Pattachitra, and the cloth that stood in for a god

For about a fortnight each summer, the doors of the Jagannath temple at Puri are shut. The images inside are said to be unwell. They are treated, repainted, rested, and kept from view, and for those days the pilgrims who have come from across Odisha and beyond cannot see the thing they came for.

What they can buy is a cloth. A small painting, perhaps thirty by forty-five centimetres, showing the three images side by side in the arrangement they would have had inside: Jagannath, his brother Balabhadra, their sister Subhadra, with the disc and the conch. It is painted by a household that has painted the same three figures for generations, in a village a few kilometres from the temple, and it is sold in the days when the temple is closed. The form is called pattachitra, and its oldest continuous job in the world is to stand in for something that is not available.

Making a surface that will hold a line

The cloth is not canvas and it is not paper. Two layers of cotton are pasted together with tamarind seed powder, and then a coating is applied: chalk or conch powder in a gum medium, worked into the weave, left to dry, and burnished with a smooth stone. Three or four coats, each one dried and rubbed back, and the surface closes. The point of all of it is to stop the cloth from drinking the paint. A line laid on an unprepared cotton surface spreads; a line laid on a burnished chalk ground sits where it is put.

That matters because the whole form is a line. Pattachitra has no shading, no modelling and no perspective. Figures are built from a contour, filled flat, and then given detail with a finer contour inside. The ornaments, the folds of a garment, the petals of a lotus, the pupils — all of it is drawn, none of it is painted in. The brush is a piece of root from the keya plant, softened in the mouth and cut to a point, and its line is as fine as the fibre it was cut from.

The palette is short and mineral. Hingula for the red — a cinnabar earth, and the colour of the background in most old pieces. Haritala for yellow, an arsenic sulphide. A blue stone, ground. Lamp soot bound with gum for black. Powdered conch for white. Five materials, no mixing, and a fixed order of work, because the ground has to be laid before the figures and the fine line has to come after the flat colour has dried.

The other job: a scroll that is sung

The same households had a second product, and it explains the form better than the temple story does. A long cloth is divided into panels, each panel a scene from a story, and the painter — who is also a singer — unrolls it panel by panel while performing the story aloud. The cloth is not a picture of the story. It is the score for the telling: it holds the sequence, so the singer can go on for an hour and a half without a book.

This is why the older work is dense in a particular way. Each panel has to be legible at arm's length, in lamplight, to someone who is listening at the same time. Figures are arranged so that a pointing hand can find them. The important one is larger. The villain is at the edge. Nothing is there for decoration, because everything has to be findable while a voice is moving.

Who pays, and for which part

Until the twentieth century the answer was straightforward: pilgrims, in a season. The painting economy was a festival economy, and its calendar was the temple's. That has one large advantage and one large weakness. The advantage is that demand is enormous and concentrated — tens of thousands of people arrive wanting a thing to take home, and they all want it in the same fortnight. The weakness is that it lasts a fortnight.

The second payer was the state and the tourist. From the 1950s the Odisha government began the now-familiar programme of craft boards and emporia, and in 2000 it declared Raghurajpur, the village where most of this painting is done, a heritage craft village. The village was paved, painted, and signposted. Visitors began arriving by bus. Households that had sold to pilgrims in June started selling to tourists in December.

The third payer is the market outside India, and this is where the sizes really diverge. A gallery panel or a hotel wall wants two metres of cloth; a craft shop in a city wants a card; a designer wants a motif it can license. Between the smallest and the largest object is a factor of fifty in area, and the technique does not change at all. Only the number of days does, and the number of days is what everything is priced from.

What the function took with it

The patti sold during Anasara has a constraint no other version has: it must be recognisable as the god. Not beautiful, not original — recognisable. A pilgrim who has come four hundred kilometres and cannot enter the temple is buying a substitute, and a substitute that gets the arrangement wrong fails at the only thing it was for. That constraint is why the traditional patti is so conservative: the three figures, the same order, the same proportions, the same background red, year after year.

Take the constraint away and the painting loosens. A tourist who wants a souvenir does not need the three figures in the right order; a hotel that wants a wall panel wants something that reads as Odia at three metres. The subjects broaden — Dasavatar, Ramayana panels, Radha and Krishna, village life, a peacock, a tree of life — and the work gets bolder and faster because it is being looked at from further away. None of this is decline. It is a different job.

The geographical indication, registered in 2008 as Orissa Pattachitra, protects the method: the ground, the pigments, the sequence of work, the producing area. It says nothing about what the object is for, because a legal instrument can only describe a process. So the register now holds a definition of pattachitra that includes a two-metre hotel panel and a fridge magnet, and excludes a screen-printed copy that is, in every respect that a buyer can see, identical to one of them.

What survives is the technique, in the hands of families who still prepare the cloth themselves, and a village that has become a stop on a tour. What has gone is the arrangement in which a painting had to be correct because it was standing in for something. That is not a small thing to lose, and it is not recoverable by anyone's decision: you cannot manufacture a reason for a cloth to need to be right. It came with the shut door, and the door opens again every year.

This is entry 14 of Arts and Performance in About India. The pillar's argument — that each of these forms survived by becoming a different thing from the one it was made as — is set out on the pillar page.