Above: Mandakranta Bose (second from right, seated) with colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
This is a hybrid form of transmission found mainly in India’s eastern state of West Bengal in rural areas and is a composite form made up of paintings and narration known as pata performances by village artists. In these performances, the performer—the painter/narrator— holds up a scroll bearing a series of roughly 14x10 cm paintings of scenes depicting one of the many major episodes of the epic and at the same time sings an oral description of the subject while offering brief comments on its meaning. Different scrolls portray different episodes. The entire performance thus functions as an evolving show-and-tell narrative much like a graphic novel but of greater flexibility in that the performer can—and usually does—make slight alterations to the narrative and to its import in response to spectator reaction at each performance.
My work in Oxford focused on the dynamic between the verbal and visual presentation of the story in an attempt to understand how a mode of public entertainment facilitates public awareness of the ideology of a long-established religious narrative even as it invites public scrutiny of some key ethical elements, such as the infallibility of rulers, family and clan loyalty, and gender inequity. It is a subject that I also addressed in a lecture at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) in June 2024, illustrated with a slide show of the paintings, which led to animated discussions, expanding my own ideas profitably. It was also during this visit that OCHS published and launched my book, Women in the Hindu World. Tracing the shifting understanding of femininity in Hindu religious culture from antiquity to the present, in this book I critically examine the roles of womanhood in Hindu society, noting especially how the faith has shaped women’s spiritual and social life. This book follows my earlier book in the field, Women in the Hindu Tradition: Rules, Roles and Exceptions (London & New York: Routledge, 2010). For supporting my work in Oxford, I am indebted to the Emeritus College at UBC for a generous subsidy.