Somewhere between Kolkata and Kharagpur, the highway world of flyovers and petrol stations gives way to something entirely different. Rice fields stretch to flat horizons. Village walls erupt in tigers, gods and serpents painted in colour so bright it seems to hum. A woman sits cross-legged in her doorway, weaving a reed mat with the unhurried precision of someone who has done this since she was seven. Here two of Bengal’s most ancient craft traditions are practised daily, passed from hand to hand, generation by generation, with a vitality that puts most cultural preservation efforts to shame.
In Naya village, a small cluster of households in Pingla block that most maps struggle to locate, every one of the 176 resident families is a practicing artist. Children who have not yet started school can already hold a brush. Grandmothers who have won national awards still paint by the light of their open doorways. International art galleries in London, Paris and New York show work that began on the floor of a mud house by the paddy fields of Paschim Medinipur.
The patachitra tradition these artists carry is one of the oldest forms of visual narrative storytelling in the world: painted scrolls accompanied by sung stories, a tradition that predates print, film and the book. What makes Naya uniquely compelling is what it has done with that tradition: rather than retreating into a museum, the patuas have weaponised their craft for modernity. They paint climate change and COVID, court cases and cyclones, alongside Radha and Krishna and the Ramayana. And they do so as a community that has navigated, for centuries, a dual religious identity that makes their work one of India's most remarkable ongoing acts of cultural syncretism: a Muslim village that paints Hindu devotional art, that straddles two faiths without apology or contradiction.
Twenty-five kilometres to the south, in the marshy lowlands of Sabang block, the weavers of Sabang have made madur mats, from a native sedge grass called madurkathi, since at least the Mughal period, when the finest variety, masland, was produced under royal patronage and collected as revenue. The craft survived colonial record-keeping, the ravages of synthetic substitutes and decades of rural poverty because 93 percent of its practitioners are women for whom weaving is not a career choice but a birthright, learned in childhood, practised in every spare hour, woven into the fabric of daily life as thoroughly as the mats themselves.
Understanding Patachitra: A Primer for Visitors
Knowing a little about patachitra before you arrive will transform a pleasant walk through a colourful village into something genuinely moving. The art has a depth that rewards preparation.
What is a pata?
In Sanskrit, pata means cloth. A pata (also spelled pat, pot, or patta in different transliterations) is a painted scroll, a long strip of treated cloth divided into sequential frames, each frame containing one scene in a continuous narrative. The scroll is rolled up when not in use. When the artist performs, they hold it in their hands and unroll it slowly, frame by frame, from bottom to top, while singing the story that each image depicts. This simultaneous visual and musical experience (pata plus song) is called pater gaan, literally 'the song of the painting'.
The tradition is ancient. References to patua artists appear in Sanskrit texts more than 2,500 years old. Some art historians trace the visual style back to the cave paintings of Ajanta. The Bengal patachitra that you see in Naya today is the direct, living descendant of this tradition, modified and enriched by centuries of influence from Mughal court art, British colonial encounter, tribal visual culture and now the internet age, but unmistakably continuous with its origins.
What do the scrolls show?
Traditionally, patachitras depicted stories from the Hindu epics: the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Krishna Lila and the tales of Durga and the snake goddess Manasa. The Naya patuas sing these stories beautifully and their deep familiarity with a theology they do not personally follow, absorbed through generations of performance, gives their renderings a quality that can be startling in its intimacy and knowledge.
In the modern era, the Naya patuas have expanded their repertoire dramatically. The same visual language that told the story of Lakshinder being bitten by the snake now tells the story of COVID-19, Cyclone Amphan, girls' education, HIV awareness and human trafficking. Manu Chitrakar illustrated a full graphic novel about the life of Martin Luther King Jr in collaboration with an American writer. Swarna Chitrakar's COVID awareness scroll went viral with over a lakh of views during the pandemic. The art form has proven itself elastic enough to absorb the twenty-first century without losing its essential character.
The Syncretic Identity of the Patuas
The patua community of Naya is Muslim. They have been Muslim, or a particular kind of Muslim, practitioners of a fluid, syncretic faith that the community calls their own, for many generations. Yet their art draws entirely from Hindu mythology and Vaishnava devotional traditions. For centuries, patuas travelled from Hindu village to Hindu village, performing at religious festivals, accepting grain and lentils as payment. They were, simultaneously, condemned by some Hindus as Muslims and rejected by some Muslims as makers of Hindu idols. Their response was characteristically pragmatic: every patua traditionally carries two names, one Hindu and one Muslim, to be deployed as the audience required.
Today this dual identity is no longer a survival strategy but a point of pride. Chitrakars like Manu and Swarna straddle both faiths openly, celebrating Muslim festivals and organising the Kali Puja in their village with equal enthusiasm. The patua community is one of the most living examples of Hindu-Muslim syncretism in contemporary India, exemplified in the daily act of painting Durga and singing her praises as a devout Muslim artist.
The Colours
Traditional patachitra colours are made entirely from natural materials, a practice that the Naya patuas revived with the help of UNESCO and banglanatak.com after a period in which synthetic dyes had become common. The palette is derived from raw turmeric (yellow), marigold flowers (deep orange), Aparajita flowers (blue), burnt rice and soot (black), Lotkon fruit (a bright tropical orange), red clay and white clay. Flowers are crushed, boiled and mixed with tree gum to bind the pigment to the cloth. The resulting colours have a luminous, slightly matte quality that is entirely distinct from any commercial paint: warmer, more alive and different in every batch because no two seasons’ flowers are identical.
Workshops on natural colour-making are available to visitors at the Folk Art Centre and in many individual patua homes. Participating in one, even briefly, reframes every scroll you look at afterwards.
