In Birbhum: forest on a Santal wall

A forest is growing on the mud walls of a small Santal house in Gopalnagar. Trees rising through the roof merge with the umbrella of the neem tree growing beside it. The path on which a male spotted deer with its fawn amble along, is lined with tiny flowers and rather giant butterflies. Bright colours fill the decorated wings of these larger-than-life versions of bulbuls, babblers, barbets and parakeets. These avian creatures of the near-by Illambazar forest, flutter against the dull white of the wall.

It is not the movement of these creatures on the wall, or the illusion of it, that alerts 75-year-old Churki Tudu. Nor does the music of the unseasonal showers on her tin roof on this afternoon in May. But the sound of our footsteps as we walk alongside this painting on the outer wall of the house, spreading like kantha-in-clay.

A pitch road that cuts across this village in Ilambazar block is dotted with many such close-knit Santal mud huts on either side. The colourful murals on the outer walls of the homes catch our attention as we pass through.

“Kids these days do new designs from phones and newspapers. Where was such variety in our times? We’d simply get some mud from the field and splash colours on the walls,” says Churki Tudu as she steps out of her room and reaches the entrance of her house. The ease in her voice with which she starts speaking, tells us that she is used to curious visitors who frequent the village to photograph the decorated walls of her house.

She doesn’t wait for us to ask, but rather dives straight into the subject she assumes we are interested in. “White mud, red mud, black mud [colour] made with hnarir tel [burnt oil residue scraped from cooking utensil] – these were the colours.” A momentary pause, and she continues: “First the old clay layer would be scraped off the wall. Then a fresh layer of mud would be plastered and then we would apply another coat. Finally, we would colour the border with kharimati [limestone or chalk].”

Churki is nostalgic about her childhood days in her birth home at Purba Barddhaman’s Akulia village. But she is aware of the Santal community’s rapidly changing ways, and the manner in which the new generation is adapting to the changes. She is currently living with her daughter in Gopalnagar. Their home is one of the 304 households in this village situated on the left of the Sriniketan Road, on the way to Ilambazar forest from Bolpur.

Roughly seven per cent of the total population of Birbhum are Adivasis. Santals (also pronounced as Santhal) are the majority -- over 80 per cent (Census 2011).

“Most families in the village have two houses – a mud house and a cement one. The wall art is made on the mud house,” says Sumi, Churki’s 40-year-old daughter. As she explains the practice and the tradition, we suddenly notice that everyone here has built a pucca house of brick and cement, right adjacent to their traditional houses. Much like a modern extension to the old, ancestral one. For them the acceptance of the new, doesn’t seem to have come at the price of the old.

The mud for the walls comes from the fresh layer of silt that gathers on the grounds during the monsoon. “We collect the silt from fields in the months of Bhadra and Ashwin [mid-August to mid-October],” says Sumi. For the annual Santal ritual of painting the house, the colours were traditionally sourced from various types of earth available around.

“Adivasis have four primary colours,” says Gagani Mandi, 40, Sumi’s friend and next-door neighbour. She goes to list them: “Kharimaati [chalk] is used for white; Laalmaati [red mud] brought from Ilambazar forest is soaked in water. Typically, we make borders with it. Sometimes we find yellow mud while boring a well. We don’t get much of this. So, whenever we get some, we preserve it carefully in sacks to be used later for painting. Then there’s black. We burn straw and then mix the ash with water to get that colour.”

“Sometimes we mix kharimaati with readily available blue in the market to create new colours for painting. We also extract green from the leaves of shim [snow peas],” says Gagani. “These [natural] colours often fade and disappear over time and so we need to apply them again [annually].”

And what about all the other colours used in the mural depicting birds, flowers, and animals on the wall of that house we saw first? “The rest of the colours are all bought from the market,” says Gagani.

“See those two houses with butterfly designs? All painted by Purnima. We just help her,” says Sumi’s daughter Rekha Murmu. The 16-year-old proudly introduces us to the busy artist working intently on a wall a little further in the village. Both she and her young painter friend Purnima Murmu, 15, study in Class 11 in Raipur Sitikantha M. High School and Daranda Chandimata Vidyalaya respectively. Rekha, a native Santali speaker, is also fluent in Bangla, like everyone in Gopalnagar.

All those birds, butterflies, and the human figures on the walls of Rekha’s own house are not their traditional motifs, nor are their methods like those her dida Churki or mother Sumi have learnt. “We have learnt all these from a didi [elder sister, as teachers are addressed] who comes to teach us painting,” says Rekha making it clear that the teacher is not from the Santal community. The paint, brush, pallet that Purnima is using are bought from the local market in Bolpur.

“Earlier, we did not paint the entire wall in our house. There would be a red clay border painted on the mud wall right under the straw thatch. Flowers and vines would be painted under that. It was simpler [artistic style],” says Rekha explaining the generational changes in the painting style. Like her grandmother Churki, she understands that the figures and designs in the older paintings were part of a larger way of life which is not the same any more.

Churki Tudu cannot remember the last time she saw a child paint a bow and an arrow. She says that people don’t paint those things nowadays; hunting itself is now banned. What they practice once in a year on the day of Bandna Parab [celebrated in the first week of January in Birbhum’s Santal community] is more of a performative ritual than real hunting. It is a symbol that traces back to their status as hunter-gatherers prior to being cultivators. Birbhum is also fast losing its forest cover.

“Most Santal families in Gopalnagar are sharecroppers working on others’ fields. We grow paddy in monsoon and potato in winter and depend on this harvest for our yearly grain for meals,” says Gagani, sitting on the floor inside the pucca part of the house scattered with harvested potatoes. The division of the harvest is decided between the landowner and the sharecropper on the basis of who invests most in seeds and fertilisers. Only a handful of families have land of their own. That too one or two bighas at the most. (A bigha here is 0.33 acre.) Besides paddy, they cultivate potato, mustard, sesame, brinjal and tomato.

Livestock rearing, tea and snack stalls and battery-operated e-rickshaw are additional avenues for earning for the community. But life here still revolves round the harvests. “We usually paint our walls during the month of Aghran [mid-November to mid-December] before the [Bandna] festivities,” says Sumi. The process of applying a fresh coat of mud on the walls every year and maintaining it are largely done by women in a Santal family.

But why decorate the houses now when it is not festival time?

It’s also done during family weddings, says Rekha. And they are expecting one soon in Purnima’s house and so, the women in the family are decorating the walls. The resident artists have moved the furniture around. The portraits of Raghunath Murmu (renowned Santali scholar, playwright and creator of the Ol Chiki script), Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and Rabindranath Thakur are off the wall, resting on a bed. Rekha says that the three portraits housed here are community assets and are in demand for display during community festivals and celebrations.

These are the images and shades that still bind the Santal community at Gopalnagar village together through generations. Just like the colours of the distinctive tattoo that women - Gagani, Sumi and Rekha’s friend Brishti wear on their upper chest. “It hurts a lot. So, I didn’t do it on the chest. But see, I got it on my hand,” Rekha says enthusiastically, stretching her arm adorned with flower-patterned tattoos similar to what her mother has on her chest. The tattoo becomes a rite of passage – of time and traditions - from Sumi to Rekha.

“We all have to get these tattoos done when we are 5 or 6 years old. People from Bihar come here to do these. It hurts a lot if we are to do this later when one grows up. This is our symbol. Ma-Dadi [mothers and grandmothers] have passed these on to us. The colour fades slowly [with time],” Sumi says with a smile.

A smile that spreads across the faces of girls gathered there – Purnima, Rekha and Brishti. A smile that doesn’t fade but shines bright like the colours on the painted walls on this rain-washed afternoon.

This story was originally reported in Bangla.