Durga Puja at Hat Serendi Village

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Durga Puja at Hat Serendi Village:

Keepers of the Faith

http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=200971

 

by Shamik Bag

 

Scarcity introduced Hat Serinda village to pata Pujas. Now,

it's a part of their tradition. A recent documentary film

celebrates the spirit of pata Puja in the rural outpost

 

Kolkata, September 9 [2006]: When, less than three weeks

from now, pandals get dressed for Puja awards, dazzling

lights balm the otherwise scarred streets, and Durga Puja

returns to Kolkata on cola money, a village in Birbhum

district will gather around small, square canvases and

invoke the Goddess through their own meagre means.

 

Money, or the lack of it, was why Hat Serendi village, 20

kms from Bolpur, first chose to represent the Goddess not

through expensive clay idols, but through the traditional art

form of patas. That, going by what the villagers say, was

almost 250 years back. The tradition still hasn't fallen,

either to a culture of commerce or the call of

commercialization.

 

Debiprasad Ghosh first came to know about Hat Serendi

village and its custom of celebrating Durga Puja through

patas over three decades back. A magazine article in 1974

by Amiya Bandhypadhyay, says Ghosh, first planted the

seed of the documentary in him. It was only in 1999 that he

managed to tread his way to the Birbhum village with

camera, crew, et al. Hat Serendi, his 35-minute long

documentary, got screened last week at the Chitrabani

auditorium. "What I found unique about the village is their

method of celebrating Durga Puja and the way the pata

paintings best evoke the sense of motherhood. The feeling

stayed with me all these years," says Ghosh, who is known

for his books on Bengali cinema and who had previously

completed a documentary film on little-known yet gifted

painter, Gopal Sarkar.

 

In Hat Serinda, Ghosh takes viewers on the rural, dirt trail,

the camera following the cloud of the season, the shimmer

across kaash- filled fields and the quack quack of duck

families frolicking in the village pond. The trail stops at the

doorstep of the 74-year-old patua, Gurupada Sutradhar.

Sutradhar fumbles for words, his voice and frame had been

rendered dim and bent by age and anguish, but his fingers

give nothing of his physical infirmity away. As the camera

closes in on his canvas, Sutradhar's fingers sketch the

reverent outlines of the deity, painstakingly working on

every detail with only the wrinkled skin of his fingers

hinting at his experience as a pata artist. "When I went to

shoot, I found him, along with his brother Adorgopal

Sutradhar, to be the only true exponents of the pata Puja.

Even though he was unlettered, Gurupadababu was

extremely well-versed in religious text and came across as a

very conscious individual. The Sutradhars are social

outcasts and what I found ironic was their work of art was

being worshipped by the rest of the village," says Ghosh.

 

The documentary captures some of the gaiety of the

Bengali's four days in Hat Serinda where the entire village

turns up to celebrate in front of a painted frame that, at the

most, stretches up to 6 feet. "They started this trend of

worshipping Durga through pata primarily because they

could not afford to pay for the clay idols. Now, even though

some of them have the means, they continue the tradition,"

Ghosh informs. It is a tradition that, Ghosh prophesizes, will

continue for some more time, even if tenuously, especially

so because the elderly Sutradhar has since passed away.

"But I don't know whether the pata Puja tradition will be

around 10 years from now." Possibly, that is what makes

Hat Serinda - the place and the documentary - so special.