CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The tradition of  narrative scroll painting called Patuya art (also spelled Patua),  is adopting modernity. The painters are extending their range by including more contemporary themes yet maintaining an Indian touch to their portrayals.

An example is a portrayal of a scene from the Sept. 11 incidents — with a Bengali twist. The painting tells the story of a Kolkata boy, who is betrothed to a local girl, and goes to New York for higher studies. There he falls in love with a blonde American girl, and in the process reneges on his commitment to his fiancée back home. The boy gets a job at the World Trade Center but is a victim of the Sept. 11 tragedy.

The art of the Patuyas, as these itinerant scroll painters and singers are called, and their adaptations to a changing global world was the subject of a talk entitled "Moving Songs: Bengali Patuyas (Scroll Painters/Singers) in Transition" held at Harvard University on Feb. 16. Frank Korom, associate professor of Religion and Anthropology at Boston University was the presenter of the talk. He was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in India during 2004-2005, where he conducted his fieldwork in the village of Naya in the Medinipur district of rural West Bengal. Korom recently received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation to further his studies. The talk was organized by the Ethnomusicology Seminar at the Humanities Center as part of this year's theme "Music and Mobility."  The South Asia Initiative of the Asia Center at Harvard cosponsored the talk, attended by approximately 15 people.

The Patuyas were originally low caste Hindus who converted to Islam. Yet, they sang songs to Hindu gods and goddesses and were patronized by Hindus. Thus they were never completely accepted in the Muslim Ummah (community). Their low-caste status, and the fact that they ate beef denied them widespread acceptance in the Hindu eyes. They have remained between cultures and faiths, and even their dwellings are located in an area between the Hindu and Muslim communities in their village.

Patuya painting has been characterized by religious and mythical imagery. The paintings themselves are done on fabric, which can be silk or cotton, or, more recently, on poster paper. The colors are made from commonly available materials. Turmeric, vermillion, burnt rice, collyrium (kajal) are among the things employed as basic colors, by mixing with water, and the sap from the bel fruit (wood-apple) functions as the mordant. The borders of a painting are first penciled in and then the motifs are painted onto a series of rectangular frames that form the scroll. Traditionally, the themes and iconography has included mainly Hindu images and tales such as those of the goddess Durga slaying the demon Mahisasura, Savitri and Satyavan, the snake goddess Manasa and episodes from the Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. A Sufi saint, Satya Pir is also frequently represented in their work.

The effect of colonization, which pitted a traditional lifestyle with one that was western and "modern," was one of the major reasons that the Patuyas had to develop newer themes, according to Korom. Popular cinema also affected them since suddenly there was a more attractive and accessible mode of entertainment that promised flashier images.

The Patuyas have responded by incorporating many social and political themes in their repertoire. Their subjects now include issues of dowry, childcare, HIV prevention, communal violence in India (the Babri Masjid demolition, for example), the recent tsunami and topics of global terrorism that include the Sept.11 incident.

Yet, as the Sept. 11 scroll demonstrates, the characters peopling such foreign settings and incidents and the story behind such scrolls have a local relevance.

The Harvard talk was followed by a brief question and answer session. There were questions regarding the awareness of qualitative differentiation in the singing among the Patuya singers, the position of women in the society and the themes adopted by the Patuyas. Liza Vick, who works at the music department library at Harvard and did her master's thesis on Cambodian dance, was quite intrigued by this art form: "I certainly learned something new and unique," she said. Valerie Diallo, who runs a nonprofit organization in Lowell, Mass. that also deals in fair trade of folk art, was very impressed by the talk and the light it shed on the Patuyas. She hoped she could step in to expand the market for Patuya art.