Place · Pattachitra heritage village · India
Raghurajpur
Raghurajpur, a village beside the Bhargavi river twelve kilometres from Puri, is Odisha's state-designated heritage craft village and the hereditary home of the chitrakar families who paint pattachitra on cloth and tussar silk and carve palm-leaf manuscripts. All 120 houses in the two-row village street are workshops; three generations of a single family will often work on the same cloth, grinding mineral and vegetable colours and applying them over a layered tamarind-paste ground. Raghurajpur is also the birthplace of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, the Padma Vibhushan dancer who codified modern Odissi, and the training ground of its gotipua boy-dancer tradition from which Odissi emerged.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.904, 85.754
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyJagannātha Temple, Puri
Raghurajpur's chitrakar families supply the pattachitra paintings and painted deity portraits used in and around the Jagannath temple at Puri — notably the anasara patti images that replace the main icons for a fortnight each year during the Snana Yatra retreat. The village is twelve kilometres from Puri on the Bhargavi river, and almost every household works to Jagannath-temple ritual demand. Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, the Padma Vibhushan architect of modern Odissi dance, was born here, and the gotipua boy-dancer troupes from which Odissi partly emerged still train in the village.
- Site withinPaṭṭachitra, Raghurajpur
Paṭṭachitra, the cloth-and-palm-leaf painting tradition of Odisha, has had its heartland for five centuries in Raghurajpur, the heritage craft village 10 km south of Puri. Every household in Raghurajpur paints; the state recognised the village as its first Heritage Crafts Village in 2000. The pigments are still ground from indigenous minerals and plants.
Sources
Standard reference.
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