BharatSangraha

Rarh · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain

The small things

  • Brick because there is no stoneThe laterite shelf yields gravel and murram, not building stone. Every major temple in the Rarh is therefore brick, and the decorative programme — Ramayana and Krishna scenes, hunts, battles, boats, and in several Bishnupur temples Portuguese soldiers with muskets — is pressed from carved wooden moulds and set into the face in registers. The art form exists because of a geological absence.
  • A roof that imitates thatchThe curved chala cornice on a Bengal temple is a brick copy of the sag in a bamboo-and-thatch village roof. Masons reproduced in fired clay a shape that in the original was the result of gravity acting on bamboo — and then counted the slopes, so a temple is described as do-chala, char-chala, at-chala or jor-bangla before anything else is said about it.
  • Posto and the opium monopolyPoppy was grown across Bengal and Bihar under the Company's opium monopoly, and the seed left after the latex was taken had no export value. It stayed local, cheap, and available in quantity in exactly the districts that grew the crop — which is the most common explanation for why posto became a staple here and nowhere else in India. It also happens to suit the climate, being eaten as a cooling food in the hottest part of Bengal.
  • One mould, one castingIn dokra the clay mould has to be broken to get the metal out, so it cannot be reused. Every piece is therefore unique by construction, and the fine parallel lines on the surface are the impressions of the wax threads that were wound round the core before the clay went on.
  • Chhau, split three ways by a boundaryPurulia's Chhau is masked and acrobatic, Seraikela's is masked and lyrical with a much subtler movement vocabulary, and Mayurbhanj's is danced without a mask at all. They are three treatments of one form, separated by the lines drawn between West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha, and UNESCO's 2010 inscription covers all three together — a rare official recognition that the tradition is one thing.
  • The standard came from hereStandard colloquial Bengali descends from the Rarhi dialect group, and specifically from its Nadia–Shantipur variety. The practical consequence is that a Purulia villager speaks a variety of the same dialect group that supplied the standard, and is nonetheless heard in Kolkata as speaking incorrectly.
  • A district drawn by a songManbhum was a district of Bihar until 1956. A long campaign for its Bengali-speaking areas to be transferred to West Bengal used Tusu songs as its principal medium — new verses composed and sung about the demand, in a form the authorities could not easily prosecute. Purulia district was created that year. It is one of the few Indian boundary changes with a folk-song repertoire attached to it.
  • Coal, firstCommercial coal mining in India began at Raniganj in 1774. Everything downstream — the railway to the coalfield, the Damodar Valley Corporation, the Durgapur steel plant, the subsidence that has swallowed parts of several towns — follows from that seam, and it sits directly under the temple and terracotta country.
  • India's first river valley authorityThe Damodar was called the sorrow of Bengal for floods that reached the delta. The Damodar Valley Corporation, set up in 1948 on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was India's first multipurpose river valley project. Its dams are on the Jharkhand side and its irrigated command is on the Bengal side, which is the whole argument of this region in one arrangement.
  • The mask you cannot see out ofA Chhau mask covers the entire face, with only small openings. That single constraint produces the form's whole style: no facial expression is available, so meaning has to be carried by leaps, spins, weight shifts and the flare of the costume, and rehearsal is partly about learning to move blind.
  • Sculpture made outdoors, on purposeRamkinkar Baij built Santhal Family and the Mill Call in the open at Santiniketan in cement and laterite chips rather than in bronze or marble, at monumental scale, in the late 1930s. They were made where they stand, weather where they stand, and take as their subject the Santal families living in the villages around the campus.
  • Ten weeks of jaggeryDate-palm sap ferments within hours of leaving the tree, so it must be boiled the morning it is drawn, and the tree only yields in the cold months. Nolen gur therefore exists for about ten weeks a year. An entire class of Bengali sweets is built on an ingredient that cannot be stockpiled, which is why their season is discussed like a harvest.

Small local details of Rarh — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)