Phullara-r Bhoj [Phullara's Feast]
Subject
Phullara-r Bhoj [Phullara's Feast]
Description
The story of Phullara-r Bhoj [Phullara's Feast] is taken from the Bengali Mangalkavya tradition of oral narrative poetry, which tells the tales of deities who establish their cult among human beings. This popular genre in Bengali, influenced by regional cults such as that of Chandi, Manasa, Dharma, or Vaishnav songs, flourished from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth. Phullara's story appears in the Chandimangal composed by Mukandaram Chakravarti in the late sixteenth century in West Bengal, India.
This collection selects as its focus the laments of Phullara, a poor hunter's wife, on finding means of sustenance. While the scroll painters decided to focus specifically on Phullara's lament on seasonal hardships across the year, the graphic artist merged the traditional Bengali tale with his contemporary experiences of working in the small Lepcha village of Loleygaon, on a Himalayan ridge. The items in this collection demonstrate the processes by which the narrative was researched, analysed, and reworked, to create the final outputs of the scroll and graphic narratives. The collection contains source materials that were created and shared, videos and photographs of the painting, writing, and ideation in progress, interviews with the artists, performance videos, and images and texts of the graphic and scroll narratives that were finally created.
This collection selects as its focus the laments of Phullara, a poor hunter's wife, on finding means of sustenance. While the scroll painters decided to focus specifically on Phullara's lament on seasonal hardships across the year, the graphic artist merged the traditional Bengali tale with his contemporary experiences of working in the small Lepcha village of Loleygaon, on a Himalayan ridge. The items in this collection demonstrate the processes by which the narrative was researched, analysed, and reworked, to create the final outputs of the scroll and graphic narratives. The collection contains source materials that were created and shared, videos and photographs of the painting, writing, and ideation in progress, interviews with the artists, performance videos, and images and texts of the graphic and scroll narratives that were finally created.
Creator
Chitrakar, Dukhushyam
Chitrakar, Jahanara
Chitrakar, Lutfa
Chitrakar, Rabbani
Chitrakar, Rahim
Chitrakar, Rahman
Chitrakar, Rehana
Chitrakar, Ushiara
Sen, Sarbajit
Source
Mukundaram Chakravarti, Chandimangal, c.1700, ed. Sukumar Sen (Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, 1955).
Publisher
University of Exeter
Date
2019-11
Contributor
Brock, Dan
Dutta, Shrutakirti
Fereday, Graham
Gupta, Abhijit
Halder, Bhagirath
Holding, Richard
Long, Lily
Mbedzi, Tumisang
Mondal, Sujit
Mukherjee, Ayesha
Spence, Connor
Tupman, Charlotte
Rights
CC BY-NC
Language
Bengali
English
Identifier
3416cc9ee54f0886a3b149f0a3f05044.jpg
Coverage
Bengal, India; c.1700
Loleygaon, Himalayas, India; c.1980s
Relation
Chandimangal, Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800.
David Curley, Poetry and History: Bengali Maṅgal-kābya and Social Change in Precolonial Bengal (2008). A Collection of Open Access Books and Monographs. 5.
Ajit Chitrakar, Chandi Mangal, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.