Folk Hero

Patachitra,Bengals traditional scroll painting,meets Martin Luther King Jr and the history of the US civil rights movement on the pages of I See The Promised Land,a graphic novel on the life of the American icon. In its stylised visuals and striking colours,one sees the imagination of Manu Chitrakar,a 39-year-old patua scroll painter from a small West Midnapore village in West Bengal,and his retelling of events that took place thousands of miles away,50 years ago. I had never heard of racial struggle in the US. But when the story was narrated to me,I realised that in spirit,it had a lot in common with the caste struggle in our country. Or even the freedom movement, says Chitrakar,who was asked by Chennai-based Tara Books to illustrate the book.

The publishers collaborated with Chitrakar,African-American writer and blues singer Arthur Flowers and designer Guglielmo Rossi on the book. We were aware that Martin Luther King Jr has been written about widely. But we were convinced that our version would be different: the art is distinctive and it comes from a story-telling tradition that resonates with older African-American narrative modes, says V Geetha of Tara Books.

Pat or scroll painting was a natural choice as the publishers had earlier worked with patuas and found them willing to expand their interests to contemporary issues and world history. Patua artists are also familiar with a storyboard as they draw their stories in panels. They have an intuitive grasp of the relationship between text and picture,given that they sing out the tale,filling in the gaps,as it were,between story panels, adds Geetha.

Patachitra is not the only traditional art form that is telling a new story. Delhi-based Navayana Publishers has commissioned Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam to illustrate the life of BR Ambedkar in a graphic biography. People know very little about his life and work and we thought a graphic book,done in an alternative style,will attract new audiences to Ambedkars life and message, says S Anand,publisher of the Navayana imprint and co-author of Bhimayana.

For Tara Books,it was about giving an Indian perspective to the movement against racism and slavery. After all,it was a struggle for ones rights,for freedom to live with dignity. I studied several pictures from the time and discussed the political and social impressions of Kings struggle with my publisher, says Chitrakar. A Bengali teacher at Delhi University helped him understand the text by Flowers.

The artwork in I See… easily straddles histories and cultures. A snake-and-ladder boardgame is used as a metaphor for the Black-American predicament. Snakes outnumber ladders and images of Aryan gods adorn the fringes of the board. The text reads,It is as if the gods,in need of an instrument,declared the Blacks were to be the despised of the earth. The following pages come alive with glimpses of the slave trade dark-skinned figures bound and confined to boxes in ships; people huddled in the lowest decks,and torso-less heads floating on blue seas. The book then moves to the atrocities of Ku Klux Klan of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A rural setting complete with a distinctly Indian hut seems to be engulfed in a profusion of red and orange fire,in the patua grammar. King,in this narrative,is a flawed dreamer,who fights what is handed down to his clan as destiny.

Chitrakar,who makes a living out of selling pat paintings,still finds it difficult to pronounce Ku Klux Klan. But he had little difficulty with Flowers musical retelling of history: In our art form,words and images come to us simultaneously. When they explained to me how Flowers had written the prose,I found it very similar to how a baul would tell a story in Bengal.