Patua

Communities & Cultures Performance & Practice

An artisanal community from the eastern states of the Indian subcontinent, primarily West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand, as well as parts of Bangladesh, known for their visual and performative tradition of narrative scroll-painting. Patua paintings rose to prominence with urban migration and colonial patronage and eventually became a subset of the nineteenth-century Kalighat school. The term is also used for the artwork produced by this community.

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