For eight centuries the Patuas, a community of Bengali artists, have maintained a distinct storytelling tradition, painting scrolls and performing songs to illustrate history and myth. Then came television and the global art market. Samanth Subramanian in The National:
Every time it rains, the paths in the Indian village of Thekuachak turn slick and gray with loose mud. During the week of my last visit, the monsoon was particularly severe, and a haymaker of a rainstorm hit the state of West Bengal squarely on the nose. Kolkata was afloat, flights and trains were cancelled, and the highways were barely navigable. Walking in Thekuachak called for patience, vigilant eyes and nimble feet, and I looked up only occasionally, to see Mairun Chitrakar ahead of me, leading the way to his house.
Mairun, a short man with a wizened face, is a Patua, a member of a community of artists spread across the Medinipur and Birbhum districts in West Bengal. Since at least the 13th century, the Patuas have practiced a version of show-and-tell, wandering from village to village singing stories from the religious epics and unfurling painted scrolls to illustrate their tales - a form of static cinema long before cinema itself. Every Patua’s last name is Chitrakar - a word that means, quite literally, “artist.” Mairun, who is 57, is one of around 500 Patuas in Medinipur, and there have been artists in his family for more than 200 years.
I was in a taxi in 1984, driving through the desert in Rajasthan in north-west India. It was June, the hottest month, and this sandstorm whipped up. It went from a clear, sunny day to dark and dusty, with a very strong wind. My first inclination was to protect my equipment, but then I realised I should get out and take some pictures because it was so dramatic. You can always buy a new camera, after all, but good pictures are few and far between.
In 2001 the Taliban destroyed two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan, around 140 miles northwest of Kabul, which were hewn out of sandstone cliffs in the sixth century and, measuring up to 55 metres, were the biggest of their kind.
Although caves decorated with precious murals from 5th to 9th century A.D. also suffered from Taliban attacks on this World Heritage Site, they have since become the focus of a major discovery, revealing Buddhist oil paintings that predate those in Renaissance Europe by hundreds of years.
A football team from a village near Calcutta hold a muddy celebration after triumphing in their league. Their victory was captured by the amateur Indian photographer Nimai Chandra Ghosh, who won the sports category of the 2008 Sony World Photography Awards.
Philip Glass wrote his third opera, the seminal Satyagraha, in 1979. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s formative years in South Africa and the development of his philosophy, the work has its Met premiere on 11 April in a new production by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch. The 70-year-old composer, a veteran of 20 operas, told the Met’s Elena Park what moved him to address the subject-and what Gandhi’s message can teach us today.
Q:What does the concept of satyagraha mean to you now?
Being inspired by social change through non-violence was authentic. I can identify with that idea as strongly today as I did when I wrote the opera. I was in my 40s at that time, so I wasn’t like a kid. But I’m in a very different place now. For one thing, I’ve seen the world change in a dramatic and not particularly good way. We’re in a more desperate situation than we were 30 years ago.
[Photo: Drawing from the Bhagavad Gita, the opera opens on a mythical battlefield where two royal families prepare to wage a fierce war.]
And here, Mahatma Gahdhi’s granddaughter Ela Gandhi talks about his legacy, her family’s work on Indian Opinion, the newspaper founded by Gandhi, and her own youth in South Africa.Do you think an opera about satyagraha can educate and enlighten?
Q: Do you think an opera about satyagraha can educate and enlighten?
Music, opera, drama, and other forms of art convey feelings and reflect the times. While words can express things openly and in a way that people can easily understand, the arts express the same things in a more subtle way. Over the years many great poets, musicians, and dancers all expressed their feelings about societal issues and it made an impact on the community.
Meet Afuganisu-tan, Kyrgyz-tan, Pakisu-tan, Meriken, Turkmenis-tan and Uzbekis-tan. They are all characters in Afghanis-tan — the story of Afghanistan and its neighbours, illustrated Manga-style.
Born in the UK of Bangladeshi origin, award winning choreographer Akram Khan is skilled in Kathak and classical ballet. His new work Bahok (Bengali for ‘carrier’) is a collaboration with the National Ballet of China. It will be performed at Birmingham as pasrt of the International Dance Festival.
The scene is a dingy departure lounge. People sit around waiting to leave, anxiously watching the information display for news, their feet and hands flicking in unconscious ticks of boredom and agitation.
Then a girl starts talking; she is the kind of woman you avoid in public places such as these. Confused and distressed, she clutches pieces of paper which she consults as she tries to imagine her home. This is the starting point for Akram Khan’s Bahok.
When American curators arrived one spring morning at Norbugang Yu Lhakang, a Buddhist temple in a remote village in western Bhutan, they found a group of monks sitting on the floor in bright robes, chanting. They had been there since 6 a.m., intent on creating the right ambience for a divination ceremony.
The question before them was whether a small 18th-century gilt bronze sculpture - a female personification of supreme Buddhist wisdom - could make its way to the United States for a traveling exhibition of Bhutanese art.
It fell to the sculpture’s owner, a Bhutanese businessman whose family had had the piece for generations, to roll the divination dice. Tremulously, he rolled a two, a six and a nine.
Bhutan has always been beautiful, but now it is beautiful and luxurious. Tom Fordyce in The Times, UK:
It was a disturbing scene. Three half-naked men, all wearing hideous carved masks, were running towards me, brandishing wooden phalluses the size of monkey wrenches. On my right, a shaven-headed monk mumbled a monotone mantra while striking a pair of discordant cymbals.
Overhead circled a large flock of ravens, getting closer with every lap. From the ancient monastery to my left came another man, wearing what appeared to be a welder’s mask, a sheen of oil and not much else.
Tara Douglas in Mint on a unique experiment between Indian tribal artists and Scottish animators:
This is the story of a creative collaboration between tribal artists from central India and young animators from Scotland: ‘The Tallest Story Competition’ consists of the first collection of tribal stories to have come to life through animation.
Leslie Mackenzie, director of Scotland-based West Highland Animation, wanted to tell stories about unknown places to children in her country. She rallied support from Gaelic cultural organizations, on condition that the first version would be in Gaelic. The half-hour animation series has now been dubbed into English, Hindi and five Indian languages-Halbi, Santhal, Marathi, Gond, Soara-of the communities represented in the films.
Tehelka’s Shoma Chaudhury visits exiled artist M.F. Husain in Dubai
ON 19 JANUARY, 2008, the day twenty men with hockey sticks smashed NDTV’s office in Ahmedabad, and beat two of the staff, for running an SMS poll on whether MF Husain should be awarded the Bharat Ratna, the master himself sat quietly on the floor of his home in faraway Dubai, rapt in a sketch of two ceremonial horses - a wedding card for Ustad Amjad Ali Khan’s son.
A meditative silence enveloped the room, heightened by the rhythmic sound of his sketching pen. Nothing could touch him, immune in his concentration. The sun set outside on a brilliant skyline. The beautiful room acquired a sense of prayer. Husain had just spent hours outlining his love for Hindu philosophy and culture, a life lived in its worship. Eight years spent painting the Ramayana, as many painting the Mahabharata.
Hundreds of canvases of Ganesha and Shiva and Parvati and Hanuman, the ragas, the natyas and Benaras. Seventy years spent as “Chobi Das”, a devotee of the image. Seventy years spent roaming the earth, seeking to enrich its understanding of India. And now, they were smashing offices in his name. Declaring him an apostate.
Thanks to Sohail Hashmi for sending us this posting by Carol Grisanti at MSNBC’s Worldblog on Pakistan’s National Art Gallery which opened in November last year
There is something of a modern-day bard in Pakistani architect Naeem Pasha, but it’s not just because he writes poetry – it’s more an expression of what he wants his buildings to be.
“It’s not that I am concentrating on purely architectural expression,” said Pasha, 64, his brown-rimmed glasses perfectly offsetting a head of thick snow-white hair and neat goatee. “All those sketches would have a lot of couplets, the beginning of a poem might be there,” he said smiling.
Archana in the Mail Today looks at an ongoing photography exhibition at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art
A 1933 self-portrait by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil clicked in Paris. This section is curated by the photographer’s grandson, the artist Vivan Sundaram and Devika Daulet Singh
In its latest issue, Matters of Art has an article by Sohail Hashmi on Sahmat’s celebration of M.F. Husain’s birthday last year
Hundreds of people, young and not so young, including artists, writers, musicians, dancers, film makers and actors were joined by students, cultural activists, professors, lawyers, journalists and others on the lawns of Vithal Bhai Patel House on October 2, 2007. They had come together at the call of Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, to stand as one as a expression of solidarity with M.F. Husain, the most well known and popular Indian artist, who is compelled to live in exile because the law and order machinery of the largest democracy in the world is not prepared to guarantee his security.
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Art | Tagged: India, Bengal, Kolkata, Patua, Painted scrolls | 
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