Bengal Tigers

Mantu Chitrakar is a traditional scroll painter from West Bengal who, like other men and women of his community, learned to paint and draw while he was still a child. Mantu has painted several scrolls on events such as 9/11, the devastating tsunami of 2006 and the assassinations of former Indian prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

Patachitra, or ‘pats’, are scroll paintings from West Bengal, intimately bound up with itinerant storytelling and songs. Historically, patachitra were cloth scrolls on which mythological or epic stories were painted as a sequence of frames. The artists (patua) would travel from village to village, slowly unrolling the scrolls and singing the stories. Patachitras have been compared to cinema frames or animation and are said to be one of the oldest forms of audiovisual communication.