শিল্প Art forms
The festival is a commission
বাংলার শিল্পের মরশুম
Five days of ritual are the visible end of a year of work by potters, foil-beaters, pith-carvers, scroll painters, drummers, bamboo riggers and lighting engineers. Most of it is seasonal. Some of it is disappearing. Every entry below names someone still doing it.
সংকট At risk
What is actually disappearing
These are not nostalgia. They are trades with a shrinking number of working hands, usually because a cheaper industrial substitute exists and the skill takes a decade to learn.
ডাকের সাজ
Daker Saj
Daker saj is one of the few Indian craft names that is an accidental fossil of global trade, it records a supply chain running from a German foil mill to a Calcutta post office to a potter's lane.
The Malakar decorator families of Kumartuli's saj-para, Kolkata (approach via Kumartuli Mritshilpi Samiti)
শোলার সাজ
Sholar Saj (Sholapith)
The same craft dresses both ends of a Bengali life, the shola topor and mukut worn by a bride and groom at a wedding, and the white ornament that goes into the river with the goddess.
Sandip Biswas (National Awardee, Murshidabad); Ananta Malakar (Birbhum, National Awardee); Samir Saha (President's Awardee)
চালচিত্র
Chalchitra (Painted Backdrop)
The chalchitra has escaped the idol. Theme pujas now hire patuas to paint chalchitra logic across an entire pandal, walls, ceiling and corridor, so visitors walk inside the backdrop instead of looking at it.
Reba Pal, Krishnanagar (Nadia), in her eighties and still painting chalchitra; also the Chitrataru patua cooperative, Naya, Pingla
যাত্রা
Jatra (Folk Opera)
Jatra's stagecraft is the direct ancestor of Bengal's rod puppetry, Danger Putul Naach copies jatra in costume, script, music and enactment, so the puppets are literally miniature jatra actors.
The surviving jatra companies of Chitpur Road, Kolkata; the state-sponsored Biswa Bangla Jatra Utsav
পুতুল নাচ
Putul Naach (Rod Puppetry)
Modern Bengali puppetry has a Moscow accent, Suresh Dutta trained at the Obraztsov Puppet Theatre in Moscow and came home to found the Calcutta Puppet Theatre, where a whole generation learned Russian-style rod technique.
Jadunath Haldar Putul Natch Opera, the oldest active rod-puppet group in West Bengal; and Bangopootool, a non-profit reviving the form in schools
বায়োস্কোপ
Bioscope (The Peep-Show Box)
The trade has vanished so completely that in Bangladesh, where the last operators are periodically filmed, the national arts academy has never even formally recognised bioscope as a traditional performing art.
No reliably documented living hereditary practitioner in West Bengal; see the Gurusaday Museum, Joka, and the Daricha Foundation archive, and the 2006 documentary The Bioscopewallah