Swarna Chitrakar has been going places and her work has been displayed across the world in countries like France, Sweden and the US. Pix: Shreya Shukla

Swarna Chitrakar’s two-year-old blue brick house stands out among the mud huts of Naya village in West Midnapore. “I’ve just returned from Paris,” beams the 40-year-old Patua, who remembers the dates she created her scrolls depending on which foreign exhibition they were painted for. In the last eight years, she has unrolled her scrolls and sung in Sweden, Boston and Paris. “We took about a hundred pats from our village to Paris. It was a good sale,” says Swarna. Naya is a village of 52 patua families, most of whom live solely off the art.

A stone’s throw away, her brother Manu Chitrakar stands painting on the whitewashed walls of his brand new house for the village’s upcoming Pot Maya fair. The 38-year-old Patua earns an average of Rs 15,000-Rs 20,000 a month through the sale of his scrolls and has accompanied his sister to Paris and Sweden.

Patachitra has come a long way from the time when people thought it was a dying art just waiting for an R.I.P sign to be planted on it. Today, much against expectations, the art is alive and kicking.

Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial hosted a Patachitra exhibition recently that included pats depicting contemporary times. Pix: Rashbehari Das

Pats were scrolls on which mythological or epic stories were painted as a sequence of frames. The Patua would travel from one village to another unrolling these and singing of, say, the abduction of Sita or the marksmanship of Arjuna. But with the rise of cinema and the collapse of the zamindari system from which they received patronage, many Patuas were forced to look for alternative employment.

“I’d bought a van to ferry people and vegetables as my art wasn’t supporting my family,” says Yakub Chitrakar, as he sits by a latticed window painting a scene from The Mahabharata.

But a chance meeting with director Bappaditya Bandopadhyay, who featured him in his film Shilpantar, put him back on the art track. Soon, orders began trickling in and in 2004 he linked up with Banglanatak dot com, a social enterprise that works towards the sustainable development of folk art. “Pat has now even gone international,” says Yakub, who went to the UK in 2007 and 2010.

Then, there’s Moyna Chitrakar who took part in the 6th China International Cultural Industries Fair in 2010 while Mantu and his wife Jaba Chitrakar’s pats are part of the National Museums Liverpool’s exhibition, Telling Tales: Story Scrolls from India, touring North West England. These contemporary pats highlight issues like HIV/AIDS, women’s rights and the Afghanistan war.

“We collected contemporary pats to show the innovative developments happening in what was previously considered a traditional and static art form,” says Emma Martin, head of Ethnology & curator of Asia Collections, National Museums Liverpool.

Similarly, the Patachitra exhibition, held last year, at Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial had pats from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, including contemporary pats like one in which a woman uses a cellphone to light her way through a dark city street.

“Patachitra was a dying art form because its subject was the oft repeated episodes from the epics ,” says Suman Das of Banglanatak dot com.

Today many artists are dealing with contemporary themes. So Swarna paints and sings about 9/11, tsunamis, female infanticide (into which she weaves personal experiences) and HIV/AIDS.

Moyna Chitrakar (in saree) exhibited her art at the 6th China International Cultural Industries Fair in 2010; (above) Banglanatak dot com’s POTential workshop focused on putting pat on all kinds of objects PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BANGLANATAK DOT COM

In some cases, the pats have been used for specific campaigns. So it was social entrepreneur Nandita Palchoudhuri who suggested that Rani Chitrakar and her husband Shamsundar make HIV/AIDS scrolls. Three years later, David Gere (who is also actor Richard Gere’s brother) of the University of California, Los Angeles, partnered with Palchoudhuri and created an HIV awareness programme in which Patuas joined health workers to visit Bengal’s villages.

“We’ve performed in villages without electricity, and even sung about HIV prevention at the village tap where women-folk congregate,” says Swarna.

On the other hand, the Patuas are being encouraged to look beyond the paper scroll as a medium, through workshops with new media artists. Banglanatak dot com’s POTential, a collaborative workshop between Transit (a group of London based artists) and the Patuas, saw the folk artists paint all sorts of objects, including a bicycle.

So you now have Patuas painting on everything from clothes to home décor items. Artist Srikanta Paul, who’s developing products like carry bags and lanterns for Pot Maya, stresses the need to identify target customers — affluent and middle class city folk. The Patuas are also being taught basic marketing and soft skills such as quoting prices and greeting foreign customers in English.

“I have to draw according to the market, don’t I?” says Yakub candidly. Today, his family of six, including his son who is eight, paints pats and lives off the sales. Yakub’s van was never used. “Patachitra is a parampara, a tradition. It has to be kept alive,” he says, dipping his brush into the vegetable dye.