From Oral Tradition to "Folk Art": Reevaluating Bengali Scroll Paintings

This study contributes to the scholarship on the politics of production and consumption of the arts in modern India as well as to relating issues of aesthetics and development. The A. describes the tradition of scroll painters - Patuas (patuy ā) - and the practice of storytelling in contemporary West Bengal, where a small number of picture showmen who follow this caste-based occupation can still be found. She analyses the process by which this tradition was recognized as folk art and demonstrates a shift of genre from a primarily oral tradition to a primarily visual tradition (i.e., from the performance of scrolls to their selling as art products). She argues that Patua art, as it is perceived today, is a quite recent phenomenon, generated to a great extent by the urban intellectual elite of Calcutta.