Tradition · scroll painting & narration tradition · India
Jadopaṭiā scroll painting
Also known as Jadopatia, Jadupatua, Chaksudan, Santhal scroll
The painted scrolls of the Jadopatia painters of the Santhal Parganas, unrolled frame by frame and sung to Santhal households — most importantly the Chaksudan pat, shown to a bereaved family and said to restore sight to the dead in the next world, for which the painter is paid.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 24.268, 87.249
Worth knowing
The painters are not Santhal but a small artisan community who serve Santhal ritual, which is an arrangement with few parallels: a hereditary outsider group holding a necessary place inside another community's funeral rites. The scrolls also carry the creation story, and the tradition is now down to a handful of families at Amrapara and Dumka.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueSohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh
Jadopatia scrolls and the Khovar and Sohrai wall paintings are the two painting traditions of the Santhal Parganas and the Hazaribagh valleys, and they work in opposite directions: the scroll is made by a hereditary outsider community and sung to a Santhal household for a fee, while the wall painting is made by the women of the house for their own marriage and harvest.
- AnaloguePaṭṭachitra, Raghurajpur
Jadopatia and Odisha's pattachitra are both painted scrolls unrolled and narrated, and they belong to the same eastern Indian family as Bengali patua singing. The difference is the occasion: the Chaksudan pat is shown to a bereaved Santhal family and said to restore sight to the dead, and the painter is paid for that specific service rather than for a picture.
- AnalogueChhau, Seraikela and Mayurbhanj
Chhau and the Jadopatia scrolls are the two performance traditions of this plateau that cross community lines to do a job: a masked martial dance performed at the spring new year by castes who trained as soldiers, and a painted scroll narrated to a bereaved household by painters who are not of that household's community. Neither is a temple art and neither is on a classical list.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jadupatua”. W.G. Archer's Santhal Parganas collections; Sangeet Natak Akademi and Crafts Council documentation of the Jadopatia scrolls.
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