interstice
Representation of anthropomorphic beast in rickshaw painting
Figurative fantasy of social biology
The depiction of beast in the rickshaw painting seems akin to a figurative fantasy of a social biology1. However, this theoretical position becomes an ineffectual rhetoric if not analyzed in the context of how such a representational tradition has been informed by the literary antecedents of the past. Rickshaw painting in its graphic progression has often remained closely tied with other popular forms of artistic practice, the anthropomorphic tradition, on the other hand, flows from the age-old corpuses of parables and allegories, which were once in circulation in both oral and written forms. The story about the clever Jackal mentoring the seven crocodile siblings who, on the sly, was hatching a diabolical plan to devour them one by one is a folk tale which was once part of the school curriculum in the 1960s and 70s. This story of the pundit who got away with his wicked scheme by showing, in seven consecutive turns, the remaining single baby crock to the mother, has also seen myriad painted versions in the 1970s. Aside from such textual overlapping, whereby the traditional narrative enters the urban territory in popular art form, by way of analyzing a selection of artistic motifs and techniques one may also be able to investigate into the social biology of rickshaw painting.
1
Rickshaw painting emerged as a unique urban popular expression in the then East Pakistan (now, Bangladesh) in the 1950s, after rickshaws were introduced on Dhaka roads for the first time. Though, as an art form decorating a moving vehicle it may be seen as an altered form of the itinerant story tellers' traditional performances which imparted the collective knowledge by subjecting the audience to interlocution in relation to the visuals encapsulated in pat2 paintings.
As a form of expression, initially it attracted little or no attention from the cognoscenti. It was caught on the radar of the mainstream media only when some artists and institutions brought them to the mainstream venues, who also began to consciously collaborate in exploring its versatile potential, which, somewhat, played a role in revitalizing the creative imagination of Dhaka avant-garde.
Rickshaw art's close affiliation with the entire community as spectators besides the ones who control the content and are responsible for its staging; rickshaw puller, owner of the rickshaw as well as the passengers; makes it an encoded narrative of the low-brow sentiment. Being an organic and ambulant form, it integrates both rural and urban pop languages in its wide sweep across styles, subject matters and their kitschy interpretations.
Rickshaw art being the aggregate achievements of both Dhakai artisans and their Muslim non-Bengali counterparts, predominantly of Bihari denomination who flocked to Dhaka after having been displaced from India following the communal riots across the subcontinent during the Partition in 1947, its evolution took a sinuous course. As a trajectory tracing a fluid interlacing with other forms of popular art, it grew in close proximity with cinema banner painting alongside other popular genres from rural Bangladesh, with the traditional shora painting providing the template for its decorative floral motifs defined by linearity.
The rickshaw appears more like a mobile gallery since it is a decorated manual transport. In St Gallen's article entitled, Rickshaw: A Museum Full of Folk Arts, it is stated, '… a Rickshaw itself is a piece of art. When it moves from one place to another, it not only moves with the passengers and other load, but it moves with a museum full of folk arts. Every inch of the Rickshaw is well decorated with paintings, tassels, tinsels and colourful plastic and hood works. Rickshaw hoods, footholds, seats and in the back side, even in frame and in chassis there is a sign of art. A charismatically painted rectangular metal board at the backside, between the two wheels needs to be bold, eye-catching. Rickshaw artists aim to decorate the vehicles with as much drama and colour as possible […].
A genre in its own right, rickshaw painting can easily pass for a kitsch that never veils the true intention behind a work – be that an eroticized depiction of female icons from filmdom, or an urban scene featuring stylistic cars as fetish objects. The prevalence of bright, primary colours is a testimony to its on-the-face aesthetics. The depiction of figural and nonfigural elements often appears flat, or modelled on the cinema hoarding pictures where matinee idols are rendered exotic through the colour tones used to dramatic effects. In the absence of the academic art's preoccupation with perspective and the illusion of depth, a playful adaptation of all existing popular forms of art lends rickshaw painting a character of its own. The works, in many different ways, harness the restlessness of the bihari populace – the advantaged minority during the Pakistan era turned disfranchised refugees in independent Bangladesh – who was pushed to the peripheral existence in slums across Dhaka.
The motifs of rickshaw art are distinct and in a state of perpetual change. '… from scenery relating to the realities of their life to nature in Bangladesh, scenes from films, futuristic cities, exotic birds' are portrayed in parallel with 'idyllic scenes of rural Bengal with plump hens, placid cows, coconut palms, neat huts, gentle streams. Islamic scenes such as mosques and Borak, the winged horse, are also frequently found.' In addition, in the decade of 70s appears the dominating theme of combats between muktijoddhas (freedom fighters) and Pakistani soldiers. Following this tradition, aside from other images of the war of independence of Bangladesh, one discovers works on the Gulf War of 1990, 'war against Terror' (Afghan war,
Iraq war) and so on. In many cases, although the artists take their inspiration from calendars or film posters as frame of reference, their ability to incite primordial imagination and collective unconscious constitutes the primary creative wellspring. In this respect the rickshaw art of Bangladesh reincarnated the representation of anthropomorphic beasts whose lineage, in the visual expression, can be traced to the pat paintings that emerged at Kalighat, Kolkata, in the nineteenth century. There is a tendency to relate this archetypal propensity for presenting the anthropomorphic traits in rickshaw painting to a specific reality of a historical event. Therefore, it is obserevd that, 'in the mid-70s when a government sanction was imposed on painting humans on rickshaw, the rickshaw painters resorted to representing birds and animals instead of human figures on their plates. For instance; a jackal playing the role of a traffic police, a tiger strolling down the street, are juxtaposed with a rabbit walking to school dangling a schoolbag. The familiar scenes of an urban clime – only without a trace of human presence– wherein the human space is taken over by a riot of birds and animals'3. Based on the pretext that it challenges public morality, 'towards the end of the 1960s,'4 an uninterrupted chain of injunctions was issued by the state against the portrayal of humans, chiefly characters from films.
France Lasnier observes '[…] crack-downs have been regular, banning these paintings when they appeared to offend public morality. In 1971, atrocity scenes were banned. Rear mirrors were also banned; it was alleged that pullers were using them to stare at female passengers. Rear mirrors have never reappeared in Dhaka.
In 1978, the municipal authorities in Dhaka again tried to halt portraits, particularly portraits of film stars. Thousands of birds and futuristic scenes blossomed as an immediate consequence. […] 1982 saw a major upheaval when the martial law authorities enacted a new law banning art work on buses, trucks and baby-taxis, the latter having to be painted black with a yellow top. […] in the 1980's rickshaw plates satirized society by painting men with animal faces or animals behaving like women.' 5
‘The cycle rickshaws which are now seen in Bangladesh and India and other parts of South and South East Asia have their origin in the hand-pulled rickshaws of Japan. The Japanese story-telling pat2. jin-riki-sha, which literally translated means 'man-powered vehicle' appeared in Japan around 1870, and was soon in Shanghai, Singapore, Hongkong, Calcutta and other Asian cities. It even went as far afield as the French Indo-China colonies and South Africa. Although the hand pulled rickshaw is said to have originated in Japan, the cycle rickshaw was never widely used there. It was in Singapore in the late 1920's that they appeared on a large scale and caused much amusement.'1
Rob Gallagher in his book The Rickshaws of Bangladesh explicates the nature of Rickshaw as a mode of transport: 'One trishaw is a rickshaw attached to a bicycle, and there is one handy contraption which combined the worst of two worlds. The drivers ride the bicycle and the passengers ride a little green side-car with a frilled hood on red spokes. The trishaw may have such accessories as shiny brass rails, chintz cushions and model train curtains, but it never has springs and you can record every cobble of the road using your spine as pedometer. In traffic it is a worse menace than an ox cart, since trishaw drivers think faster than oxen and can do terrible things more unexpectedly.'2
In Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1936, a transport called becacks (pedicabs), much in the likeness of rickshaw was introduced. Shireen Akbar in her scholarly tract traces the origin of rickshaw back to 1940s laying credence with Jamindar Gokul Babu for launching this vehicle for the first time.3 France Lasnier in his book Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh,4 presents the fact that, 30 years after the introduction of Rickshaws in Japan, Bangladesh saw these vehicles in the 1930s. Rickshaw originated as an urban phenomenon. According to Lasnier, in 1938, a Bengali jamindar from Sutrapur and a gentleman from the Hindu merchant class (Marwari) from Wari initiated the use of this vehicle by each purchasing six of these. These rickshaws, which were transported by steamer from Kolkata, bear little resemblance with the current standardized version. Niaz Zaman's research reveals a different genealogy, which establishes Chittagong with the credential of pioneering the introduction of rickshaws before they found their way to Dhaka, although, rickshaws are not known to spread to other parts of the country including Dhaka from this epicenter. In the 30s and 40s in Dhaka and the outlying areas the popularity of rickshaw gained momentum by way of the private use of these vehicles by European jute merchants located in Narayanganj and Mymensing. In 1941, a total of 37 rickshaws are recorded to have plied the streets of Dhaka. Six years apart this number rose to 181 in 1947. Prior to 1947 Dhaka was a mufossil town. According the census of 1951, it had a population of 62,469. However, in 1998, the demography expanded to over 8 million, comparatively that year the number of registered rickshaws stood at 2,74,265 and in the countryside it was estimated at 91,040. It emerged as an alternative mode to substitute for the traditional horse/bullock drawn carriages. Popular consensus has it that there exists approximately two and a half times as many the number of rickshaws outside the official record. In 2000, a speculated number of 2,40,000 strong rickshaws was recorded in Dhaka.
References
- Shireen Akbar, Rickshaw Painting – Traffic Art in Bangladesh, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, 1994.
- Rob Gallagher, The Rickshaws of Bangladesh, The University Press Ltd., Dhaka, 1992.
- Shireen Akbar, ibid.
- France Lasnier, Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh, The University Press Ltd., Dhaka, 2002.
2
The bestiary representation in Rickshaw painting of Bangladesh encodes a` bio-semiotic anthropomorphic framework' entrenched in a communicative situation. The Rickshaw painters did not intend to enclose animals in the metonymic symbolism of animalist aggression. On rickshaws beasts are signified as post-beast anthropomorphic characters. Therefore, these beasts display human emotions, intellect, language and the articulation of an intrinsic sensibility for a peculiar logic contesting the limitations of the logic of scientific rationality. In this regard, the animals represented in rickshaw art assume a reality akin to an imaginary human condition.
As a result, these painted figures become a creation of artistic imagination which is basically born of the artist's critical approach to socio-psycho-physical problematic which is innately human. The artist, through his imagination whereby the collective was aligned with the personal, attempted to transcend the circumscription of the 'visible' human appearance and expressions.
The painters, aiming purely at making ends meet, despite being situated in the scenario of progressive urbanization of Bangladesh – the bazaars, ganj, or metropolitan spaces – were linked inextricably to an unconscious creative spring which in terms of the dynamics of time expressed itself as a continuation of folk narratology of Bengal. Since folk narratology is the offspring of a community or tribal consciousness, '[t]here is no duality or contradiction between nature or art in tribal … aesthetics.'6 In rickshaw art the beast appears denoting the characteristic of humans where animality as a natural trait juxtaposes rationality.
Additionally, in the bestiary representation one encounters '… greater cohesion between art and life, society and individual, abstract and concrete, work and play, rational and irrational…' (K A Panikker) Through the creative impulse engendering the bestial figuration the artist articulates a relationship between nature and the social relations that shape him as an impersonal narrator '… because s/he is fictionalizing community experience…'. And by visually demonstrating their collective experience opens out to the aforesaid anthropomorphic framework.
The conceptual dialogic interplay between man and beast creates '… a relationship between animal fiction and human meaning' (K A Panikker). By means of this beast-centric pictorial semiotics comes into being a distinct figurative fantasy which stands in contradiction to the monumental High Art trajectory. Since neither a human form nor a beast figure stands in exclusion of each other, the representation of the bestiary in the rickshaw art, in the final analysis, transforms itself into the figurative fantasy channelized through an allegorical logic. It is incomparable to what is grotesque and gruesome, and is, rather, connected to a parabolic tradition. The allegorical logic of the figurative fantasy exhibits the medievalist, pre-modern performance by the present day painter of a tribal episteme, manifesting itself in simple, clear but indirect diction. This way of bestiary representation bridges the past with the present creating a liminal space to allow for the dialogue between 'medievalism and urban popular culture'.
rickshaw art offers its micro-narratives in loud, repeatitive stream of communication. Though, in the new millennium, it is considered a form of visual culture which is slowly receding as digital media is now gradually replacing the former painted plates.
Notes
- Social Biology examines human behaviour by drawing insights from the animal kingdom. It is a meshing of humans and animals in a social ecosystem that indicates an interdependence between these species, where one mirrors the other's behavioral pattern and social functionality.
- 'Pat' etymologically refers to a cotton cloth primed to be used as an alternative to canvas to depict religious, mythological and popular folk themes. it also considered as patchitra or pat painting.
- Shawon Akhand Story-Telling Pat 2. The Rickshaw Paintings of Bangladesh, Art of Bangladesh: A Newsletter at Jalrong.com, Issue: January 2009.
- Shireen Akbar, Rickshaw Painting – Traffic Art in Bangladesh, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, 1994.
- France Lasnier, Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh, The University Press Ltd., Dhaka, 2002.
- K Ayappa Panikker, Indian Narratology, Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre, New Delhi.