A patachitra scroll, translated into English, is headed for global glory

It wasn’t just language that lay heavily between Joydeb Chitrakar and his brand new scroll-book Tsunami. It was luck that had stood between Chitrakar, a Midnapore-based patachitra artist and the tsunami that left parts of our country disfigured beyond recognition in 2004. And it was also this emotional distance from the immediate experience of a calamity of that proportion that made it difficult for Chitrakar to try paint a scroll on the tsunami. “I used to paint scrolls and compose songs primarily on Bengali folklore and Indian mythology. Then I tried exploring topics like awareness about malaria, polio vaccination etc. These were things that were of immediate concern in my world in Daspur village,” says Chitrakar. However, Chitrakar and his wife Moyna made an effort to collect information about the event from newspapers. “We tried reading up all Bengali newspapers and their tsunami coverage. Though we can’t read English properly we got magazines and papers and skimmed through them,” says Moyna, Chitrakar’s wife. Pictures, to repeat a cliché, say a thousand words. And they worked superbly for Joydeb and Moyna who pieced the story together mostly through the pictures they gathered.

The Bengali version of the scroll came about in 2005. Later, while performing at an arts fair in Chennai, the Chitrakars were spotted by Tara Books who bought their Bengali scroll for Rs 8,000. “We got a call from the publishers a month later to work on an English version. We also attended a workshop where we learnt to work on a different paper size,” says Moyna. Their work has been translated into several other languages and is on the way to find a global readership.

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