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ContentsEDITORIAL

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ISHTIHAR TASVEEREN: VISUAL CULTURE OF EARLY URDU MAGAZINES

Yousuf Saeed4

THE TACOMA NARROWS CONVERSATION: EPISODE 27

Abhishek Hazra22

DANCE OF THE DYING MURALS

M.V. Bhaskar34

OF IMAGE AND WORD: TRACING EVOLUTIONS IN STORYTELLING TRADITION

Vidyun Sabhaney50

LITTLE ARTISTS OF CHIZAMI: PAINTING STORIES, SKETCHING A UNIVERSE

Aditi Chitre78

ArtConnectAn IFA Publication

Volume 7 Number 2

July - December 2013

Editor

C.K. Meena

Co-Editor

Rashmi Sawhney

Design

Mishta Roy

Printed by B Narahari, published by Arundhati Ghosh on behalf of India Foundation

for the Arts and printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road,

Manipal, Udipi, Karnataka - 576 104 and published at India Foundation for the

Arts, 'Apurva', Ground Floor, No 259, 4th Cross, Raj Mahal Vilas IInd Stage, IInd

Block, Bangalore - 560 094. Editor - C.K. Meena

Photo and Text Credits

Yousuf Saeed, Abhishek Hazra, M.V. Bhaskar, K. Thanigaimani, Rajiv Kumar,

D. Samson, C.P. Satyajit, Vidyun Sabhaney, Shohei Emura, Alexandra Moskovchuk,

Aditi Chitre, Tshetsholo Naro

Cover Image

The cover of The Tiger, an illustrated book of stories created by Eyete Kapfo

of Chizami, Nagaland during an IFA-supported workshop

held by Aditi Chitre in 2012.

The copyright for the Gul-e-Bakavali poster on Page 29 In ArtConnect Volume 7 Number 1 is held byVirchand Dharamsey. We regret the omission. — Editor

All efforts have been made to contact and receive permission from all copyright holders. Any source not acknowledged will be credited in subsequent issues.

An emphasis on the visual arts characterises this issue—sixteenth-century murals given newlife through digital technology, traditional picture-storytelling used to extend comic bookart, visual imagery in nineteenth-century Urdu magazines, and the amazing creations thatspring from children in Nagaland who have never been to formal art classes.

Many have lamented the decline of Urdu, a language that was once vital to northern Indianintellectual life, but Yousuf Saeed reminds us that it was also a language connected tomainstream media, industry and politics. Through his analysis of the visual imagery inpopular Urdu magazines of the past, he demonstrates how Urdu’s early print culture wasan inclusive medium for mainstream secular communication, and not restricted to Islamicthemes as it is today.

Time has dealt harshly with the ancient murals of the Venugopala Parthasarathy temple atChengam in Tamil Nadu. M.V. Bhaskar explains how, through his novel method ofconservation that involves photographing, scanning and digitally tracing the images, heplans to breathe fresh life into them by using them in an animation film.

In an attempt to extend her practice as a comic-book artist, Vidyun Sabhaney has beenexamining the relationship between the oral and the visual in the telling of the epics. Sheand her collaborator Shohei Emura have been documenting how stories from theMahabharata are told in three picture-storytelling traditions—from Karnataka, WestBengal and Rajasthan. Sabhaney’s essay brings out the evolving nature of these traditions.

Visual arts practice among the young in Nagaland has been strangely neglected, as AditiChitre discovered when she worked closely with the North East Network to hold an artworkshop in Chizami in 2011. She nurtured the untapped potential of the children, none ofwhom had had any formal training in the arts, when she returned in 2012 to hold astorytelling and visual arts workshop. Through a photo-essay, Chitre walks us through thechildren’s creative journey that resulted in an illustrated (as yet unpublished) book of stories.

If there is a wild card in this pack it would have to be Abhishek Hazra who takes on thepersona of one Pratyut Panna interviewing a notional author Anuprash Joshi who haswritten a series of books about his unwritten books. Each book in Joshi’s FailBook project isa detailed description of several books he has failed to write. Readers of Hazra’s piecemay be forgiven for believing they have stumbled into Borges territory. We predict that itwill also bust their guts, and therefore extend our sympathies in advance.

C.K. [email protected]

Editorial

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Ishtihar Tasveeren:Visual Culture of

Early UrduMagazines

Yousuf SaeedAll images courtesy the author

The nineteenth century witnessed a boom in commercial publishingin Urdu, a language that was vital to northern Indian intellectual life,a language of both courtly poetry and popular prose. Its declinebegan soon after India’s independence, however, since it was nolonger taught in most schools. After 1947, as Urdu-literategenerations dwindled, Urdu’s connection with mainstream media,industry and politics was affected. Today, most Urdu publications inIndia are restricted to religious themes or to issues of the Muslimcommunity. Through his analysis of popular visual imagery in Urdumagazines and journals, Yousuf Saeed demonstrates that Urdu’searly print culture was not restricted to Islamic or Islamicate themesand was a more inclusive medium for mainstream secularcommunication.

Cover of an embroidery book Razia ki maghribi mashriqi kasheeda kaari (Razia’seastern-western embroidery), published by Naya Kitab Ghar, Delhi. Circa 1940s.

ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 7, Number 2

In India, printed Urdu literatureand Urdu language have in recenttimes been associated with

Muslims and Islam. They are oftenassumed to reflect religious orthodoxyand austere iconoclasm because of anapparent absence of images—or atleast of images of the human figure—

in its contemporary printedexamples. Ignorance about Urdu’seclectic and celebratory past isoften so acute that it can createabsurd situations, as a recentexample shows: Mumbai Policeclaimed that couplets ofnineteenth-century Urdu poetMirza Ghalib incited hatred andterror.

1But this narrow stereotype

of Urdu may not necessarily be aconstruction of non-Urdu-speakersalone. Even many ‘Urdu-wallahs’ orMuslims consider it not only theirlanguage but also a symbol of theirreligious identity rather than ashared cultural entity. A handful ofUrdu speakers, though, do make aneffort to dispel this identity myth.

2

Urdu was not always typecast inIndia, however. Urdu, spoken orwritten, was the most commonmedium of mainstreamcommunication, especially at thetime when print culture beganthriving in north India. Whiletoday’s Urdu printed literature

such as books, magazines or otherephemera may reflect a lack of liberalvisuals or artistic creativity, probablydue to a decline in its readership,Urdu printed ephemera before theearly twentieth century was the maincarrier of ideas, news, business and

Advertisement for perfume products from AsgharAli Mohammed Ali of Lucknow. Published fromLahore in 1931.

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Visual Culture of Early Urdu Magazines – Yousuf Saeed

education, with a large pan-Indiareadership that was not restricted toMuslims. Its popularity can be gaugedby the fact that Urdu magazinescarried the advertisements of almostall mainstream commercial brands justas today’s major newspapers andmagazines do. Most importantly, theadvertisements and the illustratedfeatures in popular Urdu periodicalsdepicted culture, arts, cinema,glamour, women etc. in a totally

unrestrained manner. The magazinesalso catered to the religious or culturalneeds of Hindus and othercommunities as much as they did tothose of Muslims. Similarly, Urdu wasone of the first Indian languages inwhich ‘progressive’ ephemera such asgreeting cards, calendars and businessstationery were printed and usedwidely.

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Soon after India’s independence in1947, however, one witnessed a declinein Urdu’s print culture, primarily sinceUrdu was removed not only from beinga medium of education but also as asubject in most schools in north India,mainly in Uttar Pradesh, whichironically was its birth place andnatural home. In short, all subsequentgenerations were deprived of a languageand script that had been essential totheir ancestors.

4Naturally, the first

thing to be affected was Urdu’sconnection with mainstream media,industry, politics, and people’sprofessional lives. Slowly, as the Urdu-literate generation dwindled, so did theliberal and inclusive image of thelanguage and its printed literature. Andtoday, most Urdu works published inIndia are restricted to religious themesor the issues of the Muslim community,and are devoid of any liberal visualdepictions.

European-looking man and woman in an advertisement for Okasa, a health drink, printedin Musavvir, 1941.

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However, in the nineteenth century,Urdu played a crucial role in almostevery sphere of northern Indianintellectual life. It emerged as alanguage not only of courtly poetrybut also of popular prose, a languageto spread religious values, mouldpublic opinion, and transmitknowledge and education. In thenineteenth century there was a boomin commercial publishing, to cater toelite Urdu and Hindi readers as wellas to neo-literate non-elites who hadthus far not accessed the written orprinted word. According to FrancescaOrsini, a large repertoire of popularliterature such as detective novels,theatre transcripts, songbooks, saintbiographies, serialised narratives, andpopular poetry, printed on cheappaper, provided an activity of pleasurefor thousands of new readers.

5

Moreover this early print culture alsoreflected a considerable hybridity andfluidity between Urdu and Hindi. Inthe ‘commercialisation of leisure’,according to Orsini, the boundariesbetween Urdu and Hindi hadcollapsed somewhat. Most of thesechapbooks also contained attractiveillustrations, some on the covers andmany inside, resembling thosedepicting characters or scenes inworks of fiction. The word ba-tasveerat(with pictures) was added to the titles

of many of these books to attractbuyers. Some of the famous publishersof such illustrated Urdu literaturewere in Delhi, Kanpur and Lahore,and they included Matba’ NavalKishore from Lucknow. Naval KishorePress, in fact, was the most prolificpublishing house, bringing out a largenumber of titles in Urdu, Hindi,Arabic and Persian.

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Along with print technology fromEurope, there entered Europeancommercial products, and theiradvertising images that appeared innewspapers and magazines in Englishand in local languages. When onelooks at a few mainstreamadvertisements published in theEnglish press in the early twentiethcentury, one finds that a distinctivefeature of representation seems to bethe contrast between European andIndian facial features and lifestyles, asif different products were meant forclients of different classes or identitieseven if the product was imported fromEurope. This is interesting because thetwo contrasting advertisements wereoften published in the same Englishperiodicals or printed spaces that wereseen or read by both Europeans andthe Indian elite.

7But often, the

European dress or mannerism is alsopresented to the Indian readers (such

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as in a 1930 Urdu advertisement for ahealth supplement drug Okasa) as arole model of modernism which theIndians (or Urdu readers) ought toadopt. The style of art or illustrationused in much of this print culture isclearly influenced by photography;however, photographs have not beenliberally used because of technicallimitations. Much of the colourprinting in early era was done in

Europe since colour presses were rarein India until the twentieth century.

Many illustrated Urdu newspapersand magazines had started appearingin north India in the mid-nineteenthcentury. They were mostly publishedfrom Delhi and Lahore, and amongthe first were Avadh Akhbar,

8and

Dehli Urdu Akhbar started in 1836by Maulvi M. Baqar. Soon thereappeared some women’s magazinestoo, catering mostly to the purdahwomen in ashraf or elite families ofnorth India. Tahzib un-Niswan wasstarted at Lahore in 1898, Khatun ofAligarh ran from 1904 to 1914, andIsmat, started by Delhi’s Urdunovelist Rashid-ul Khairi in 1908,ran the longest, until the 1950s.These magazines raised importantsocial issues such as the low socialstatus of Muslim women, even asthey reaffirmed women’s domesticroles by dealing with topics such assewing, cooking, child-rearing andhome economics.

9Many of them

carried images not only to illustratethe topics but also as decoration.This popular print culture alsofeatured illustrated Urdu books oncookery, embroidery and similartopics much sought after by families.The images reflected a somewhatEuropean style of human features

Ismat, the cover of an Urdu magazine for women,issue of February 1938, published from Delhi bythe editor Rashidul Khairi.


and backdrops, and there was nohesitation in the depiction of bodies,even those of women.

In some of the early Urdu magazines,‘beautiful’ images were not used purelyfor their sensual value; there wereefforts to connect or complementthem with ideas through the writtenword, especially poetry, which is said

to enhance the meaning of images.Many magazines carried images ofnatural beauty or pretty women,usually in colour, accompanied bycreative captions and often poems thatpaid tribute to the images. Somemagazines such as Alamgir of Lahore(circa 1920-30s) carried reproductionsof oleographs depicting scenic beauty(often painted by the local artists suchas Hakim Faqir M. Chishti or Prof.Allah Bakhsh), which were‘commented upon’ in romantic poetryby well-known poets.

Delhi and Lahore were major centresof print production that also hadbusiness relations and heavy mutualpostal traffic until 1947.

10These two

centres produced, besides books andmagazines, popular ephemera such asreligious and decorative posters andcalendar art that were sought after allover India.

11But the 1947 Partition of

India came as a big blow to these largebusiness centres as they were cut offfrom one another. The family businessof Ismat magazine was transferredfrom Delhi to Karachi by Rashid’s sonRaziq-ul Khairi, and continued therefor long. But Partition also reorientedmany businesses on both sides of theborder, and after a brief lull, Delhi’sUrdu print culture picked up slowly.There appeared many other popularmagazines in Urdu from Delhi around

Photograph of an unidentified film actress printedalong with Urdu poetry in the Urdu magazineAlamgir, Lahore, 1935.


1950, some of them lasting till the endof the twentieth century.

Whether in general-interestmagazines or those meant specificallyfor women, the female body has beenused as a staple feature in advertisingto attract potential buyers towards aproduct, right from the timecommercial advertisements startedappearing in India. Urdu magazinesand their advertisements were notdevoid of such gender stereotypes,

Advertisement for Jharan hair-oil, printed inMusavvir, 1941.

An advertisement for His Master’s Voice gramophone playerpublished in 1935 in an Urdu newspaper.


either. The female body not onlysolicited the attention of the maleviewer but it also assuaged masculineanxiety in reproducing and reaffirmingtraditional roles for women. Thisregressive tendency in the media is atodds with the advertising industry’sself projection as the face of‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. In Urduprinted literature, most of the imagesand advertising messages reflected a

romantic notion of the female bodyand largely promoted cosmetics andbeauty products. Moreover, themodern woman was shown as havingmany chores to do in her daily life—maintaining new standards ofdomestic cleanliness, handling the newgadgets of kitchen and laundry, and

Advertisement for Woodward’s gripe water inUrdu, published circa 1930s.

Advertisement for Murphy radio featuring India’sbeauty queen Miss Naqi Jahan, printed in theUrdu magazine Shama, June 1967, Delhi.


Advertisement for Radium tonic pills, printed in the Urdu magazine Bisvin Sadi, June 1976, Delhi.

using newer ways of keeping thehusband and children happy.

12In a

popular nineteenth-century Urdunovel, Mirat ul-’Arus (the Bride’sMirror) the protagonist Asghari’shouse was in perfect order “as if thehouse were a machine, with all itsworks in good order”.

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Studying the images andadvertisements of commodities in late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuryIndian print is like conducting anarchaeological search of the times.Each product and its promotion tellsus so much about the development ofsociety in colonial India, the likes anddislikes of people and even the socialhierarchy being addressed in theadvertisements. A large number ofprinted ads are about wonder drugsand magic pills that can treat all yourailments and miraculously bring backyour youth. Many of these productsare European while some also usetraditional Indian medical systemssuch as Ayurveda and Unani. Thereappears to be some sort of massanxiety about bringing back one’shealth by using oils, lotions, potionsand tablets. From these magazineadvertisements, one gathers that anactive culture of mail-order purchaseswas already common then, since mostadvertisements provide the option of

sending the product by post, andpayments by money-order.

The wonder drugs included potionsfor enhancing sexual vigour andvirility, and treatments for infertility.There are drugs “guaranteed to makewomen give birth to a male child only”,stressing on the “misfortune of familiesthat have not had a son despite tryinghard for many years”. There areadvertisements for illustrated

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Advertisement for United pressure cooker, printedin Bano, April 1976.

chapbooks such as kama-shastra andkokh-shastra that explain to newly-wedcouples the secrets of a blissfulmarried life in simple Urdu. Thenthere are naughty and secretivebooklets with erotic tales of abeautiful woman’s nuptial night and soon (with titles such as Suhagan kaSuhag). All these books could beordered by mail and “will arrive atyour doorstep in an unmarked parcelfor secrecy”, said the ad.

A number of mechanical devices and

commodities that had just arrivedfrom Europe became not only a crazebut also a symbol of high culture.Radio and gramophone were the mostcommon forms of mediatedentertainment, and such gadgets werecommonly advertised in Urduperiodicals. Many other innovativeimported products were available inthe market to inspire awe and wonderin the buyers, such as alarm clocks,portable printing machines, shavingmachines, toy pistols, torch-lights,movie projectors and even devices that


15Advertisement for Surf printed in Bisvin Sadi,October 1969.

Cover of a popular chapbook of Urdu poetryGhalib ki Ghazlein published in 1970, Delhi.


claimed to make you invisible!

Gramophone records were especiallypopular among the Urdu readers as alarge number of recordings ofqawwali, Urdu poetry and Islamicdevotional music was made availableon from early on, and theiradvertisements regularly featured thelatest released discs.

14From the pre-

1950s era we move on to the second

half of the twentieth century wherenew magazines and Urdu publishinghouses started emerging. Old Delhi orShahjahan had a large business ofhakims or traditional doctors, some ofwhom hailed from families that servedthe Mughal rulers. New businessesemerged from such families, withbrand names such as Hamdard andSham’a Laboratories that are active tilldate. Besides selling their traditionalpharmaceutical and health-relatedproducts, such companies also helpedestablish a vibrant culture of popularprint. Urdu periodicals Bano, BiswinSadi and Sham’a emerged as amongthe best-selling family magazines innorth India. They came with small-sized ‘digests’ such as Huma, Huda,Shabistan and Mehrab that focussedon general and sometimes religioustopics. While Bano and Biswin Sadicatered to women’s issues, Sham’a(along with its Hindi counterpartSushma) was the most popularmagazine devoted to Indian cinema,which freely provided gossip as well asglamorous images of actors andactresses. Of course, these magazinesalso printed advertisements of theproducts from their parent companies.

The female body continues to remaina prominent feature in much of latertwentieth-century print culture.

Advertisement for Lux soap featuring Indian filmactress Sharmila Tagore, printed in Shama, June1967. A byline of the advertising agency Lintascan be seen in Urdu at bottom left.

Images and art styles change but theolder domestic roles of women getreinforced with newer products andservices. The women in Urduadvertisements work in offices, drivescooters and attend parties with malefriends; however, they also have to usemore advanced types of detergentpowders and futuristic pressurecookers at home. Among the various commodities, soaphas been the most evident symbol ofmodernity, hygiene, and a projectedbeauty which has been represented inpopular print literature through itsadvertisements, specifically that of onesoap brand—Lux.

15It was projected as

the soap used by the film stars andthere was hardly any famous Indiancinema actress who did not appear inthe Lux soap advertisements. Sincepopular cinema represented thedreams of millions, the image ofluxury soap too allowed them toimagine themselves like the film stars.There were plenty of periodicalsdevoted to detective stories and novelsright from the late nineteenth century.But from the mid-twentieth century,Mujrim and Jasoosi Duniya emerged asthe most sought after digest-sizedvolumes with popular detectivecharacters such as Imran. JasoosiDuniya’s author Ibne Safi was born in1928 near Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh)

and later moved to Pakistan. Thesedetective novels are characterised bycolourful cover art that itself could bedocumented and studied.

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The covers are bursting with prettywomen, guns, blood and gore that,besides reflecting the plot, also catchthe eye of those who might buythem at bookshops on railwayplatforms or the roadside shacks.


The cover of an Urdu detective novel, Wardatein,published from Delhi, 1940.

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It would be incorrect to assume thattwentieth-century Urdu print culturewas only filled with liberal images ofwomen and sensuality. One cannotignore a large volume of literaturedevoted to religion and Muslimidentity. Delhi’s publishers producedperiodicals such as the monthly Molvi(1950s to1960s), Aastana (1970s to1980s), and the digest-sized Hudathat focused on devotionalliterature—inspiring stories fromIslam’s history, religious poetry, andsermons. There were images too—mostly of the Mecca and Medinashrines and also those of Indian Sufishrines. The magazines also carried artwork based on calligraphy of Qur’anicliterature in Arabic. But even thesemagazines, until the 1980s, wereliberal enough to carry advertisementsof commodities such as clothes, shoes,clocks and all other worldly objectsrequired in daily life. However, theydid carry ads for fashionable burqas(veils) meant for modern Muslimwomen, stressing yet again on ideas ofmodesty and chastity of women in theIslamic society.

Looking at these advertisements inUrdu magazines one may wonderwhat is so special about them. Afterall, most of them are simply Urduversions of the mainstream product

advertisements in English or any otherIndian language publications. What isspecial is that most examplespresented here are from the early- andmid-twentieth century, and onedoesn’t see them any more in Urduprint culture. They belong to a ‘goldenera’ of Urdu print culture, whichreveals the openness and eclecticism ofUrdu readers.

It is important to document and studythese images because many of thoseliberated periodicals are no longerprinted, and the Indian industry andcommercial establishments do notconsider the current Urdu magazinescommercially rewarding enough toadvertise in. Until the 1980s, almostall major advertising agencies in Indiahad creative staff or resources inUrdu; most ad campaigns wereoriginally conceived and designed inUrdu rather than simply copied fromthe English templates. Their artiststoo often came from a lineage ofpractitioners in the Indo-Muslimartistic tradition, such as calendar art,which too is almost extinct. Thedecline of Urdu print culture mayhave occurred parallel to a process of‘ghettoisation’ of the Indian Muslimcommunity in India since 1947.

17

These have been complex processesand no single factor can be considered

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responsible for them. But Urdulanguage and its print culture is notdead yet. New magazines and popularliterature is being published, but thetendency has mostly been to impartvalues of a rather sanitised religionamong the new generation ofMuslims. The visual culture of thesemagazines reflects icons and motifs ofthe Arab world rather than of India,as the new global Muslimsincreasingly seek their culturalidentities in west Asia.

Yousuf Saeed is a filmmaker andauthor whose documentary films andresearch has focused on South Asia’sshared cultural traditions and popularvisual culture. His films Basant(1997), Khayal Darpan (2006), andMaking of the Taj (2013) have beenshown internationally. He is theauthor of Muslim Devotional Art inIndia (Routledge, 2012), and co-manages Tasveer Ghar, the onlinearchive of South Asia’s popular visualculture.

NOTES

1. Gilani, Iftikhar, ‘Mirza Ghalib isfanning hate feelings: Cops’ theory’,Daily News and Analysis (DNA),Mumbai, 10 April 2012.

2. Safavi, Rana, ‘My name Is Urdu andI am not a Muslim’, Tehelka blog, 24April 2013,http://blog.tehelka.com/my-name-is-urdu-and-i-am-not-a-muslim

3. Saeed, Yousuf, ‘Eid Mubarak:Cross-cultural Image Exchange inMuslim South Asia,’ Tasveer Ghar,March 2011, New Delhi.http://tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/117/

4. Farouqui, Athar, ‘The Problem ofUrdu in India—Political orExistential? An Interview with S.R.Faruqi’, The Annual of Urdu Studies,Vol.10, 1995, pp.157-67.

5. Orsini, Francesca, Print andPleasure: Popular literature andentertaining fictions in colonial northIndia, New Delhi: Permanent Black,2009.

6. Stark, Ulrike, An Empire of Books:The Naval Kishore Press and theDiffusion of the Printed Word in

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Colonial India, New Delhi: PermanentBlack, 2007.

7. Saeed, Yousuf, ‘Setting GenderRoles in Early Indian PrintAdvertisements’, Marg, Mumbai: MargPublications, Vol.62 No.4, June 2011,pp. 84-91.

8. Stark, Ulrike, ‘Politics, Public Issuesand the Promotion of UrduLiterature: Avadh Akhbar, the FirstUrdu Daily in Northern India’, Annualof Urdu Studies 18, 2003, pp. 66-94.

9. Minault, Gail, ‘Urdu Women’sMagazines in the Early TwentiethCentury’, Manushi, No. 48,September-October 1988, pp. 2-9.

10. Sunaga, Emiko, ‘A Study of theUrdu Print Culture of South Asiasince the Late Eighteenth Century’,Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies 6,March 2013, pp. 136-144.

11. Saeed, Yousuf, Muslim DevotionalArt in India, New Delhi: Routledge,2012.

12. McGowan, Abigail, ‘Modernity atHome: Leisure, Autonomy and theNew Woman in India’, Tasveer Ghar,http://tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/95/

13. Ahmed, Nazir Ahmad, The Bride’sMirror: A Tale of Life in Delhi aHundred Years Ago, trans. G.E. Ward,Delhi: Permanent Black, 1869.

14. Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt, ‘HisMaster’s Voice? Exploring Qawwaliand ‘Gramophone Culture’ in SouthAsia’, Popular Music, CambridgeUniversity Press, Volume 18, Issue 01,January 1999, pp. 63-98.

15. Gadihoke, Sabeena, ‘Selling Soapand Stardom: the Story of Lux’,Tasveer Ghar,http://tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/104/

16. Several of Ibne Safi’s detectivenovels have recently been translatedand published in English along withtheir cover art by Blaft Publications,Chennai. See http://blaft.com

17. Ali, Imran and Yoginder Sikand,‘Ghettoisation of Muslims in India’,Counter Currents, 7 January 2005,http://www.countercurrents.org/comm-sikand070206.htm

Cover of a religious magazine Astana showing the image of a Sufi shrine, published from Delhi, 1970.

The TacomaNarrows

Conversation:Episode 27

Abhishek Hazra

Like all good introductions, this too will begin with aninvocation, one that will channel the presence of someonewho deeply informs our practice:

Failure-Art. Non-Failure Art. Ecological Art. Kinetic Art. NewMedia Art. Performance Art. Text-Based Art. Slide Show Art.Pretentious Art. Blood Art. Dust Art. Verbose-interviews-masquerading-as Art. Well, it doesn’t matter which art-genreyou belong to, as long as you are ashamed of it.

(The following is a short excerpt from an online radio showcalled the Tacoma Narrows Conversation, in which the writerAnuprash Joshi was interviewed by Pratyut Panna, theshow’s host.)

For today’s edition of the TacomaNarrows Conversation, we willbe talking to Anuprash Joshi,

who has been pursuing his FailBookproject for the last ten years. TheFailBook project, as many of youmight know, is an ongoing book series,where each book is a detaileddescription of books that Anuprashhas failed to write. There have beenfive books in this series so far, with thesixth one due for publication nextyear.

Typically, each book in the projectspeaks about eight failed books ingreat detail: eight books thatAnuprash has failed to write. Whilethe range of topics covered in each ofthese unwritten books is definitely

interesting—from the history oflepidopterists’ field accessories to thechemistry of paper pulp—eachFailBook is also marked by the waythese failed or unwritten books arethemselves described. ‘Description’ isperhaps not an accurate word to usehere, as they are not simplydescriptions and neither are they asummary of his research notes.Perhaps one could call them deicticinvocations?Let us hear Anuprash tell us moreabout them.

PP: Hello Anuprash! Welcome tothe show.

AJ: It’s a pleasure to be here atTacoma Narrows.

24

PP: Anuprash, apologies forindulging in the ‘origin-fetish’, buthow did you get started on yourFailBook project?

AJ: Well, as you will realise, the ideaitself is nothing particularly novel.Many writers have spoken about theirunwritten books. And in fact, ahistory of unwritten books is the topicof an unwritten book in the thirdbook in the FailBook series.

So, around ten years back, I was tryingto finish a book about this entireolfactory aspect of bibliophilia. I hadstructured it around five apparentlydisconnected chapters, each of whichelaborated on a particular area—forexample there was this chapter onhow to analyse the Raman spectra ofprinting inks and related dyestuffs,and there was another one on ways totweak the filters in those heavy dutyindustrial masks so that you caninhale the aroma of really old bookswithout getting into some healthhazard.

Now, expectedly enough, I was havingreal difficulty in completing each ofthese chapters—they were perpetuallyin various stages of revision and re-revision and drastic re-writes. At somepoint, I think, I realised that perhaps

each of these chapters were meant tobe a separate book by itself. And withthat realisation I also quickly figuredout that, for various reasons, I won’tbe able to write those books. Orrather, I won’t be able to finish themwithin the practical frameworks offinishing books.

PP: Was talking about that failurethen a way of coming to terms withit?

AJ: Yes, absolutely. At least for thefirst FailBook that was very much thestarting point, and this influenced theentire structure of it. This decision toinclude my research notes, and otherpreparatory material in the finalpublished book, was motivated by thisentire ‘coming to terms with the failurething’. The idea was that let someoneelse write the book that I won’t be ableto. Let their success redeem my failureand all that sort of stuff. And it is onlywhen the first book was published,and I held the actual book in myhand, did I realise the problematicaspect of that position. I mean, wheredo you draw the line between writingand not-writing? At what point does adetailed chapter summary become achapter?

Now, you might say that it’s a pretty

25

The Tacoma Narrows Conversation – Abhishek Hazra


obvious question, and I realise that at apractical, pragmatic level, perhaps it is,but I still think that this threshold isan extremely slippery one. Think aboutdead authors and their unfinishedbooks and how astute and diligenteditors find ways to clothe thoseunfinished chapters in the properattire of publishable text. Or how, oncea particular text has been canonised,there is an almost interminable searchfor alternative, unpublished versions ofthe text—the various draft versionsspread across scratched-overmanuscripts and mutilated notebooks.And often when you go through thesealternative versions, you encounter thatclassic forking path moment: where thesingularity of the published text givesway to alternative universes, that arealso interconnected in some strangeway.

And it is this interconnection thatperhaps makes this bifurcationscenario slightly different from a ManyWorlds Hypothesis kind of context.As a reader when you traverse thedense network of these variations, yourealise that in some way, each node, orvariant, telescopes all the other nodes.One could dismiss this as ahallucination of readerly affect,stemming possibly from one’s deepengagement with this universe of

texts. However, that acute and oftenoverwhelming feeling of reading all thevariants simultaneously is actuallyquite a real thing.

PP: Is this why from the secondbook onwards, you do away with theresearch notes alltogether?

AJ: Well, in a way yes. But they don’treally go away. I still do have to makethese notes for myself to make senseof the subject that I am grapplingwith. The only difference is that theydon’t enter the space of the book—atleast not within some ethicalframework of material evidence: “Look!Here, I have done the research to backupmy claim of failure. You can’t tell methat I didn’t try.”

This material evidence of effort is tiedup to the typology of Good Failuresand Bad Failures: perhaps there caneven be a category of Lazy Failure?This demonstration of sincereattempts is one more way in whichfailure gets rehabilitated as processwith a capital P. Any suspicion of alack of conscientiousness alsoimmediately casts a doubt on theauthenticity of this failure one isclaiming to have achieved. How can Isay I have failed in something if Ihaven’t even tried?

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PP: But there can be other sourcesof failure too, can’t there? Forexample, if we look at the enthusiast,then we witness this irresolvable gapbetween his enthusiasm for a subjectand his actual competence in it.

AJ: Which is why the figure of theincompetent enthusiast keeps comingback to me. In fact, it was the title ofan essay I had written earlier this year.There I was trying to think about thisamateur mathematicians’ club inBhopal whose members try tomemorise all the questions in theMathematical Tripos from 1820onwards.

PP: The Cambridge one?

AJ: Yes, that one!

So, yes, this club has around fifteenmembers and only some of them areformally trained in maths—even thenthey would at the most have anundergraduate degree. Most of themhave very different professional lives—one is a horticultural expert, another isa librarian at Bharat Bhavan—butthey all have this strange fascinationwith mathematics. In their weeklymeetings they quiz one another on thequestions for a given year and whenthey are all ready they really perform

like a band. One of them shouts outthe question number and the othersrecite out the questions in unison. It’squite a remarkable sight. The week Iwas there they had chosen the 1854Tripos papers—the year that thephysicist Maxwell was the secondWrangler.

After spending some time with them,I am not even sure if it’s reallymathematics that is the object of theiraffection. Although if you ask themthey talk a lot about architecture—and inhabitation. For them, thisseemingly absurd act of memorisingall these really difficult questions is away of spending time in the House ofMaths. And of course, you can’t reallyexplain it logically—the sensibleresponse would of course be to tellthem to go and learn some real mathsand thrust Spivak’s Calculus at them.

But in a way, they have a certain,almost textural sense of the terrain ofthe discipline. They are quite alert tothe actual texts of the questionsthemselves and you can sense thatthey are thinking about thetransformations within the disciplineof mathematics or even trying topostulate their own theories for thosetransformations. For example, one ofthem had his pet theory that the 1938

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Tripos questions had a stronginfluence of the French Bourbakigroup. I didn’t really follow up thisparticular observation, so I can’t testifyto its veracity, but in this case that’snot the point. What excited me is thatalthough they have this close focus onCambridge, they are really engagingwith the larger history of thediscipline.

PP: Did you see them in some wayas kindred spirits? It is interestingthat in an interview you gave afterthe publication of the secondFailBook—the one which is markedby a total absence of any researchnotes—you also spoke about thisquality of inhabitation.

AJ: In some way, perhaps I do. Andyes, this aspect of inhabitation stillinterests me—although I am not surehow much the FailBook series reallysucceeds in producing that feeling ofinhabiting a discourse. There, youhave it again—the fundamental ironyof speaking about failure, which ofcourse is one of the running themes inthe entire series.

And while you can reduce this ironyto a formal problem in logic or settheory, or even point to theconstituent contradiction in any

binary configuration, in my mind itdoesn’t really lessen the complexnature of this irony. One could saythat this is even infinitely generative—that it compels someone invested inthinking about failure, to produce aseries of attempts that continuouslygrapple with this irony.

PP: How did BURP (BrihannalaUniversity Regional Press), thepublishers for the secondFailBook, respond to your decisionto print only the rejection lettersof other publishers and not theactual manuscript which wasrejected?

AJ: Oh! They took it quite sportingly—very much in the spirit of theproject. Oarseed, who was my editorthen at BURP, was a huge supporterof this project. And of course, he wasthe one who selected this almostheavily rejected manuscript.

PP: But are all those detailedrejection slips for real? Or is it asly homage to Umberto Eco? Sinceanyone familiar with publication isimmediately suspicious of thelength and quality of thoserejection letters. They are indeedmore like letters, or even likeblind reviews.

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AJ: Perhaps they are blind reviewsmasquerading as rejection slips. Whoknows! However, I also realise thatirrespective of whatever I say, thisspectre of the fictional will alwayshaunt those rejection letters. Soreally, it is up to you to decide ontheir authenticity.

Also, I have to disappoint yourattempt to trace a lineage ofinfluences. While an obsession withparatextual epiphenomena has itselfa long history, my specific interest infailure stems more from my uncle.Till his last day, he practised thedifficult art of resonant singing.Which as you would know, involvesproducing a kind of rhythmic, voice-based pattern-making. These auralpatterns are then directed towards avariety of small household objects.The idea is to find, by trial and error,the natural frequency of a particularobject—a coffee cup for instance—and sing to it in its natural frequency.Typically, for most small objects,even a few minutes of resonantsinging throws it into violent spasmsof sympathetic resonance. Theyoscillate wildly with enhancedamplitude and ultimately shatter intoa thousand little pieces.

Postscript

Anuprash was very keen to interspersean advertisement for CIDEFA, one ofhis new entrepreneurial projects,throughout the show. He had even gotone of his collaborators to producesome interesting spoken-wordsnatches that worked as a strangehybrid of retro radio jingle and peppy-yuppy Kickstarter promotional video.While these jingles were quiteinteresting as audio material, as theproducer of the show I felt they mightbe a bit too interruptive: althoughperhaps that is precisely whatAnuprash wanted. Anyway, hegraciously agreed to stick to the mainconversation while promising to comeback later for another show thatwould focus only on CIDEFA, hiscitation database project. However,given his busy schedule, we suspectthat is not going to materialiseanytime soon. So, in the interim, weare publishing here a brief note aboutCIDEFA. We hope to bring you amore extended text on CIDEFAsoon.

Project CIDEFA

CIDEFA aims to extend the web ofcitation metrics firmly established inthe world of scholarly publication, in

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the sciences as well as in thehumanities, into the world of artisticpractice and production. As we allknow, the citation index of an articlepublished in an academic journal orany other ‘reputed’ publication gives anaccount of the number of times thatparticular article has been cited byother authors. A comprehensiveindexing system coupled with agranular querying interface, allows usaccess into the hidden orchardsnestled within academia’s charmedmatrix. For example, according toinitial estimates, while Ashis Nandy’spaper ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’has been cited around 146 times, atleast five of those citations are ininstances which themselves havethree-digit citation counts.

Now, of course, metrics obsessedbureaucrats have seized-upon suchsucculent numbers as IF (ImpactFactor) and H-Index with anunprecedented intensity and interest.While we don’t believe that scholarlywork can be reduced to merenumbers—and after all, there has tobe space for a reader who is just areader and not a compulsive citation-emitter—we also realise that if thingslike your shoehorn can have their owninternet (communicating with othershoe horns or even with a paper

trimmer) then massive networkintegration with a quantifiablefootprint is inevitable.

The new database, and theaccompanying regulatory protocolsproposed by the Tacoma NarrowsRepository, the informal consortiumof artists and academics who haveconceptualised CIDEFA, will recordthe number of valid citations (to otherartworks) that any given artworkmakes. The artist can submit herartwork along with its citationalmetadata—i.e. information about thenature and number of other artworksher piece makes a reference to, be itSukumaran’s Post Office orSwaminathan’s crows—to a regulatingbody, who will then authenticate thevalidity of metadata or the artist’scitational claim. Every time a givenartwork is published (or in otherwords exhibited) its record in thedatabase is updated. Here, roughlyspeaking, an artwork is treated as anequivalent of a scholarly paper, andcorrespondingly an exhibition isequated with a journal. The validatedcitation record will be made publiclyavailable in an open access website.

The immediate practical benefits ofCIDEFA are clearly quite evident.Many artists are increasingly finding

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themselves within a formalisedacademic context, competing for thescarce resources of grants and researchfunds. Often the other academics theycompete with are not artists and comefrom disciplines that already have aflourishing citation indexing system,which then allows them to drape thesignificance of their research with thelegitimising aura of these citationmetrics. CIDEFA will help to addressthis lack. Secondly, while we all knowthat artists are already subjected tofine-grained quantitative analysis—sharp eyes on the look-out for whoappreciates and who depreciates—thecriteria of analysis in such metrics areoften far from artistic and scholarlyinterests.

Do we hear you groaning inexasperation at the sight of suchexhausted binaries as market and non-market? While many of us at TacomaNarrows Repository no longer pursuethe locational co-ordinates of outsiderpositions, almost all of us ambivalentlynurse the idea that perhaps metrics arenot inherently tainted, and that theremight be ways to tinker with them.Many of you have also expressedconcern about CIDEFA’s feasibility.We appreciate your concern. However,since the Tacoma Narrows Repositoryis voluntary and entirely self-funded,

we didn’t have to suffer the ignominyof doing a feasibility analysis for agrant application. We know that thispiece of information is making youeven more worried about CIDEFA’sfate. We can only suggest that youkeep an eye out for the notificationalerts that pop up in your favouritesocial media feed system.

CIDEFA 1.6 is still beta and that’sour current version.

And we have updates in the pipeline.

You can reach usat: [email protected]

A shorter version of this text wasperformed for Failure Room curatedby Meera Menezes (part of SaraiReader 09: The Exhibition)

Abhishek Hazra is an artist andoccasional writer based in Bangalore.Although he can’t converse with hisangular momentum his favouritebicycle is a Carnot.

Dance of the Dying Murals

M.V. Bhaskar

The seventeenth-century murals of the VenugopalaParthasarathy temple at Chengam in Tamil Nadu arefighting a losing battle against time. Parts of themare badly damaged, and M.V. Bhaskar was given anIFA grant to photograph, scan and digitally tracethem. In this essay, Bhaskar explains how, through hisnovel method of conservation, he plans to give theseancient images new life by using them in animationand for Kalamkari work.

My first involvement withmural paintings began in2003, when I was asked to

manage the image archive of a muralpainting documentation project thatcovered eleven locations in TamilNadu.

1It was evident right at the

outset that one of the logicaloutcomes of my engagement wouldbe an animation film based on thestories painted on the walls andceilings of temples and palaces.

Ten years later, a Ramayana is takingshape. The music is getting done.The cast is getting rigged. There isplenty more to be done.

I had a bit of a headstart, beginningwith a beautiful story—many stories,in fact, illustrated by mastermuralists and handed to me on aplatter as storyboards. Among themost accessible of the narrativemurals that I eventually got to seeand document across forty-twoknown locations in Tamil Nadu werethe Ramayana murals—in particular,those found on the ceiling of theforecourt of the VenugopalaParthasarathy temple at Chengam onthe Bangalore-Tiruvannamalaihighway (Fig.1). The murals are ofseventeenth century vintage (Nayakaperiod) and carry bilingual Telugu-Tamil label inscriptions. I wanted to

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animate them and I had no idea how.

I went to Mumbai in August 2012 toparticipate in an IFA event, and at theend of the session, a young womancame up to me and asked if I had seenLotte Reiniger. I asked her to spell thename for me. Back in Chennai, I saw

the wonderful 1920s silhouetteanimations of German film directorCharlotte “Lotte” Reiniger anddiscovered that she had taken thesame route as I much after her.As parallel reference, I had been

recording leather puppetperformances of the Ramayana by

Dance of the Dying Murals – M.V. Bhaskar

Fig. 1: The ceiling on the forecourt of the Venugopala Parthasarathy temple at Chengam,Tiruvannamalai district, Tamil Nadu, with traces of the murals painted around a central decorativerelief, in three registers. The scenes depict the Book of War from the Sri Ranganatha Ramayana(Telugu). Size: approximately 14.5’ x 14.5’.

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Contributor - Name of Article

A section of the mural painting from the temple at Tiruppudaimarudur, Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu, showing incidents related to theascent of Saivism and the decline of Jainism in early medieval Tamil country. Photograph: Rajiv Kumar. The tracing (by D. Samson)and the reconstruction of the damaged parts of the mural are featured overleaf. Full story on http://tnmurals.org


Khande Ramadas and Party ofDharmavaram (Fig. 2). For Lotte, thestarting point had been Chineseshadow puppetry. I first sought torecord leather puppets for use assoundtrack. Slowly, dimly, I began tosee that the mural cast could berigged for animation just as thepuppets are, with hinges at theshoulder, elbow, wrist, crotch (male),hip (female), knee and ankle. Thehead is mounted on a stick held inanother hand by the puppeteers, sothe head is free to turn forward andbackward, and this concept would

work just as well. There are no rigsfor jaw, eye and finger movement andthat is the boundary of leather puppettheatre. Leather puppetry also avoids,for obvious reasons, bow-and-arrowcombat, and yet fight sequences arethe most fun. The puppeteers work upa form of dive-wrestling with fantasticsound effects from behind their whitescreen, which has the audience insplits. Monkeys and demonssomersault in mid-air and fall on andcrush one another.

2I expect to feature

a lot of dive-wrestling in myforthcoming film.

Fig. 2: Khande Ramadas and Party, leather puppeteers from Dharmavaram, Andhra Pradesh, performing theRamayana. As part of the IFA project, I have documented their performance thrice, at Dharmavaram, Chennai andPune (in the picture), in that order. Photograph by K. Thanigaimani.

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Another aspect of the animation thathas held me continuously interestedis based on a particular scene depictedin the Chengam Ramayana narrative.The mural is badly bruised andneglected. The narrative, based onSri Ranganatha Ramayana, theTelugu version of the epic whichacquired written form apparently inthe fifteenth century, features Ravana(Fig. 3) in a paataala hoomam(underground fire sacrifice). Thestory goes that even a thousandRamas cannot defeat Ravana if hecompletes his underground firesacrifice, and therefore he cannot beallowed to do so. The monkeys try todisrupt the sacrifice. The mightiestgenerals of the monkey army—Angadha, Sugriva, Nala, Nila and

the invincible Hanuman—try tobreak the barrier to the netherworldof Ravana. The ten-headed demoncannot be moved. Animating theimmoveable seemed like a good idea,but I needed soundtrack.

If Ravana was doing a fire sacrifice,he must be uttering some mantra:what could it be? The texts offeredno clue. Years earlier, I had heard alecture demonstration on the uniqueform of ritual temple music calledmallaari (practised to this daythough in decline) performed by theperiya meelam, as the tavil-and-nagaswaram ensemble is known. It isplayed at different times of the day,coinciding with temple activities suchas procession or bath of the deity.

Fig. 3: Ravana performs his underground fire sacrifice under an arch, the artist’s representation of thebarrier to the netherworld, which the monkeys must cross in order to destroy Ravana’s ritual. The textof the Ranganatha Ramayana alludes to a smoke-filled Lanka of zero visibility where nothing, letalone Ravana, can be found. Photograph by C.P. Satyajit.


Now, in nagaswaram performances thepercussion always enters first. Thetavils begin to play, set the tempo andinvite the melody to join in. Thisinvitational piece to mallaari is calledalaarippu. There is a vocal base to thisalaarippu and its col or bol has neverleft me from the first time I heard it.

kuṇṭa kuṇṭākkik kurutak kuṇṭākkikuṇṭakuṇṭākkik kurutak kuṇṭākkikurutakkurutakkak kuṇṭak kuṇṭākkikurutakkurutakkak kurutak kuṇṭākki

... and so on. This is set to five beatsand carries no meaning.

3Ravana

utters this ‘mantra’ in the animation,his ten heads concatenating itpolyrhythmically. All the while, themonkeys kick and scream offbeat,trying to break into the netherworld. Look south on the ceiling atChengam, and you find the mostpeaceful part of this war- and time-

ravaged Ramayana. Sita is returningto Rama (Fig. 4). Vibhishana, withstaff in hand, and his three royalmusicians playing the drum, the oboe(no finger-holes) and the horn, leadthe procession. Trijata, Sita’sconfidante, is walking with thequeen-to-be. In April 2011 we visiteda few villages within three-to-fourhours’ drive from Chennai andrecorded these instruments.Permission from the templeauthorities to digitise the murals waspending at that time, and wouldn’tarrive for another year. The projecthad reached a stasis. My enthusiasmhad ebbed away. Luckily, it occurredto me to go after and gather themusic featured in the murals. If Icouldn’t shoot, I could record.Adrenalin began to flow again.Our crew headed to a MahabharataTerukkuuttu (street play)performance,chasing the musicians who perform

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Fig. 4: Sita, in the palanquin, is returning to Rama after the war. Vibhishana, fourth from left, isleading Sita to Rama. Three royal musicians announce Sita’s return. The scene has been inspirationaland instrumental in leading me to look for and record the music portrayed in the murals. Photograph by C.P. Satyajit.


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for the Kuuttu (play), hoping to findamong them the instruments themselvesor knowledge of such instruments.They took us around and found every one of these instruments,instrumentalists, and more (Fig. 5). In just one day of field recording andwith no real preparation we cameaway with a rich cache of authenticsound. Thereafter, finding theinstruments featured in the muralpaintings and field-recording them,rather than composing in the studio,became a central strategy. Going afterthe leather puppeteers was anextension of this logic, which, as itturned out, had far-reachingconsequences on the way the filmwould approach the techniques ofanimation.

The delay in getting permission todigitise the Chengam murals wasfortuitous for another reason. When weultimately documented the murals morethan a year after I had originallyplanned to do so, I had access to muchsuperior technology. My photographer -friend C.P. Satyajit, who specialises inautomobile photography, had justacquired an eighty-megapixel camera,four times as high as was available ayear earlier. For the first time, I was ableto see everything the murals had anddidn’t have, and I was able to read everyextant letter in the label inscriptions.

The visual canvas of the film wasstoryboard-ready alright, but notquite. The murals are more lost thanpreserved; there’s hardly a figure in

Fig. 5: Processional instruments such as featured in the mural and as seen in this photograph, whichare hundreds of years of old, can still be found in common use. The instrumentalists have other jobs,but come election time or local festivals and they pull the old brass out and tune them up.

them that can be seen in its entirety.Animating them makes it mandatory,at some level, for the broken, peeledand distressed figures to be firstbrought back to near-original form ina way that nothing is imagined. Inother words, take the guesswork outand look for the most appropriate

methodologies to reconstruct thenarratives in their entirety.

The Tale Reconstructed

I began with some low-hanging fruit. Ipicked for reconstruction those muralsthat were relatively well preserved,


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Fig. 6: A picture of a mural from the seventeenth century as it exists in the Narumpunathaswamytemple at Tiruppudaimarudur, Tirunelveli District, Tamil Nadu. In the walls inside the temple tower offive tiers, there are mural paintings, among them depictions of Arab/Portuguese traders selling horsesto the local king ahead of his war with the invading army of Krishnadevaraya. This mural is from this‘horse-trading’ series. Size: 2' x 6' (w x h without border). Middle: A digital tracing of the mural,outline only. Right: A cloth replica produced by powder-tracing the line drawing and then by drawingand dyeing it using Kalamkari techniques.

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such as the one featured on thedoublespread pages of this article.Such gifts were very few. I brought theresults of the in situ digitisation intothe computer and viewed them atmagnifications that the first-generation digital SLR camerasallowed. The pixel density was barelyenough, but we had proof on handthat digital image acquisition and themethodologies we used were betterthan anything done up to that pointwith mural painting documentation.

Working with the photographs, Ibegan to trace the line segments of themurals which, it must be noted, areprimarily linear and atonal with flatpigments filling the spaces enclosed bythe lines. The digital (not automated)tracing obtained is in the form of whatis known as Scalable Vector Graphic(SVG). In this effort I am supportedby D. Samson, my illustrator-colleague, and a department of overtwenty graphic artists at TNQ Booksand Journals, a Chennai-basedcompany that I work with, whichprovides publishing services topublishers of scientific, technical,medical and scholarly content.

SVG is a digital file format in whichline art behaves like a font in the sensethat no matter how much you enlarge

it, it does not break apart, unlikephotographic images, which pixellateand disintegrate when magnifiedbeyond a threshold. An SVG is amathematical expression of lines andcurves, and is therefore a machine-readable drawing that a computerattached with an output stylus canpractically print or carve on anysurface—paper, metal, plastic, wood—and to any size.

However, it was not machinereproduction but high-fidelityreconstruction that I was interested in.As Samson and I were struggling withthe tracings, it appeared to me that Ishould involve some native craftsmenwho were familiar with the themesand the grammar of the characters andcomposition.

Eighty kilometres from Chennai isKalahasti, in Andhra Pradesh, whichis home to hundreds of Kalamkariartists who could paint Ramayana intheir sleep. I approached one of them,Patalam Ramachandriah, with actual-size printouts of some of mydelineations, gave him colourreferences and also took him to somelocations so that he could see themurals for himself. The idea was thatthe Kalamkari artist would powder-trace the black-and-white printout

onto cloth, and then infuse thecolours, using resist-dye methodscharacteristic to Kalamkari, achievingas close an approximation to themural-pigment colour-space aspossible (Fig. 6) in actual size. Theexploratory work of having theKalamkari artist replicate it on clothmade me realise the greater value thatthe traditional artist could bring to thereconstruction process.

As a next test, I traced parts of themural as they were present and beganto seek the expertise of the Kalamkariartist to interpolate the missing parts.To give a simple example, if we lookat the composition of the coronationof Rama, it always features aparticular ensemble of characters,with some local variations. Now, ifthere are seven sages in thecomposition blessing Rama and threeof them had peeled off, the Kalamkariartist knew exactly which three wentmissing and how to put them back.And so, the Kalamkari artist becamenot just a replicator, but a valuablecontributor and collaborator inreconstructing the narrative.

Kalamkari had another appeal—itsagelessness. When a photographicdocumentation project is conceived,photography is often deemed to be an

end in itself. However, fromexperience, we know thatphotographic print and film have onlya limited life, and as for digitalarchives, it is too early to tell.Kalamkari, on the other hand, hasproved that it can last a millennium orlonger, if we go by examples ofexhibits of textile art that we see inmuseums all around the world.

Why Another Ramayana?

It is said that the Ramayana makessaints out of thieves and liars. Fromhaving once been in advertising tonow being in conservation of sorts hasbeen a journey. The Ramayana is self-perpetuating. It does not need aBhaskar, but if he is there, the storywill find him. As it unfolds in manyforms, I owe it to the reader to informhim/her that my obsession withanimating the Ramayana is merely tobring a popular perspective to themore fundamental aspects ofreconstructing the mural, and thisshould be seen as the true intent ofthis project.

Reviewing the project proposal twoyears ago, Anupam Sah, Head of ArtConservation, Research and Training,at CSMVS Conservation Centre ofthe Chhatrapathi Shivaji Maharaj

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Vastu Sangrahalay, Mumbai, pointedout: “Digital stitching in full colourdepth, to actual size, is a very usefuldocumentation technique necessary forthe planning of actual physicalconservation of mural paintings.Digital tracing to scale prepares thebase format on which a distressmapping or graphic condition report isprepared. Both these aspects that theproject proposes are often not done bythe custodians who are supposed to beresponsible for the upkeep of the siteprincipally because of lack ofawareness of the practicality of thisdocumentation technique.”

The Ramayana chose itself for thereason that the Ramayana alone canbe retold and reconstructed, bothreliably and creatively, by vast sectionsof Indian society, be theycraftspersons, conservators or novices.It happens that there are seven visualnarratives of the Ramayana in muralpainting form in Tamil Nadu, and Ihave been part of documenting six ofthem, opening up the possibilities forrich cross-referencing, disambiguationand verification.

M.V. Bhaskar works in academicpublishing. He has experience acrossprint, film, web and technology andcombines it to construct multileveldocumentation of subjects that he gets exposed to.

(The author can be contacted at:[email protected] pages of interest:www.chengammurals.org,www.tnmurals.org,www.kalamkariepics.org)

NOTES

1. A project of the Centre for Plants,People and Ecosystems (CPPE),Chennai, with Prof. S. Balusamy asProject Coordinator. A partial reportof the project can be accessed onlineat http://tnmurals.org.

2. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJwsi8Q26ps. This article attempts to express in printaspects that belong to the morecomplex online and film media. Forthis reason, elements of the articlethat cannot be featured here in printare cross-referenced to a companionwebsite, http://chengammurals.org,which features audio, video,interactive materials and links.

3. See http://youtu.be/Lj8X6zcHBkg.

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Of Image and Word:Tracing Evolutions inStorytelling Tradition

Vidyun Sabhaney

In an attempt to extend her practice as a comic-book artist, Vidyun Sabhaneyhas been studying how stories from the Mahabharata are told in threepicture-storytelling traditions: Togalu Gombeyatta in Karnataka, Patuachitra(painting and performance) in West Bengal and the Kaavad from Rajasthan.From 2012 through 2013, as Sabhaney and her collaborator Shohei Emuratravelled to meet practitioners of these traditions, they realised that notradition was monolithic, and that there were differences across villages,artists and generations. Why do these differences exist? What are some of thenewer developments in the form? These questions shed light on the evolvingnature of traditional art practices, and helped Sabhaney in her attempt tounderstand the relationship between the oral and the visual in the telling ofthe epics.

A haathfiruthalibaavli puppet from the collection of the puppeteer Ramaiah.Puppets with movable arms are now in vogue. Photograph by Vidyun Sabhaney.

It is a long journey from Hassan toKoppal, one that requires thetraveller to change buses twice—

first at Harihara and then at Hospet.Both are frenetic small towns in northKarnataka. Hospet, which is thebetter known of the two as it serves asa gateway to Hampi, is rife with afluctuating energy that characterisestourist centres, the kind of energy thatpeaks with the arrival of a busload ofpeople. Everywhere, there are eyesmaking contact, men and womenfollowing your shadow anddemanding money, pushers of taxisand hotels who always claim to havethe best deal, tiny shops sellingmillions of tiny plastic knick-knacks,forced conversation in broken Englishand questions that seem all toopersonal ... . This energy wanes assoon as the bus empties and its formerinhabitants disappear into the night.Until, of course, another set of wheelsturns into the station and the cyclebegins anew. The frenzy of Harihara,on the other hand, is the harmlesskind—the kind that plays Kolaveri Diloudly and repeatedly till every shopand every house seems to sway to itssweet, laconic beat.

Between these two stops are longperiods of calm. It is an opportunityfor the idle traveller to watch, through

rusted bus windows, Karnatakatransforming painfully from lushfertility to barrenness. You findyourself in a land prone to duststorms, where sudden patches of greengrass seem unnatural. Scarecrowsstanding arm-in-arm endlessly guardthe empty fields. When Koppal doesfinally appear on the horizon it feels asif nothing, let alone a story, could growthere.

And yet, stories were precisely whymy collaborator Shohei Emura and Iwere there—or rather, one story,perhaps the longest ever told: theMahabharata. Its sudden turns andsecret passageways have seduced many,and led them to a lifetime of study.Our own foray into its complexnarrative has been through themedium of comics. Comics require theartist to break down a visual narrativeinto image blocks called panels which,when seen in sequence, must tell acomplete story with or without words.While conceptualising our project,however, we felt constrained by thefinality of the comic medium. TheMahabharata is an epic that hasgrown and spread orally; thetransience of the spoken word, thepauses in conversation through whichanother story may be teased out, thestrain of unreliability in memory—all

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are players in this grand epic. Howdoes one capture this quality in thecomic? Should the attempt be madethrough content, as we did in our2012 comic Chilka,

1or through a new

visual language? This question led usto study three picture-storytellingtraditions in India that tell storiesfrom the Mahabharata: TogaluGombeyatta in Karnataka, BengaliPata (painting and performance) inWest Bengal and the Kaavad fromRajasthan. From 2012 through 2013we travelled to meet artists whopractise these traditions. Our primarymeans of inquiry were interviews, anddocumentation through sketches,photographs and videos.

Coming as we did from Delhi, wherethe mythology of the creator casts itsshadow widely over the art world, wewere not prepared to see tradition asanything other than inherited culturalpractices maintained by specificcommunities. We imagined that thesepractices had kept a safe distance fromthe seeming complexity of our urbanlives, and that they could serve as a‘window’ into narratives of the past.We could not, as the story usuallygoes, have been more wrong. Ourmost significant realisations were thatnone of these traditions aremonolithic; that the knowledge base

of one artist cannot be traded foranother, even if they were born intothe same tradition; and that there aredifferences across villages, practitionersand generations. Further inquiry intothe differences led us, ratherunceremoniously at times, to quasi-biographies of these forms. We wereasking ourselves and the artists: Whydo these differences exist? Are theyanomalies? What are some of thenewer developments in the form?These questions shed light on thecontinuous process of evolutionwithin what is constructed as‘tradition’.

Togalu Gombeyatta

Koppal is a district in Karnatakawhich is home to the only family thatstill performs using the beautifuljamkatbaavli puppets of the TogaluGombeyatta leather puppetrytradition, which is said to be at least400 years old. We had travelled all theway to watch and record one of theserare performances. We chose thestrong and silent Yenkappa, who hadlearnt his craft from his father, thefamous Doddballapa, with whom hetoured the world in the late 1980s.Since performances are hard to comeby, Yenkappa spends most of his timefarming corn. He claimed at one point

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Evolutions in Storytelling – Vidyun Sabhaney

A Togalu Gombeyatta performancein Mandeya, Karnataka, sketched byShohei Emura.

that it gives you a more visceralstrength than wheat or rice does.When he said this, we had a laughabout how that kind of strength—stamina, even—is needed for aperformance using the jamkatbaavlipuppets. But we were to realise thetruth of that statement.

Togalu Gombeyatta combines song,dialogue and the play of puppets totell stories from the Ramayanaand the Mahabharata. Its practice isrestricted to one particularcommunity—the Killekyathas. Thepuppets are made from the crisp,translucent leather of goat’s skin,which allows light to pass throughit—a quality that makes it ideal fornight-time storytelling. There are twokinds of puppets within TogaluGombeyatta: the haathfiruthalibaavliand the older jamkatbaavli. Thejamkatbaavli, which were widely usedtill thirty-odd years ago, are on theirway out. The lynchpin of a performancewith these puppets is the male head ofthe family. Occasionally, the puppeteerand his family will even indulge infriendly, if inappropriate, banter acrossthe screen that separates them.Yenkappa, for example, seemedparticularly fond of making jokesabout his aged mother’s equally ageddigestive system. His role is all-

encompassing: to move the puppetsagainst the thin-cotton screen, deliverall dialogue as well as initiate songs.The stage, traditionally made frombamboo, fits just one person; the restof the family sits outside, maintainingthe taal and singing along to songs.Most performances follow a standardformat but there is much room forexperimentation during the interplayof characters.

The jamkatbaavli, also referred to ascompositional puppets because they arenot limited to depicting just onecharacter, can be loosely divided intothree categories: puppets that depictentire scenes, those that are specific tocharacters yet retain a narrative quality,and those portraying ‘everyday life’. Thelast category is used to illustrate thehumorous lives of minor characterswithin the larger epic narrative, and isbelieved to strongly reflect the lives andpractices of the puppeteers themselves.The images painted on these puppetsare so specific that each performancerequires a different set of puppets foreach scene. Puppeteers reminisce over atime when a single performance of theRamayana had a collection of fiftypuppets for the scenes related to justRama.

Gunduraju, a master-puppeteer from

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Hassan, links this particularcharacteristic to Chitrakathi, a form ofstorytelling practised in Maharashtra.(All Togalu Gombeyatta practitionersclaim that their community migratedfrom Maharashtra several hundredyears ago; even today they speakMarathi amongst themselves.) InChitrakathi, the performer showsimages painted on loose sheets ofpaper and narrates the story. Pointingto the similarities in the visual styles ofthe Chitrakathi and the jamkatbaavli,Gunduraju opines that the former is aday-time substitute for the latter; ashe points out, leather puppetry canonly be brought to life by the light of alamp.

The style and rhythm of thejamkatbaavli performance differs fromwhat is commonly understood to be‘puppetry’. The puppets slowly enterthe stage, dance softly from left toright, and bend respectfully as theydeliver dialogue to each other. This isfar from the style of the generationthat actively practises TogaluGombeyatta, a generation that usesthe haathfiruthalibaavli puppets, whichare animated not by the compositionof the images painted on them but byhow they are moved. They have threesticks, two of which move the arms,unlike the jamkatbaavli which requires

only one stick. Humanoidgesticulation is a key technique in thisstyle and, simultaneously, the sharpestpoint of departure from the oldperformance style.

Nagaraju, a sixty-year-old puppeteerfrom Mandeya (and Gunduraju’sfather-in-law), says that leatherpuppetry was infused with speed andvigour in order to compete withtelevision, an opinion voiced by manypuppeteers we spoke to. Television,when it arrived, was not only moreseductive but it also told stories fromthe epics, taking away audiences whomight have patronised performancesfor their socio-religious content. Thislack of interest has spurred activeadaptations of the form. The old styleof performance of leather puppeteersof Karnataka has given way to aformat that now requires—rather,needs—women to deliver dialogue,sing and manipulate new puppets. Thestage has been expanded to seat allmembers of the troupe on it, with thewomen and children on the frontlinemanaging the puppets. The male headof the family sits at the back with themusicians, directing the performanceand often, playing the harmonium.While he no longer controls thepuppets he is still very much thepuppet-master; his troupe is expected

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A jamkatbaavli puppet of a queen. These puppets, and the style of performance thataccompanies them, are very rarely used today. Photograph by Vidyun Sabhaney.

to carefully follow his instructions.The gender shift is, nonetheless,significant. Gunduraju explained thatwomen were not allowed to enter thestage until very recently; he impliedthat menses was thought to makethem impure. When one views thegulf between the new style and theold, it seems that modernentertainment has dramatically alteredthe practice of this centuries-oldtradition.

Though it is difficult to pinpointwhen Togalu Gombeyatta took birth,every puppeteer you meet will insistthat it was devised when Ramahimself was leaving earth for heaven.Moments before his departure(though the details of how thistranspired vary in each account),Rama is said to have given his paintedimage to a man called Guha. Guhawas then told by the Lord to spreadhis story among the people, andensure that it never be forgotten. Thecommunity that considers Guha to betheir first father, and thereforepractise Togalu Gombeyatta, are theKillekyathas (or alternatively,Shillekyathas). While they do notoften agree on the origin of theircommunity, the Killekyathas havedeveloped a strict, mutually agreed-upon system of territory by which

other, more dangerous, disagreementsmay not arise.

Gunduraju explained this to us duringour very first encounter at his home.Each puppeteer, he said, inherits a setof villages from his father which arehis property, and in which only he isallowed to perform.

2He is expected to

perform in each of his villages at leastonce a year, as Togalu performancesare said to bring blessings and keepevil spirits at bay. In return, he has aright over a certain amount of rice orragi from every house of the village,which must be collected door to doorafter every performance. Unfortunately,these days, few are at home when thepuppeteers come knocking becausemost people now work in the servicesindustry in neighbouring towns andcities. Consequently, a puppeteer couldhave to wait days for his share.

Few do. Most carve out their ownniche from the various permutationsand combinations that exist within thenexus of tradition and adaptation.Gunduraju from Hassan prefers toperform for government anddevelopmental programmes, whichgive him the option of staying at homeand educating his children. His father-in-law Nagaraju still travels fromvillage to village but has left behind

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the compositional puppets. Anotherpuppeteer we met in Mandeya isvisibly trapped by the occupation,unable to perform effectively butunwilling to give it up. Doddballapa’sfamily in Koppal, encouraged byresearchers,

3has retained the

compositional puppets but they rarelyget the opportunity to perform. Whenthey do perform, however, they draw alarger audience than I have seenelsewhere. One that does not dissipateafter the first hour, one that laughs atall of Yenkappa’s jokes and one thatseems more concerned, for a change,with the performance itself ratherthan with the visitors who haverequested it.

4

Bengali Pata

Our travels in Karnataka led us tobelieve that traditions of storytellingcould be understood in terms of oldand new—what could have been inthe past and what is unequivocally inthe present. But where Karnatakawas stark, Bengal, home to a Patatradition, was dense, humid. We werethere when the state was still deep inthe clutches of a muggy summer; themonth of May was taking a slow turnbefore handing over its burden toJune. We lumbered from interview tointerview, seeking not just

information but some kind of clarity,but it soon became clear that thecontemporary practice of theBengali Pata would offer none of theconveniently neat distinctionsbetween ‘then’ and ‘now’. Arthistorian Kavita Singh’s assessmentof the “unexpected richness and thesometimes frustrating complexity ofthe Bengali pata”

5holds equally true

for other contemporarymanifestations of the form. It isevident that this particular traditionwill not yield so easily to definition,especially when one observesDukusham Chitrakar’s scroll onpolitical party symbols, made in the1960s, sitting casually beside t-shirtsthat his son painted in the Pata stylelast week, even as Dukushamdiscusses, through the Saheb Pata,the involvement of his community inthe movement against Britishoccupation of India.

The Bengali Patuachitra uses picturespainted on a paper scroll to tellstories. The pictures serve as an aidto the song sung by the artist, whichis the primary vehicle of the story.The stories told in this form areextremely varied, ranging frompopular local stories (Behula andLokhindor) to the Sindubad episodeof the Ramayana to the story of

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Satya Pir (a Muslim pir). Lately,specific events of internationalsignificance such as the 9/11 attackon the World Trade Towers in NewYork and the tsunami in 2004 thataffected the Indian coastline havestarted gaining popularity. This isoften spoken of as a new trend, but

there are artists like DukushamChitrakar who have been, for years,creating performances that respondto contemporary events. And yet it isdifficult to say with certainty thatexperimentation itself is deeplyintertwined with the tradition, assome artists still adhere strictly to


Panels from a scroll known as Saheb Pat, which was performed in villages across Midnapore duringthe Indian Independence movement. This scroll belongs to Dukusham Chitrakar, of Naya village.Photograph by Vidyun Sabhaney.

Arun Patua, a Patuachitrakar fromBhirbhum, performing at ‘Image &Word: Workshop On Storytelling’.Photograph by Alexandra Moskovchuk.

what their fathers taught them.Recently, a number of younger artistsfrom this tradition, with the help ofdevelopmental organisations, havebeen able to migrate and adapt theirpainting style to a variety of surfacesand formats that can be sold togenerate income. Some of theseadaptations have successfully retaineda strong narrative element, and caneven be seen as an evolution of theform itself. In this dynamicenvironment, how do we delineatethe thrust of the past and thepresent?

For us, whether or not performance isthe primary occupation of the PataChitrakar became an importantconsideration. Our first encounterwith the shy Arun Patua, fromBhirbhum, was in 2011 at theDastakaar mela in New Delhi wherehe had been invited to sell his scrolls.Quick to grasp the scope of ourinterest but unable to respond in alanguage we would understand, heinvited us to the IIT Delhi campus,where he was performing at the behestof a Bangla-speaking professor. There,he said, we would understandeverything. The prospect ofunderstanding ‘everything’ at theoutset of the project in a setting asconventional as a classroom in an

engineering college was unsettling but,nonetheless, we went. Arriving a littleearlier than Arun and desirous ofhearing him clearly, I took a seat in thefront row of the class. Quiteunconsciously, I had judged thevolume of his voice based on hisphysical presence—he is a slim andunassuming man. This impression wasrudely shattered within the first fewseconds of his performance. His voice,loud and even, transformed theclassroom into a lush, green hamlet. Itcalled out to women and children toleave their daily chores—or, at least,turn an ear to his song and an eye tohis scroll. Those who walk fromvillage to village singing for alms relyon the traditional relationshipbetween the artist and his audience,wherein the artist is to be seen assomething of an educator and moralcompass. The Pata performer couldbe sure that audiences wouldcompensate him for the knowledge hehas passed on. His primary vehicle fortelling, and consequently for hisincome, is his song. It must alwaysring true.

Here again, the advent of televisionhas eaten into the performer’s‘market’. Visual narratives that wouldbe possible only by a PataChitrakar can now be seen and heard

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on television. According to Arun,wealthier women who can affordtelevision sets no longer leave thecomfort of their homes for stories.While some have taken to findingalternative audiences—for example,villages too poor to afford atelevision—other artists have begunto take forward the painterly aspectof their form to supply entirely newmarkets. The Pata style of paintingand their accompanying narrativeimages have found their way to wall-hangings, fans, t-shirts, coasters,saris, books etc. This shift is strongerin some villages than in others. Thereare more performers to be found inSatpolsa, where Arun hails from, andhis sasuraal Itaguria (both inBhirbhum, West Bengal). The famedNaya (West Midnapore), on theother hand, is bursting with highlyadept painters. Despite being themost famous patua pada (village ofPata performers), the younger artiststhere often do not know how to writesongs or perform. The steady demandfor painted items means that theyneed never perform for a living,except perhaps to demonstrate theuse of the scroll. The oldergeneration in the same village, on theother hand, is proficient in singing(though they might not have muchpractice of late) and the song is an

important part of their creativeprocess.

There appears to be a shift towardsthe painterly aspect of the tradition.The most telling piece of evidence isthe variety of scrolls—primarily interms of shape and size—that artistsin Naya stock, compared to those inSatpolsa. Scrolls in Naya areintended to meet the requirements ofany kind of customer that mighthappen to drop by the artists stall ata mela: big, medium, small, stylised,imaginative, authentic, old, colourful,black-and-white etc. Artists inSatpolsa and Itaguria, on the otherhand, have a limited number ofscrolls in their possession, eachbearing the scars of daily wear andtear. If one would like to purchase ascroll from either of these places, itwould have to be specially made bythose with time at hand. Indeed,most of the scrolls documented by usin Satpolsa had ten to twelve panels,each of which had to be seen inperformance to be understood fully.On the other hand, scrolls in Nayatended to be smaller, with four to sixpanels. This is not to say thatthe Pata Chitrakars do not makelonger scrolls there, but they oftenchoose to make smaller ones. MaynaChitrakar informed us that these are

65


easier to sell at fairs such as Dastakarand Hasta Shilpi Mela. The largerscrolls, according to him, are used toattract the attention of potentialcustomers as they are visible fromafar but the real sales are from thesmaller ones, the ones that can beeasily hung up on a wall at home.

A natural question that emerges fromthis discourse is this: why are theseadaptations taking place in Naya, andnot Satpolsa or Itaguria? Whiletravelling with a Japanese illustratorand armfuls of documentationmaterial, you grow accustomed topeople staring wide-eyed at you,wondering, at the very least, who youare and why you’re there. However, onthe train journey from Howrah toBalichak (the station closest to Naya),it seemed we were not worth a secondlook—except perhaps to check if we’dbe willing to give up our seats. Ishould have guessed that we were notamongst an elite few who hadtravelled down; this particular pada is,after all, just a day trip from Kolkata.Daily travellers on the train routemust have long acclimatised to thepresence of strangers. Naya, with itsforty-five closely-knit Chitrakarhouseholds, has become something ofa hotspot for business and research, aswell as for the inevitable overlap

between the two. The flow of visitorsis steady even in the hottest ofmonths, with artists often hosting twoor three groups at a time.Entrepreneurial artists like MaynaChitrakar and Khandu Chitrakar haveeven built extra floors above theirhomes to offer board and lodging tovisitors like us whose work requiresthem to stay on for a few nights.Understandably, most opt for theintimacy of the artists’ homes andhome-cooked food over the fare atBalichak, which would no doubtburden both the heart and the pocket.Tellingly, when I asked Arun when avisitor had last come to Satpolsa hecould not remember, and tentativelyguessed that it was eight years ago.

Patua padas with links to researchers,craft melas, charitable organisations,publishers and designers seem to bemoving, or have already moved, fromperformance to the painterly practice.As the market for products and art-works (including books) in the Patastyle grows and diversifies,understanding a Pata Chitrakar’s workwill increasingly depend on knowingwhere he is from and the influencesthat come with this location; thecontexts of all artists, despite theirostensibly being from the samecommunity, are not comparable.

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Rajasthani Kaavad

Umi Ram met us at Ramdevra, apopular temple near Pokhran inRajasthan. A few feet away fromwhere we settled down to interviewhim, busloads of people weredisembarking and bringing theirpilgrimage to an end by dusty foot.The Kaavad, he explained, is both arecord of the gods, and of people. It isa shrine, a wooden temple on whichimages from stories of gods andgoddesses are painted. Usually, eachstory is represented by one panelisedimage which the performer points toas he recites, similar to the Patatradition. The Kaavad itself iscomprised of multiple wooden panelsor doors that fold into one anotherother to make it compact, portable.The Bhat, as the performer is known,periodically takes this shrine to hispatron families, which he refers to ashis ‘jajmans’ (hereditary patrons). Likehis forefathers before him, hemaintains a record of all births, deathsand marriages in these families; theirrelationship goes back severalgenerations. In exchange for a specialdaan (alms), he will have their imagepainted on his Kaavad, where they canbe shown in the sacred act ofpilgrimage to places such as Ramdevra.In older Kaavads they are shown on

horses, camels and elephants; lately,however, aeroplanes and cars havebecome the preferred vehiclefor darshan (act of ‘sight’, usuallyreferring to the viewing of a holyperson or image of a deity). As withthe Bengali Pata, location is animportant consideration when tryingto understand the Kaavad. It is one ofthe few traditions in which the makerand the performer come from differentcommunities, and are physicallyseparated by hundreds of miles.

The Suthar community in Mewar,which uniquely combines the skills ofcarpentry and painting to make theKaavad, lives in a town called Bassi inChittor. This district is a hotspot ontourist maps for its sprawling fort,which has stood unshakably over thearea since the seventh century. Theperformers hail from Nagaur, close toJodhpur. Motivated by the availabilityof cheap land for farming or a jobopportunity that would supplementtheir income, some of these Bhatshave chosen to settle in towns alongthe Indo-Pak border. From there, theytravel widely in Rajasthan in the dryseasons to meet their jajmans. Theirtraditional occupation is deeply tied tothe lineage of these upper-castefamilies. While the practice does notsupport them entirely, it is still going

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A traditional Kaavad, which records thegenealogy of the Bhat’s patron families.Photograph by Alexandra Moskovchuk.


The Kaavad now comes in a variety of sizes. Photograph by Vidyun Sabhaney.

strong. According to Nina Sabnani,each of these communities—themaker, the performer, and thepatrons—continue to draw a strongsense of identity from the Kaavad.This, she says, accounts for thesurvival of its traditional form.

6

But what of the tiny Kaavads thatpepper shop-windows acrossRajasthan? Being carpenters as wellas painters, the Suthars of Bassi neednot depend on the Kaavad for theirincome; besides regular carpentrywork they have traditionally madetoys, chowki, Gangaur, and paintedchitram on house walls in the festivalseason. But sales from the Kaavadhave been very good of late.According to Kaavad-maker DwarkaPrasad, the community now makes aclear distinction between ‘banchanewala’ Kaavad (meant forperformance) and ‘bechne wala’Kaavad (for sale). The former is of astandard size (one-and-a-half feet)and colour scheme (mostly red andyellow) but has variable aspects.While a standard set of narrativeimages on the lives of gods and saintsmust be painted onto every Kaavadof this kind, each Bhat has his ownset of patron families on whoserequest he will paint their images onhis Kaavad. These images are, as

mentioned earlier, of the family on apilgrimage. The family may chose thenumber of members that are to berepresented, and their mode oftransportation. For this reason,Kaavads intended for performanceare made-to-order, a process forwhich the commissioning Bhat willlikely travel down to Bassi himself, orat the very least send a trustedrepresentative. Once it is ready, theBhat will paint the names of thepatrons depicted on the Kaavad, aswell as the amount donated by them.This is written in a language calledPingla known only to the Bhats.Kojaram, a Bhat, reports a new trend:each family unit now wants its ownpanel whereas earlier they werehappy to share with the larger, jointfamily.

Experimentation has taken placespecifically within the format of theKaavad intended for sale, in terms ofsize, colour and, most interestingly,content. The reason for this, mostSuthars say, is that the Kaavad hasbecome a very popular touristsouvenir. Kalu, one of the youngerartists, claims that in a year he makesalmost 600 Kaavads, which are thendistributed to tourist centres andcraft melas across the country. Mostof these Kaavads are small, i.e.

71


Newer stories are emerging in the practice of Kaavad. This new Kaavad tells the story of a girlnamed Meena who travels across the world to study and ultimately returns home to take care of herfamily. Photograph by Alexandra Moskovchuk.

between three and twelve inches. Themost popular size is around sixinches, as it is ideal for tourists to fitinto their suitcases, even as itmaintains the integrity of the image.By comparison, the traditionalKaavad is approximately one-and-a-half feet tall. Prem Singh, who alsolives in Bassi, has begun supplyingKaavads along with silver-work todestinations such as Bikaner, Jaipur,Jodhpur, and Udaipur. This issurprising, not because these itemsdo not travel but because thedistribution is usually managedwithin the artists’ family. LikeBengali Pata, an economy has begunto develop around the commercialKaavad. And, like the Bengali Pata,‘new’ content has begun to emerge.

Though they are not the storytellersof the tradition, some of the olderKaavad-makers have begun todevelop and paint new, and somewhatclumsy, visual narratives on thetraditional structure of the Kaavad.The result is Kaavads on GuruNanak, Jesus Christ, MahatmaGandhi, selections from thePanchatantra, and even a girl namedMeena who travels abroad in searchof education. These artists say thatwhen they go to melas they find thatsome potential customers cannot

relate to their traditional content. AKaavad on Guru Nanak, for example,was developed especially by MangilalMistry for a mela in Chandigarhwhere, he predicted, a large numberof attendees would be Sikh. Othernew stories are based on similar logic,though there are some commissionedworks as well. The plot of these isvery often derived from locallypublished educational picture-books.The Kaavads that result from thisprocess, however, are neverperformed by the Bhats. In fact, it islikely that they would never see them.

Eye to the Future

I have heard it said, quite often, thatthe storytelling tradition in India isdying. This is not untrue. There are asignificant number who have left theoccupation in favour of morelucrative jobs, particularly in the caseof Togalu Gombeyatta. There areartists who, famously, have sold theirentire collection of puppets ordumped them in the river, and movedon to pick up jobs varying fromteaching to military service. There areother artists who complain, oftenloudly, of their children abandoningtheir heritage. On the other hand,there is also willingness on the partof some artists to experiment with

74


form—a hunger, even, to make whatnew markets would relate to. Thesemarkets are populated not byaudiences but by customers lookingto purchase decorations, picturebooks, clothing, souvenirs etc.

It has now become possible to simplylook at a Kaavad and accuratelydeduce its function in society:genealogical document ordecoration/gift. The needs of thecommunities involved—the makerand his new customers, the performerand his patrons—are so specific thatthey do not overlap. The traditionalKaavad, because it is so strongly tiedinto the identity and lineage of thejajmans, is not likely to ‘forget’ itsfounding narratives in a hurry.Tellingly, the ‘bechne wala’ Kaavadand the Bengali Pata painting style,and consequently the stories thathave traditionally accompanied them,travel further and wider today thantheir songs ever have. TogaluGombeyatta, on the other hand,needs performance to keep its storiesalive. In a world that seems to bemoving away from live performance,its practice offers little incentive byway of livelihood. The markets thathave come to support other traditionsdo so through their visualmanifestation. While some members

of its community make productssuch as leather lampshades, a robustmarket has not developed for these.And so, Togalu suffers.

When viewed together, the aestheticcontent of these objects made for themarket, often simultaneously‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, is of greatsignificance. It is a mirror to theconstant flux in our everyday life. Italso mirrors the change that allartists across media are experiencingtoday. The medium of comics, forexample, has developed hand-in-hand with printing technology; aslow process of evolution that wasguided by the mechanisation ofprinting. Today, those who live withan eye to the future are bidding adieuto printing itself; they are seekingways to migrate the forms ofexpression that it birthed—whethertext or image or both—onto laptops,mobiles, iPADs, Kindles etc. Thismigration, at least for comics, willchange its formal qualities, whichhave developed around thephysicality of the book, such as thepage-turn and the double spread.Indeed, speaking comics are already areality on touch-screens, heraldingthe potential for a return to a show-and-tell with pictures similar to thatof Patuachitra.

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The future is uncertain. In the yearsto come, which formats will bepopular and why? What will theirantecedents be? How will they beread? The evolution of form hasinspired us to develop new comicnarratives. As the form movedtowards a manifestation that heavilyfavoured the visual and graduallyrelegated performance to memory, itaffected our attempt to understandthe relationship between the oral andthe visual in the performance of theepics. This change will possibly definehow epics and local folk tales occupyand shape everyday lives in the future.It is unlikely that stories that havetravelled from tongue to tongue, frombrush to brush, will disappearcompletely. They have their own pulse,which we seek to examine through ourforthcoming travelogue.

7

Vidyun Sabhaney is a comic bookwriter based in New Delhi. She iscurrently writing a travelogue based onher experiences researching traditionalforms of storytelling across India.

NOTES

1. Chilka refers to a thirty-nine-pagecomic that Shohei Emura and VidyunSabhaney contributed to the PaoAnthology of Comics Volume1 (Penguin India, 2012). Set in thetime of the Mahabharata, Chilka is thestory of Baba and his rebelliousgrandson. With the help of rishiNarada, Baba stumbles upon a ‘secretweapon’ that he believes will saveArjuna the Pandava from death at thehands of Karna. The comicexperiments with the possibility ofnew characters and new stories withinthe known epic narrative.

2. In his book ‘Karnataka Puppetry’,S.A. Krishnaiah (MGM College,Udupi) also mentions boundarystones which were used to mark outthe ‘territory’ of each puppeteer: “Thestone is called ‘Ellekallu’,‘Hadbastinakallu’ or‘Gomberamakallu’. The term refers toa stone which was installed to markthe boundary of a puppeteer’s familyor the puppeteer’s area of right ofoperation. It throws light on rite ofinstallation, the purpose andownership etc. Usually on such stonesone can find either the name of thepuppeteer family with figure of‘Killekyatha’ or line drawings of a male

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figure with a hair tuft.” The same bookprovides details of the practices andrituals of the Killekyatha community.

3. Doddballapa’s family, in particular,has been encouraged by S.A.Krishnaiah (of MGM College, Udupi)to retain the jamkatbaavli style ofperformance.

4. Traditionally, puppeteers regularlyperformed at villages that fell withintheir respective territories. However,as local interest in puppet shows hasdeclined in recent years, performancesare not as frequent as they used to be.If a performance is not expected in thenear future, researchers (such asourselves) are inclined to request for aspecial performance. Similarly,puppeteers are often requested toperform at weddings and otherauspicious events. In bothcircumstances, a fee must be paid tothe performers.

5. Kavita Singh, ‘Stylistic Differencesand Narrative Choices inBengali Pata Paintings’ in Journal ofArts & Ideas, March 1995. The fullquote: “In fact it is erroneous to speakof the tradition as a tradition. Onseeing a number of scrolls, bothcontemporary ones in the hands ofthe patuas and older pieces in

museums, one comes face to face withthe unexpected richness and thesometimes frustrating complexity ofthe Bengali pata.”

6. Nina Sabnani, ‘The Kaavadstorytelling tradition of Rajasthan’ inDesign Thoughts, July 2009. The fullquote: “The Kaavad offers an identityto all the communities that areconnected to it. Each community hasmultiple identities but in this specificone concerning the Kaavad they are allrelated. The makers get theiruniqueness as they are the only oneswho make them and were created tomake them. They depend on thetellers to some degree to continuemaking the Kaavads. The tellers gettheir professional identity from thevery name and depend on theirpatrons to continue the tradition. Thepatrons ‘recognize themselves’ andtheir ancestors in the images that theKaavad mirrors. The myth in a wayexplains the reality and reinforces thedependence and synergy.”

7. This proposed travelogue will be inthe form of a comic book; it willcombine information on thesetraditions with the experiences thatSabhaney and Emura had whileresearching them.

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Little Artists ofChizami:

Painting Stories, Sketching a Universe

Aditi Chitre

All photographs except the last by Aditi Chitre

Visual arts practice among the young in Nagaland has been strangelyneglected despite its being a region of great artistic traditions andachievements. When Aditi Chitre worked closely with the North East Networkto hold an art workshop in Chizami in 2011, she discovered the untappedpotential of the children, none of whom had had any formal training in thearts. An IFA grant helped her return in 2012 to hold a storytelling and visualarts workshop for twelve children. This photo-essay traces the children’screative journey and the spectacular blossoming of their imagination thatresulted in an illustrated book of stories.

Tshenyi-u’s unbridled brush strokes in the pagesof her sketchbook.


Travel anywhere withinNagaland and your eyes arecertain to absorb more beauty

than your heart can possibly contain. Atwo-to-three-hour drive, winding upthe hills from Kohima, will bring you toChizami in Phek district.

Perched on a hilltop is the North EastNetwork (NEN) resource centre. NENis an NGO that works towardsempowering women of conflict zones,through advocacy and training. Theirmethod of working through conflictimpact is farsighted. In order to build afuture society from within the socialand political issues that north-easternIndia faces today, NEN is trying toempower the youth with a space wherethey can explore their personalpotentials and practise a freedom ofchoice in careers. It has beenencouraging the youth to participate inconferences, workshops and sportstraining (in a football-loving region) andto join eco clubs that train kids todocument the biodiversity of theirneighbourhood. It has been successfulin inviting village elders to share theirknowledge with the young, and isworking towards conservation, as theland itself is Nagaland’s richest potentialfor prosperity.

In 2011, with support from NEN, I

conducted an art workshop for childrenfrom Chizami and the neighbouringEnhulumi village. Over six days,twenty-one kids and I messed around,painting and drawing and telling storiesin the warm sun of a chilly Naga winter.

I had begun visiting Nagaland somethree to four years earlier. The very firstjourney had begun with a stomach-fullof stories by an elder from Chizamivillage, grandpa Nipelo. I sat beforehim, entranced by his tales of humans,spirits, animals, gods and World War II.Ever since, I have kept going back,summoned by hills and stories.

With the same clarity of thought withwhich an old man or woman wouldnarrate a story, so did the children laypaint upon paper, re-creating the worldthey had seen, the stories they hadheard. Besides taking part in the formalworkshop activities they had workedintensely in their sketchbooks. Thesketchbook was offered to them as aspace for private meanderings, a space inwhich to work independently andunrestrictedly. Most kids had workedtheir way through two sketchbookseach in just six days! On the day of thefinal display, as proud parents gazed inawe at the children’s body of work, thefull impact of their masterful confidencewith paint and design sank in. These

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were not kids who were too distractedto carry out an idea to fruition. Theyhad patiently worked on their ideas,layer upon layer, commandingperspective and colour.

This was my first workshop inChizami. NEN’s Chizami programmehead Seno Tsuhah and I both agreedthat there was no stopping now. Theseeds had been sown, of what went onto become a more intensive project withIFA in 2012.

The focus this time was on weavingtales, learning to be disobedient withthe aid of art, seeing through differentperspectives and painting withoutinstruction (since they are betterpainters than I am). The children werefed many doses of strange animation,and there was much storytelling withinthe group and several games to meltinhibitions. Once they were givenrespect for their knowledge and thephysical space to quietly disappear intotheir strokes, they created andillustrated their own stories. Lookingsharp in their winter jackets and boots,they enjoyed a day-long picnic toKohima, relaxing and frolicking aftertheir ‘study tour’ of the Kohima statemuseum, from where they gatheredingredients for stories they would writeduring their next session.

Finally, the work created by the childrenover ten days was exhibited for theirparents. They were as awed andimpressed as before, on seeing thestaggering body of work created by free-thinking children who had neverreceived a day’s art training in their lives.In many ways their work confirmedthat not practising art as a subject inschool had allowed their imagination toescape the numbing effect of trainingthat is invariably structured from anadult perspective, and which regards achild’s imagination and knowledge asnaïve and unformed.

The illustrated stories they created havebeen captured in a book—a book ofstories they can call their own. Thisbook along with the original work wasexhibited in Dimapur. It was a platformthat gathered teachers, parents andchildren of the town and encouragedthem to look at children as independentartists who didn’t need ‘teaching’ somuch as an atmosphere where theirpersonal experiences, quirks andinclinations could be respected andencouraged and shared with oneanother.

Aditi Chitre is an animationfilmmaker from Bombay.

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Little Artists of Chizami – Aditi Chitre

A magic lamp that practises free will approaches a Naga character in Lhika’s retelling of the magic lamp story.

A closeup of one of Whezokhro's paintings. I have often watched him as he painted with the patience of asaint, building up detailed strokes with texture, and gradation in highlights and tones. It is amazing how suchunwavering attention can be displayed by the cheekiest, naughtiest kid in the group.

A character in Wako's story made from the museum ingredients.

A mid-action shot in a high-drama story created byWako, composed and painted with his typically calmcommand over the medium.

One of Wako’s sketchbookexplorations from the previousyear’s workshop with NEN.

The exercise in perspective shifts, meant for expanding one's visual perspective options, evolved into an explorationin emotional perspective and identity. Here, Whezokhro describes the plight of a mosquito persecuted by humans.

In this perspective exercise, Kutshezo’s character, an ant, boldly walks across a giant’s face.

Lhika narrates an entire story through oneimage, inviting the viewer’s eyes to travelacross the expanse of the paper, followingthe character’s activities.

A character in Ethuli Tshuhah's story who leaves her home andtravels across many villages in search of a better life.

A sketchbook painting from the 2011 NEN workshop.

In the final book, each child’s selection of stories was introduced by a short note they’d written about themselves.

Alo, who documented the workshop, amused the kids with his wisecracks and clicked the whole bunch at the end ofthe workshop. They look as though they could go on for another ten days. Photograph by Tshetsholo Naro.

Tea break at the workshop. The NEN weaving centre, which lent us the space for the workshop, is wherewomen of the village execute some of their products, and from where those who prefer working from homecollect the wool they require. Chizami Weaves, their brand for the products they weave, is a women'scollective.

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India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is one of thecountry’s leading independent arts funders,championing the cause of arts philanthropy and advocating the importance of thearts in public life. In the last decade and a half we have substantially enrichedIndia's cultural landscape and infused passion and professionalism into thebusiness of arts philanthropy.

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