This time at Dastkar’s annual Nature Bazaar, on till October 19 at Delhi’s Crafts Museum, I was struck by the contemporary phad paintings on display there. Traditional phads from Rajasthan are large paintings on cloth portraying the epic lives of village gods, usually protectors of cattle. They’ve always reminded me of comic strips since they are divided into several flat planes, each forming part of a long narrative. When I was growing up in Rajasthan many years ago, phads used to be an essential part of the repertory of bhopas, itinerant village storytellers. Who’d have thought that a day would come when these pictorial stories of village heroes would find their ways into the living rooms of urban folks.
The ones on display at Nature Bazaar were interesting since they were barely recognisable as phads, even though they were painted in the same style. Here’s how. First, they were small, some barely six-inches wide (traditional phads are up to 30-feet wide). Second, they depicted a range of subjects. I saw a holi scene in Braj that was particularly striking (traditionally, they mostly depicted the lives and times of Pabuji and Devnarayan, deified rural champions of the oppressed and their animals). Third, some of them were decidedly contemporary in treatment. Some focused only on one or two protagonists, others looked like collages of roughly torn and charred paper.
To think that a decade ago, phad had almost completely died out. Its revival is credited to veteran artist and Padmashree awardee Shrilal Joshi, whose son Kalyan Joshi’s paintings were on display at Nature Bazaar. “In the fifties and sixties the demand for phad paintings grew tremendously in India and abroad. At that time, many phad artists commercialised their art to such an extent that the quality of their artwork deteriorated,” Joshi said. At a time when most ordinary phad artists were minting money, Joshi’s father steadfastly stayed away from it all, making a few phads, but with every attention to quality and detail. At that time, people laughed at him. Later, when the poor quality of phads caused a catastrophic loss of market, his father set up a school to teach the art of making phads to deserving students.
This again went against tradition since their clan had jealously guarded the secrets of the phad for centuries, choosing to not even reveal them to their daughters. But Joshi’s father was undeterred. As his students breathed new life into this ancient art, he became inspired to innovate upon the phad without compromising on quality. “The traditional phad is seven-feet long and depicts an entire story. He created small phads depicting scenes or nuances from it,” he said. Phads, thus, became a convenient size for tourists to carry home, and finally came to adorn people’s living room walls. Joshi and his brother are now driven by the same spirit of innovation. With an American art student, he has even helped create an animation film with phad figures!
“The most important thing I’ve learnt from my father is that in order to ensure the continuity of our 700-year-old craft, we have to teach it to as many as possible,” he said. He has conducted workshops in IIT (Mumbai), NIFT, NID (Ahmedabad) and many other institutions other than Dastkar. As I watched the artist patiently teach Delhi school children to draw kings with curly mustaches and queens in gorgeous garments, it seemed as if I was looking at a joyous rebirth in progress. If only there were more craftspeople like him...
