–400-year-old idols of Nabadwip Shakta Rash used Chalchitra as a part of the Pratima. These are not scrolls but large painted panels, the visual backdrop against which the goddess stands during her ten-day festival.

Kalighat Patachitra is the tradition that emerged when Patuas migrated to urban Kolkata and settled near the Kalighat Temple. The Kalighat Pata was created by Patuas who migrated to Kolkata in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was centred around the Kalighat temple. Kalighat pats are painted on individual sheets rather than scrolls, with a bold, simplified style that reflects the influence of urban life and the artists' observation of Kolkata's rapidly changing society. The form that emerged here was free-spirited, satirical, and utterly distinctive, the most direct ancestor of modern Indian folk art.

Tribal Patachitra is practised in the forested districts of West Bengal, where Santhal and other tribal communities have developed their own versions of the scroll painting tradition, drawing on imagery and stories from tribal mythology rather than Sanskrit epics.

The Making: Canvas, Colour, and the Song That Comes Last

The physical production of a Patachitra scroll is a process entirely dependent on natural materials and traditional knowledge.

A pata is created by painting on a canvas made by stitching together multiple sheets of commercial poster paper. In earlier days, jute fibre canvas was used. Plant-based colours and lamp black, a pigment made from soot, are mixed in coconut shells with the sap of the bel tree, which acts as a binder. After finishing, a thin cotton cloth is glued to the back of the painting to provide longevity. Next, the completed scrolls are kept in the sun to dry.

The colours used in traditional Patachitra are derived from entirely natural sources. Chalk dust is used for white colour, pauri for yellow, cultivated indigo for blue, bhushakali for black and metesindur for red. The preparation of these colours is itself a skill passed from generation to generation: knowing which plants yield which pigments, how to fixate them so they do not fade, and how to mix them to achieve the particular tones that Patachitra's visual style requires.

The use of natural colour is one of the individual characteristics of Bengal Patachitra. In general, blue, yellow, green, red, brown, black and white are used. The palette is limited but not impoverished; the bold, high-contrast compositions that Patachitra is known for derive their visual power precisely from the clarity and distinctness of these few colours working against each other.

The figures drawn in Patachitra have a recognisable visual style that, once seen, is immediately identifiable. One of the most distinguishable features of patachitra is its typical style of portraying faces such as long noses, prominent chins and elongated eyes. The paintings also have ornately designed borders that follow the colour scheme of the narrative scene.

The song 'The Pater Gaan' is not written until the painting is completed. The Patua paints first and then composes the verses that will accompany each panel. The relationship between image and song is not one of illustration; the painting goes beyond simply depicting what the song describes. Instead, image and song approach the same story from different angles, each carrying unique information. Together, they create an experience richer than either one alone.

What the Scrolls Tell: From Mythology to the Present

The subjects of Bengal Patachitra scrolls span an extraordinary range, from the sacred to the satirical, from ancient mythology to last week's news.

The artists narrate stories from epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata; the Puranas; religious texts like the Mangal Kavyas Manasa, Chandi, and Dharma Behula and Lakhinder; renunciation of Caitanya; and Krishna Leela. But contemporary themes form a big part of the tradition and keep it relevant. Tales from the Sufi tradition serve particularly well to address societal issues like gender equality. Patuas have tackled issues like famine and floods, elections, birth control, HIV, global warming, and terrorism. On a lighter note, they have even portrayed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Indian costumes, reimagined Godzilla and created a Titanic with cows on the deck.

That range, from Radha-Krishna to Godzilla, is not a sign of degradation or commercialisation. It is the tradition working exactly as it was always designed to work: absorbing the world as it is, translating it into the visual language of the scroll, and finding an audience willing to look and listen.

The Satyapir Pata deserves special mention as a uniquely Bengali narrative tradition. Believed to have originated in pre-partition Bengal, Satyapir Pata generally discusses spiritual power while depicting stories of Satyapir, a syncretic belief system formed by the fusion of Hindu and Islamic devotional traditions. The figure of Satyapir, understood simultaneously as a Hindu deity and a Muslim pir, is a painting subject that could only have emerged from the specific religious landscape of the Bengal delta, where Hindu and Muslim communities have lived in close proximity for centuries.

For the patuas, any pat that had outlived its use was not stored away but respectfully immersed in a river, in keeping with longstanding customs surrounding sacred materials. Yet, despite these traditions, some historic parts survive today only because they were preserved in European archives – a reminder of the colonial practice of collecting and classifying indigenous storytelling forms.

The Colonial Decline and the Scholars Who Fought Back

The agricultural economy of Bengal started to decline due to the Industrial Revolution and colonial rule. Printing press, newspaper, radio, and cinema have emerged as media of amusement and education in place of patatas. Colonial culture led to the decline of indigenous cultures.

As Bengal urbanised and modernised under British rule, the Patua's traditional market, the rural village audience that would gather to watch a scroll being unrolled, began to disappear. As entertainment alternatives multiplied, the performance economy that had sustained these artists for centuries collapsed.

During the Bengal Renaissance, Gurusaday Dutt, an Indian civil servant who was the district magistrate of Birbhum in 1930, devoted himself to collecting scroll paintings and songs and became instrumental in popularising and exhibiting patas. The Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta, organised the first public exhibition in 1932, followed by another exhibition in Shantiniketan in 1934. He also wrote and published extensively, arguing that Patuas claimed ancestry from the ancient Chitrakar caste, which was well-known as a painter caste across India. This gave Patuas a significant impetus and saw a revitalisation of the tradition as they were commissioned by individuals and organisations to depict subjects beyond religion.

Gurusaday Dutt's intervention, a civil servant taking seriously the cultural value of a wandering community's painted cloth, was pivotal. By framing Patachitra as high art deserving institutional recognition, he changed its status in the eyes of educated Bengalis and began the process that would eventually lead to GI certification, UNESCO recognition, and the establishment of a dedicated craft hub in Naya village.

From the 1970s onwards, the scenes they depicted began to include family planning, literacy campaigns, anti-dowry campaigns, and environmental appeals. In the 1980s, the demand for patua increased substantially, as its popular usage attracted people outside of art-collecting circles. Since the 1990s, selling patua paintings has become the mainstay of the artists. Therefore, the patas came to be divorced from the performance tradition and got consolidated as a visual folk art.

That final observation is the most significant shift in the tradition's modern history: the scroll painting began to be valued as a visual object, separated from the song. This created a market, but it also severed the tradition's defining characteristic. A Patachitra without its pater gaan is just a painting. A Patachitra with its song is a performance. The distinction matters enormously.

Naya Village: Where the Tradition Came Home

In 2010, a group of Hindu and Muslim patuas, also known as chitrakars, gathered in the village of Pingla in the Midnapore district of West Bengal and collectively established a Patua art hub to connect their scroll paintings with both local and global markets.

The Naya Village in Pingla, West Midnapur district of West Bengal, is the hub of Patachitra and is home to Patachitra artists, or 'Patuas', who craft vibrant scroll paintings using natural colours from leaves, flowers, and clay. These scrolls, often accompanied by sung narratives called Pater Gaan, depict stories from mythology, folklore, and contemporary life. Recognised with a Geographical Indication tag, Patachitra thrives at Pingla's Folk Art Centre, which was developed by the West Bengal government and UNESCO.

Naya village in Pingla is home to 255 Patachitra painters or Patuas. The village has a Folk Art Centre built by WBKVIB where one can learn about different kinds of scrolls and the stories and marvel at the wide range of diversified products like t-shirts, hand fans, lamps, bags, umbrellas, etc. You can attend workshops on Patachitra painting, where you can also learn to make natural colours out of raw materials like leaves and flowers.

The establishment of Naya as a destination was not simply an economic decision; it was a statement about the tradition's survival strategy. Rather than waiting for the market to come to them, the Patua community created the conditions for direct encounter. Visitors who come to Naya do not see finished paintings in a gallery. They see painters at work, hear songs being composed, and watch people grind natural pigments in coconut shells. They encounter the tradition as a living process, not a preserved artefact.

POT Maya: When the Village Becomes the Canvas

Visitors can explore the art, attend workshops, and experience the annual Pot Maya festival in November, where the village comes alive with murals and celebrations.

POT Maya, the annual festival of Patachitra art at Naya, is one of the most unusual cultural events in West Bengal. For three days each November, the villagers transform the entire village. Each wall of the mud houses was painted with motifs from a typical Patachitra painting. The three-day festival encompassed not only the stalls selling scrolls of Patachitra but also other diversified products inspired by Patachitra paintings like T-shirts, fans, earrings, sarees, dupattas and so on.

Bahadur Chitrakar, one of the main artists from the village, shared that they have a total sale of INR 15 lakhs during the three days of the fair and a regular turnover of INR 1.5 crore throughout the year during different exhibitions. This initiative also helps the empowerment of women in the community and leads to the reduction of poverty.

These numbers matter because they tell a story about what happens when a craft community takes control of its market. The Patua artists of Naya have not waited for patrons, government schemes, or export companies. They have built their own platform, their own annual event, and their own direct relationship with buyers and visitors. The result is an economic success story rare in the Indian craft landscape.

As a special initiative to protect artists' rights, signage in Bengali and English was installed in various places to request visitors to write the names of the artists and their village while posting photos and videos on social media and to use relevant hashtags. This detail, the community actively managing its own cultural documentation and credit, speaks to a level of sophistication about intellectual property and artistic identity that is genuinely remarkable.

The Women Who Began to Paint

One of the most significant developments in modern Patachitra history is the increased participation of women artists, a shift that has both economic and cultural dimensions.

Over the last 25 years, it has transformed primarily into a visual art tradition handed down from generation to generation among the Patuas of Bengal, and women of the community also began to have more access and participate in producing patas.

Historically, the performance tradition – the travelling, the public singing, the unrolling of scrolls before village audiences – was predominantly male work. Women participated in the domestic aspects of production but rarely in the public performance. As the tradition shifted towards a market for visual objects, women found more space to paint, sell, and eventually perform.

Artists like Monimala Chitrakar have built international reputations. Monimala is known for her use of bold, primal colours and the development of her own iconographic style. Her work is held in museum collections internationally, and her name, like those of other prominent Naya women painters, has become associated with the tradition's most ambitious contemporary expressions.

The inclusion of women has not diluted the tradition. It has expanded it, bringing new subjects, new emotional registers, and new visual approaches into a form that was always defined by its responsiveness to the world around it.

How to Experience Patachitra as It Was Meant to Be Experienced

For the international traveller, the most important advice about Patachitra is this: do not experience it only as a visual art form.

A scroll purchased in a Kolkata craft shop is a beautiful object. But it is incomplete. The pater-gong, the song composed by the artist to accompany that specific scroll, is the other half of what you are holding. If you have the opportunity to hear that song performed and to watch the scroll unroll panel by panel as the story progresses, you are experiencing Patachitra as it was designed to be experienced.

Visitors to Pingla will learn about the Patachitra tradition and the making and usage of natural colours, along with listening to the Patachitra songs, the Pater Gaan, to know the stories of the paintings.

Naya village is approximately 130 kilometres from Kolkata, reachable by road via NH6 towards Balichak, then to the Mundomari crossing. The nearest railway station is Balichak. The Folk Art Centre at Naya provides accommodation for visitors who wish to stay overnight – a rare opportunity to spend an evening in the village when the performance tradition becomes most vivid, in the quiet after the visitors have departed and the artists return to their own creative rhythms.

The POT Maya festival in November is the ideal moment to visit the village transformed into a painted canvas, every wall bearing Pattachitra motifs, the artists performing, and the full range of the tradition visible at once. But any visit to Naya, at any time of year, will give you access to working artists, natural colour-making workshops, and the experience of watching a scroll being painted from its earliest stages.

A Story That Has Always Known Where to Go

There is something worth sitting with as you encounter Patachitra in West Bengal. This art form is a tradition that has never needed an institution to sustain it. No royal patron was required. No government scheme was necessary to begin it. A community of artists, moving between villages with rolled cloth under their arms, carrying their stories in their voices, found audiences willing to stop and listen.

That is still what happens in Naya. The scrolls are still rolled. The songs are still sung. The stories from the Mahabharata to last year's flood, from Radha's longing to the most recent election, are still being painted into panels and performed before whoever is willing to sit and attend.

The scroll does not need you to understand Hindi or Bengali. The images are clear. The singer's facial expressions convey when the story is beautiful and when it is terrible. And the act of watching, giving your full attention to a man or woman unrolling cloth and singing what is painted there, is itself a kind of participation in something ancient.

Why Choose Folk Experience to Travel West Bengal

Traditionally, patuas travelled from village to village, performing audio-visual stories spanning mythological and religious worlds. In return for their performances, they made no specific demands; audiences offered rice, vegetables, food, and other exchangeable items.

The relationship between the performer and the audience has always built the economy of Patachitra. Folk Experience understands that relationship and is designed to immerse you in it.

When you travel with Folk Experience to Naya village, you do not simply view Patachitra paintings in a gallery setting. You sit with an artist while the scroll is painted, you hear the pater gaan composed and performed, and you understand the tradition in the only way it was ever meant to be understood: as a live encounter between a storyteller and a willing listener.

Folk Experience brings you to Naya at the moments when the village is most alive during the preparation for POT Maya in November, or during the quieter months when artists are at work in their homes and workshops, painting without the pressure of a festival audience.

The Patua community of Naya has built something rare: a craft village that manages its market, protects its own artistic credit, and controls its relationship with visitors. Folk Experience respects that structure; your visit is arranged with and through the community, not around it.

Travelling with Folk Experience means you leave Naya with more than a scroll. You leave with the song that belongs to it, recorded, noted, and explained by the artist who composed it. You carry the complete work, not just the visual half.

The syncretic tradition of Muslim artists painting Hindu mythology – the Satyapir scrolls, the Krishna Leelas, and the Durga Pats composed and performed by artists who pray towards Mecca – is one of Bengal's most extraordinary cultural inheritances. Folk Experience gives you the context to understand and appreciate what you are witnessing.

A Patachitra scroll purchased through a Folk Experience itinerary comes with the artist's name, the story it tells, and the song that accompanies it. That provenance is not a label; it is the difference between owning a painting and understanding one.

Choosing Folk Experience means choosing to hear the song alongside the painting. That is the only way Patachitra was ever meant to be received. And it is the only way it fully makes sense.