The village of newfound dreams

Loitering around the village, I entered yet another house whose front-end vestibule room doubled up as a shop and display centre. Like in the other houses, or should I say shops, here was yet another humble artist engrossed in his world of colours and paints.

He welcomed me with folded hands and introduced himself as a Bhaskar Mahapatra. The bespectacled artist asked me to freely look around his studio, which was a treasure trove of art, resplendent with colours and shiny artefacts, almost as if I was walking inside a kaleidoscope itself. Papier-mache wrapped coconuts decorated in rich colours, brightly painted woodworks, lord Jagannath’s juggernaut rath in all sizes, stacked in ascending order like matryoshka dolls, artwork on dried palm leaves, and a painted assortment of bottles, masks, handbags bedecked every shelf of the room, while piles of scrolls and manuscripts lay on the floor. What an atelier, the artist exceeding himself in every corner, I breathed to myself, almost with a tinge of jealousy. The room was a perfect mix of beauty and disorder, as all creativity should be, too effervescent to be trapped in neatly stacked boxes and cleanly contained stacks!

I then saw a box of colourful circular cards, ringed in ochre, containing the typical patta-chitra art, immediately asking what it was.

‘Ganjapa cards. Unique to Odisha, they come in packs of 4 colours, 8, 10 or even more. This one has 10 colours and are decorated with the dash-avatars of Vishnu.’ And he came up to me and showed the cards, highlighting how Balaram had replaced the conventional Krishna as the eighth avatar, in the land of Jagannath.

‘How beautiful,’ I blurted, ‘How do you play them?’

Here he blushed and replied, almost with a guilt-laced voice, ‘Babuji had taught how to paint these, he never taught how to play these though.’

I smiled back, admitting that even in the legacy of the painted arts, there was so much bestowed from one generation to another.

We moved back to his seat, the epicentre in the room, sitting on the floor on a mat, I overwhelmed with the paraphernalia that lay strewn from painting brushes to paper and the cloth-based canvas called ‘patta.’ The traditional artform here in Orissa – patta-chitra, thus translates to art on the patta or indigenous canvas.

Artist Bhaskar Mahapatra shows me a set of Ganjapa cards

I had seen a lot of the patta-chitra paintings in a few other artists’ places, but that morning, my appetite was infinite. I went through a few of his paintings, mostly those of Lord Jagannath, and appreciated the level of minute details contained within those fine brush strokes.

‘How long does it take to finish these paintings?’ I was staring at an A3 sized painting.

‘Depends on the intricacies, the simple ones are done in a few hours, the most complex ones with extremely detailed artwork can take a week.’

‘And...’ I asked a bit sheepishly, ’Are you able to sell enough of these?’

He smiled back, winning me once again with his bucolic simplicity, and this time philosophy, ‘You have dedicated yourself to retaining the artwork of generations, sometimes you are rewarded amply, you take it, other times, you have to be patient. You wait and continue painting. Sometimes I get to take classes and courses that helps me, the government recognises me once in a while, so yes, I have got my dues.’

‘How does the government support you?’ I tried to clarify

‘I get a few rewards once in a while, last time Modiji went to France, he took my painting as a gift to the French President…’

I almost dropped the wooden horse I was toying with, as the man went on drawing nonchalantly on a canvas, a line there, a stroke there, speaking as if he had gone to the village market that morning and had brought home a bit of jaggery.

‘Narendra Modi took your painting to the French President?’ I tried to clarify that I had heard the right thing.

‘Yes, but that was years back, still a fond memory. Another good memory was going to New York to hold a course on Patta-chitra painting.’

Ok, this was some heavyweight guy here, I realised, even doubting for a moment if he was truthful. I googled his name sitting there, and realised sometimes, you just trust the world. Yet, here he was, just like the other artists, making the same kind of art, with the same humility and down-to-earth nature that just blew me away. Novice or Master, they are all equals when it comes to worshipping art, in their adulation of Saraswati, or should I say Jagannath!

‘The younger artists here sometimes struggle a bit,’ he continued, ‘But there has been increasing attention over our art form, there are sales and exhibitions around the country where we get to sell our works, and then there are travellers such as yourselves, from all around the world who come over from distant lands and encourage us.’

I thought I was saturated with both artistic excellence and lessons from Master Shifu, but he continued to prove, life has no limits.

I walked around his atelier once again, feeling grateful that I got to visit this maestro’s house (And it was completely random, I could have missed his house and entered the next one for they all looked the same, and unlike our gaudy social media splashed lives, there was nothing on his house’s ‘walls’ that tried to display his vanity or achievements in life. I guess, when you are really successful in your own eyes, you turn humble, not vain or arrogant – a lesson that most of us who fail to realise as we limp up and down the corporate ladder).

I thanked him profusely for his time and then walked out. On the way back to my car, I once again acknowledged the other artists I had met that morning – a Chandrasekhar here, a Bhagaban Sahoo there, along with other artists whose simple houses lined the one main street of the village of Raghurajpur, just 50 km from Puri.

‘Overwhelming’ was the only word I could use. Perhaps, ‘humility’ would be the other.

For all these artists happily invited me to their houses and showed me their artwork. When I had entered Bhagaban Sahoo’s house earlier, I had clearly and rather unabashedly mentioned I couldn’t buy any more expensive paintings from him. His rustic smile changed not one bit, and his response won my heart, not for the first time that morning, ‘Sir, you have come from so far, you must be interested in art, or else you wouldn’t be here. And I am taking a break from my work, what better can I do than tell you more of the works of our land? Buying is one part of the story, of course, it feeds us, but even if you go back, inspired and a bit more knowledgeable about us, our school of art, our lands, our legacy, then I would have done may work as an artist. You don’t necessarily go back empty handed then, isn’t it?’

I was dumbfounded. I had read of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - a principle suggesting that the overall structure of a language affects its speakers' views and ways of thinking. Thus, people’s perceptions get shaped by the language they speak. That morning, at Raghurajpur, I felt that the hypothesis was actually being extrapolated to its next level - that the arts and craft mastered by a person also must be influencing his way of thinking, his worldly views and his philosophy. Add to that an old-world devotion to Jagannath (who was the supreme centrepiece of most paintings) and you could see that the patta-chitra that these simple people indulged in was not just a livelihood or trade, it was not even an art, rather it was a pilgrimage that only the devoted had willpower and patience to practice, perfect and thereby propagate.

Bhagaban Sahoo took me through a plethora of paintings, regaled me with their mythological stories, and explained how the real masters used natural sources to create colours rather than buy artificial dyes. He explained how centuries back, the Orissan patta-chitra art had begun to temporarily substitute the statues of Jagannath, Subhadra and Balaram at the altar of the Jagannath temple during the rath-yatra festival, when the actual idols were taken outside the temple (which also explained how over centuries, the tradition of painting the gods still remained foremost in patta-chitra art). He also described how making the patta canvas from cotton cloth and other organic pastes was a source of livelihood for the non-painting families of the village.

Finally, he also explained that the government was actually helping the village through free teaching courses to retain and expand the art form.

‘Sir, I am a Sahoo,’ he continued, ‘Caste-wise I should not be a painter, but rather a potter like my father and grandfather. But I always liked art as a child, I persevered, and here I am. How better can it be!’

I couldn’t help smile with pride and satisfaction – here was a village and art, where capability had surpassed casteism, where the government was proactively trying to retain a centuries-old tradition, and where people like Bhagaban Sahoo could live the life that they had dreamed of. The true life of an artist indeed! He was way richer than any of the cash rich tourists who visited him. And the best part, he knew this – it was right there, sparkling in those bright, dreamy eyes.

When I had visited Bali a year earlier, I was thoroughly impressed with the tiny island’s thriving culture, where villages were dedicated to practicing and retaining their legacy in painting, or pottery, or woodwork. While I revelled in the arts, I was downcast that the same was not true back home, and we were losing so much in our traditions, in our musical instruments, dialects, dance forms and art forms. But Raghurajpur proved me wrong. I know it is the exception, not the rule, as the attrition of our culture continues. Yet somewhere it is still an exception. It is a start, a tiny village, a handful of simple people. But somewhere in that limited world lies an unlimited, almost immeasurable sense of humility, of gratefulness, of hope, and above all, a universe of newfound dreams…  

18^th September; All photos: Author's archives