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A pat is a painted scroll that becomes a performance: a patua unrolls it panel by panel while singing the story. In a 2023 account of Bengal’s pat artists, painter-performers from communities concentrated in Medinipur and Birbhum are presented within a wider history of changing art practices, Hindu and Muslim religious life, and work beyond scroll-making. The feature places Western realism in that larger setting, but does not establish precisely how it changed the visual technique of pat scrolls.
What is a pat?
A pat is a painted paper scroll, assembled in the contemporary practice described by the feature from four factory-made sheets and sometimes pasted onto discarded cloth. It is divided into panels and unrolled vertically. The artist sings as each panel is revealed, turning the scroll into a narrated performance rather than a painting viewed only as a fixed image.
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In the account by Aditi Nath Sarkar, audiences might pay the performer with money, food, or another offering. The painted sequence, song, and act of revealing the panels belong together.
Who are the patuas?
Patuas are painter-performers associated with this scroll-painting and singing tradition. Sarkar’s feature describes the community as concentrated in West Bengal’s Medinipur and Birbhum districts, with patuas also found elsewhere in the state; it characterizes them as an endogamous caste or community. These geographic and social descriptions refer to the feature’s account, not a census or a claim that every patua has the same experience.
The same account describes religious and social practices that draw on both Hindu and Muslim traditions. It reports patuas taking part in Muslim weddings, funerals, and circumcision rites, as well as Hindu calendrical and wedding observances; it also describes performances in Hindu and Muslim homes and veneration of rural Bengal’s Hindu deities. The repertoire, according to the feature, contains considerably more Hindu than Muslim material, and many patuas have both Hindu and Muslim given names. This is a description of a community’s reported hybridity, not a checklist that applies to every individual.
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The feature places pat painting and performance amid the colonial-era transformation of Calcutta’s visual culture. Imported books and prints, art schools teaching realism and naturalism, watercolour and oil painting, paper and canvas, woodcuts, and metal engraving encountered older painting and performance traditions.
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That historical setting matters, but it is not the same as evidence for a particular stylistic change in pat scrolls. The feature does not trace specific techniques—such as perspective, shading, or anatomical modelling—from Western academic painting into patua work. It is therefore more accurate to say that Western visual practices formed part of the wider context in which Bengal’s art traditions developed than to assert a documented, technique-by-technique Western transformation of the pat.
There is a bounded historical connection between patuas and another Calcutta art market: Sarkar says that one group of nineteenth-century Kalighat painters, who sold watercolours of deities and notable Calcutta figures to pilgrim-tourists, came from the Medinipur Patua community. This does not mean all Kalighat painters were patuas, or that Kalighat painting and performed pat scrolls were the same practice.
What pat painting is—and is not—being compared with
| Art context | Medium and practice | What the cited account supports |
|---|---|---|
| Patua tradition | Painted scrolls unrolled panel by panel and accompanied by singing | The Scroll.in feature describes the practice and its colonial-era setting, but does not document specific Western techniques adopted in pat scrolls. |
| Bengal School | A modern painting movement associated with Abanindranath Tagore | India Modern says Tagore rejected European and academic realism and drew on Japanese ink wash and Mughal, Rajasthani, and Pahari miniature traditions. This is distinct from the patua community. |
| Durga image-making in West Bengal | Devotional sculpture and the making of clay images | Moumita Sen’s 2018 chapter argues that Western naturalism and precolonial image-making technologies contributed to a hybrid Durga form. That claim concerns Durga images, not evidence of realism in pat scrolls. |
These distinctions prevent “Western influence” from becoming a catch-all explanation. A painting movement’s response to academic realism and the naturalistic modelling of a devotional sculpture are separate histories from the scroll performance described by patuas.
Why scroll painting is not the whole livelihood
Sarkar reports that painting scrolls and singing do not provide a sufficient living on their own. The feature lists other work undertaken by patuas, including making clay Hindu deities, ritual ornaments and decorations, clay dolls and toys, peddling goods or alternative medicine, and construction day labour. This is qualitative reporting, not a current income survey, and it gives no basis for estimating earnings or how common each kind of work is today.
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The account of patua practice and its historical setting comes from Aditi Nath Sarkar’s Scroll.in feature, published May 28, 2023, and identified there as an excerpt from a book edited by Sarkar and Shatadeep Maitra and published by DAG: Bengal’s ‘pat’ artists: A blend of art tradition, Western realism and a hybrid Hindu-Muslim identity. The distinctions above draw on India Modern’s Abanindranath Tagore entry and Moumita Sen’s 2018 chapter, “From the great goddess to everywoman: Western naturalism and the Durga murti in West Bengal”.
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