Santhal Jadupatua Scrolls

The Jadupatua scrolls are a very old tradition among the Santhal, an Austro-Asiatic (Munda-language) Adivasi people of the Bengal-Jharkhand-Bihar region. The painters, itinerant minstrel-healers called Jadupatua, "magic painters" (jadu, magic; patua, painter), are a caste of Chitrakars who painted chiefly for Santhal audiences. They wandered village to village showing scrolls and chanting tribal stories of creation, death and the underworld in exchange for rice and gifts, historically using waste paper because good paper was scarce.

The tradition's most distinctive genre is the Chakshudana ("giving of the eye") death-scroll: when a Santhal died, the Jadupatua would visit the family and paint the departed with pupil-less eyes, then narrate the soul's journey and hardships to "restore" the pupils, a ritual that gave the painters their reputation as magic-workers. Beyond this, art historian Mildred Archer identified themes including Death's Kingdom, Baha Porob, the Santhal creation story, Thakur Jiu, Satya Pir and jatra scrolls.

Stylistically the scrolls share the Bengal Patua idiom while remaining a distinct tribal branch: flat single-plane figures indifferent to naturalism, a characteristic corrugated line linking forehead, nose, lips and chin, and greatly enlarged eyes, with Santhal women rendered as straight, dignified vertical figures echoing Santhal dance. Stories are told in clear-cut panels divided by horizontal bands, with simple diagrammatic trees and rocks.

The Santhal scrolls and their creation-myth narratives have been documented in exhibitions and publications (such as "Painted Songs" at the Zurich Ethnographic Museum) and in ethnographic film, and contemporary Patua artists like Swarna Chitrakar have carried the wider tradition into collaborative modern art.

The painting survives, but its living heart, the sung storytelling and the Chakshudana ritual, is close to extinction: few buyers, precarious livelihoods and television displacing the village bard have pushed most surviving artists toward painting alone, discouraging the next generation.

The tradition spans the Santhal cultural belt, Purulia (notably Majramura village), Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore and Murshidabad in West Bengal, and the Santhal Parganas and Dumka district of Jharkhand, where the related form is called Paitkar. It is one branch of the wider Pata/Patua scroll family that also includes Bengal Patachitra and Odisha Pattachitra.

[Atlas Assessment] The Santhal Jadupatua scrolls form a distinctive tribal node with graph links to the Santhal community, Purulia/Jharkhand and the wider Patua/Patachitra scroll family, and value in representing Adivasi ritual art in the Atlas. The source entry "Patachitra of Kalighat (Santhal Scrolls)" is treated here as this Jadupatua/Santhal tradition, and the Atlas flags the near-extinction of its sung-ritual function.