Krishna's Life-Story in Bengali Scrolls: Exploring the Invitation to Unroll

72 73 4 Krishna’s Life-Story in Bengali Scrolls: Exploring The Invitation to Unroll PIKA GHOSH HAVERFORD COLLEGE 74 Pika Ghosh Krishna’s Life-Story in Bengali Scrolls: Exploring The Invitation to Unroll 75 Fig. 4.1. Narrative hand-scrolls (pata) have been assembled scroll to another, and one session to the next. The coordination of verbal and bodily components Krishnalila (Play of Krishna) Scroll, and painted by the painter-minstrel (patua) with the framed scenes of images can generate distinctive interpretations. A singer may recognise Medinipur District communities of Bengal to tell stories for at least two particular visual properties in a sequence of images or consonances between verse and picture, while (nineteenth- 1 century). Opaque hundred years. Such itinerant bards have traditionally unfurling the scenes for an audience; bolder or more skilled practitioners may choose to explore watercolor on paper. Stella employed the picture sequences to sing well-known these through particular inflections of voice or gesture of hand. Such relationships can turn on Kramrisch stories from the lives of deities (fig. 4.1) and saints, the repetition or variation of colour and compositional choices, which may be underscored by the Collection, Philadelphia the epics, and more recently to address contemporary guiding finger, emphasised or subverted by the words sung. Some patua are charismatic entertainers Museum of Art, social issues and political events.2 with powerful singing voices who fill performance venues and mesmerise audiences, offering Philadelphia, Accession no: 1994- These scrolls have a distinctive vertical format of interpretive nuance through skillful manipulation of the lyrics, intonation, rhythm, and tempo. Not 148-548a,b. Photo: framed registers assembled from sheets of paper that all, however, are so overtly dramatic. Some turn the bamboo handles of the scrolls with an elegant © Philadelphia Museum of Art. are aligned and stitched to the required length for a turn of the wrist, intensifying the inherent malleability of the objects in generating movement and particular rendition of a narrative. The whole is then pauses or even stasis, while displaying a sequence of panels. Others choose to display distinctive backed with thin cotton fabric, usually extricated propensities in painting their imagery, rather than performance. Indeed, various combinations of from worn garments such as saris and dhotis which performance style can be observed, for example, among the living patua community active in the have the length required to accommodate the images’ village of Noya, in Medinipur district of south West Bengal (figs 4.9 and 4.10). Moreover, the continuous vertical format. Nineteenth-century occasion for their displays, including setting and time constraints, and the familiarity and affinity scrolls surviving in museum collections vary greatly of the audience with the performer’s themes, likewise factor in animating the performative features in length, ranging from eight panels to over fifty of their scrolls. To complicate matters further, contemporary practice indicates a range of formal and from five to forty feet, perhaps more given the and informal collaborations that are not unusual in familial productions in rural communities. longest ones are incomplete (fig. 4.2).3 This length Painters borrow (or ‘steal’, depending on the point of view) songs or lines from other composers, is integral, determining the field for designing the the rendition thus varying in nuance and quality among singers. Singers also borrow and use pictorial space, providing the physical parameters for scrolls originally painted by others in their community, equally opening up creative spaces for a distinctive visual organisation to the narrative, and interpretation and improvisation upon another painter’s visualisation. Each storyteller negotiates undergirding the conventions of handling the object the consonance of verbal to visual in performance. It also corresponds to the rhyming framework through various couplets composed to accompany the pictorial bodily strategies. Through such sequence during a performance (figs 4.3–4.6).4 variability in display, a scroll Older scrolls now in museum collections have, takes on unique incarnations at however, become estranged from the multi-sensorial each unrolling. dynamics between performer, audience, and object, all The performativity inhering once vital to their original performances. When rolled in the act of scrolling is in fact up in museum storage vaults or displayed in galleries integral to their etymology. The for viewers to traverse their entire length they are term commonly used to describe ostensibly stable objects (fig. 4.7).5 I have previously these scrolls, jorano pata, may attempted to juxtapose words of songs with visual be translated as ‘rolled scroll’. registers of scrolls, to imagine a range of relationships Although popular and scholarly between verse and visual evoked in performance.6 This literature has used the term to essay builds on that work to attend to the bodily rituals distinguish vertical scrolls from of handling and touch, which must have mediated square ones (chauko pata), the viewers’ and performers’ encounters with such adjective jorano also points to the objects. Like the aural dimension, these ephemeral act of rolling and unrolling, which practices can only be reconstructed from the variations activates the object in the hands discernible today. Yet this creative hermeneutic frees us of the performer as the story is to contemplate the social and performative qualities sung. This is precisely my interest Fig. 4.2 [detail] of objects often in museums, taking into account the in what follows: the dynamic Ramayana scroll, West Bengal lyrics of songs and interaction with the body of the movement animating the object (c.1800). Opaque singer, to explore their fundamental performativity in the hands of the performer in watercolour on 7 paper, mounted on and improvisational quality. coordination with the utterance cloth. Victoria and The performative skills of each patua are, after of the words of a song. And Albert Museum, London, Museum all, unique (fig. 4.8). Skill in handling their scrolls this dexterous manipulation no. IS.231-1953. Photo: © Victoria in concert with the tempo and rhythm of the song generates both movement and and Albert necessarily varies from one performer to the next, one chronology, the unfolding of Museum. 76 Pika Ghosh Krishna’s Life-Story in Bengali Scrolls: Exploring The Invitation to Unroll 77 Fig. 4.3 [left] Fig 4.5 [left] Rani Chitrakar Moyna Chitrakar unrolling a scroll on unrolling a female infanticide scroll during a on the terrace performance in of her home in Noya, Medinipur Noya, Medinipur (December 2000). (December 2000). Photo: © The Photo: © The Author. Author. Fig. 4.4 [right] Moyna Chitrakar unrolling a Fig 4.6 [right] scroll during a Moyna Chitrakar performance in unrolling a Noya, Medinipur scroll during a (December 2000). performance in Photo: © The Noya, Medinipur Author. (December 2000). Photo: © The Author. the narrative implicating a play of multiple temporalities. The connections and separations of movements, not merely their lives, back into the picture. registers established in the act of unrolling segment after segment, creates corresponding visual associations between the episodes revealed and removed from view, yielding particular nuance Probing the Ephemeral to the narrative.8 The interplay of closure and concealment in the unveiling of the scroll engages beholders, potentially amplifying desire to know what is beyond the visible fragment: both anticipating what comes next and recalling what has been rolled away from view, imagery that The problems inherent in analysing objects as malleable as patua scrolls are formidable, not can only be revisited through song and memory. This, coupled with certain visual techniques, can least because words cannot possibly capture the multi-sensorial and richly affective qualities of stimulate particular attentiveness or curiosity among viewers, for example, the use of a limited set the experiences today. If the efforts to translate pictures into words have always been susceptible of formal or compositional motifs deployed through variation along the length of a single scroll, to multiple impediments, to do so for a multi-media performance act is even more problematic, or across several scrolls. Familiar stories can thereby be given particular inflection when modulated as anthropologists and folklorists of theatre and performance studies have alerted. To speculate through such strategies to intensify emotional engagement and generate anticipatory desire.9 on the past in the absence of much documentation is likewise precarious, inevitably constrained 15 In an era before cinema and television, such performances were surely experienced in ways that by contemporary observations. Yet, convergence of scholarly interest in the intrinsic material are difficult to imagine, particularly from our screen-filled and screen-dependent perspectives of properties of objects as constitutive of their presence or power, and in the sensorial dimensions the twenty-first century. Yet although patua scrolls have been collected since the early decades of of experience and embodied practices, offers a lucrative opportunity to heed the performativity the twentieth century, embraced by Calcutta’s intellectuals and artists, their conditions of display and the contingent nature of patua scrolls in practice. I aim

Load more