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The Hindu
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Centre for Revival of Indigenous Art's coffee table book documents Chittara art from Karnataka's Malenadu
In the quiet villages of rain-soaked Malenadu region in Karnataka, walls become storytellers. Art in geometrical patterns bloom in natural hues. This is Deevaru Chittara, the traditional art form of Deevaru community, an agrarian and matrifocal group living in the region. For generations, their women have adorned walls, doors, fabric and ceremonial objects with symbols that speak of life, lineage and Nature. In their homes, Chittara survives not as a display, but as a living language. Now, through the pages of a 200-page coffee table book, it reaches a new audience. Deevara Chittara: the artform, the people, their culture (published by Prism Books), is the result of two-years of fieldwork and collaborations by three women: cultural researcher Geetha Bhat, documentary photographer Smitha Tumuluru and textile designer Namrata Cavale. The trio travelled through Malenadu, covering many villages. 'Every trip gave us something new,' says Geetha. 'Sometimes, we felt we had missed asking a critical question and would go back.' She recalls an impromptu trip to document Kere Bete, a mass fishing festival, when the river Varada recedes. 'We were informed the night before and all of us hopped onto a train at dawn.' Smitha adds, 'It was thrilling and terrifying to shoot in knee-deep waters with heavy cameras.' Chittara is more than just a visual art. It is a cultural documentation in pigments and patterns. Traditionally drawn during weddings, festivals and auspicious milestones, the motifs are geometric, delicate and symbolic. The ele or thread motif denotes familial ties. Nili kocchu, a criss-cross design represents the tatti (bamboo-strip walls) or the light filtering through the tatti. Poppali, a checkerboard pattern evokes the joints of the house rafters and the stars, believed to be ancestors watching over the living! 'Even Patanga or peeti motif illustrates a butterfly perched on intersecting beams, hinting at the connection between Nature and art,' says Geetha. It was Geetha's first encounter with Chittara at an exhibition in Bengaluru's Chitrakala Parishath 20 years ago that planted the seed. The conversations with the artists led her to research on the art, culture and lifestyle of this community. She later founded the Centre for Revival of Indigenous Art (CFRIA) in 2008. Her fieldwork took her deep into the villages of Sagara, Sirsi, Soraba and Shivamogga (Shimoga) taluks, where she got to see how the women returned from the fields, completed household chores and gathered to joyfully sketch the Chittara. Smitha, whose work explores arts, culture, livelihood and gender, joined Geetha to photograph and co-write the book. 'I told her I would not be able to pay a big fee,' Geetha recalls. 'Smitha instantly agreed for pay-as-we-go. I could see her passion for the work.' Moved by the aesthetic and symbolic depth of Chittara at a CIFRIA workshop, Namrata began designing projects for CFRIA and came on board in 2018. 'This book was Geetha's dream,' Namrata says. 'Though I had designed scarves and murals for CFRIA earlier, this was my first experience at designing a book and every part of it felt meaningful. As a team, we aligned on core values and aesthetics,' shares. The most prominent expression is the Hase Gode Chittara, painted on the eastern or northern walls of homes. 'It is considered auspicious,' says Geetha. Its beauty is enhanced by enclosing it within a three-sided border, the fourth is left bare, to convey visitors are always welcome to their homes. Tiny figurines of musicians often mark the bottom of this composition. The three-sided borders are also drawn at the entry door as Bagilu Chittara. The drawings are architectural in their essence, documenting the structure of the home and life. Metthina Chittara, for instance, features in two-storied houses. While Namrata's architect-mother could verify the drawings representing the structural elements of the house in Chittara patterns for the book, Smitha's mathematician-father decoded the underlying geometry and symmetry in the motifs, highlighting the community's intuitive brilliance. The floral motifs — Chendu hoovu — appear as a single flower or torans (festive garland), while malli hoovu shows up as a saalu (linear pattern). A nesting bird, Goodina hakki, represents a female bird waiting for her mate. 'The madanakai (L-shaped wall brackets) on either side of the hase gode chittara not only represent the beams, but metamorphically indicate extension of families,' explains Smitha. Chittara also documents ceremonial objects such as basinga and tondla, headgears for the bride and groom, painted as ornamental motifs, while the Vastra Chittara, drawn on a cloth is used to wrap and store these objects post-wedding. The Tiruge mane, a carved pedestal used for placing offerings, has its own chittara representation. The moole aarathi is drawn on the eechalu chaape (grass mat) during weddings. This pattern is drawn as small as an 8-moole (8 corner) aarathi chittara to as big as 64 or 160 cornered-patterns. 'How these corners are connected is left to each artist's creative interpretation,' says Namrata. The four colours used in Chittara are rooted in ecology. Red is drawn from kemmannu (red earth) or raja kallu (red stone); white from soaked and ground rice or jedi mannu (white clay); black from roasted rice grains and yellow from the seasonal fruit of Guruge tree, a species of Garcinia. 'Since yellow pigment comes from a specific seasonal fruit, it is used sparingly,' reveals Smitha, while the brush – pundi naaru, is made from a variety of jute fibre. The book is a careful-curation of all these layers. Each section walks the reader through the history, motifs, rituals and evolving social landscapes of Deevaru community. 'We have used colloquial Kannada for Chittara motifs such as ele, patanga, moole, poppali, but catalogued all in the glossary section,' says Geetha. Namrata's design philosophy was to create breathing space for the art. 'This was not just about layout, but about reverence,' she says. The festive fairs in the villages are adapted into therina chittara. The painting of theru (chariot) depicts the devaru (deity), placed in the centre and people pulling the chariot. Among the most interesting rituals of the community is Bhoomi Hunnime Habba, a festival that celebrates mother earth. Held on the full moon before Deepavali, this resembles a seemantha or baby shower for the earth. Deevaru women prepare charaga (rice porridge with greens and vegetables), carry many delicacies in a Chittara-painted basket called Bhoomanni Butti and offer portions not just to each other, but also to birds, rodents, snakes — everything that share the field's ecosystem. 'For them, nature is god,' says Geetha. CFRIA's mission goes beyond the book. It conducts exhibitions, workshops and invites women from the community to paint walls of varied institutions. I wish to take this beautiful artform and living tradition and culture of the Deevaru community to the outside world,' says Geetha.
India Today
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
What makes Chittara murals a hidden gem
The Madhubani paintings of Bihar's Maithili-speaking Mithila region were unknown to the larger world until a Britisher gave it a platform in the late 1970s by doing a book on it. Then the culturatti of Delhi and the sarkari patronage systems and the badshahs of Bollywood took over, and every drawing room, airline interior or powder-rooms in big hotels boasted of it. This was some 40 years happened next, in the 1980s—Warli wall art, a lesser-known tribal art confined to a part of Maharashtra until the same design jet set of Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Baroda and Delhi put it on a pedestal. Now, one hopes it will be the turn of Karnataka's Chittara, a higher-grade version in both form and design; ritually and socially indigenous art at its Western Ghats are rich in wildlife, waterfalls, hills and forests, in which dwell the most sophisticated artists and graphic designers. Using brushes made of the simplest of straw or natural fibre (pundi naaru) and colours extracted from seeds, fruits and other parts of plants, ordinary farm hands, for whom art is life is art, make patterns so geometrically intricate that perhaps even AI can't replicate them. Without modern technology, even a proper brush, they paint the most complex of designs and motifs that city slickers dub as art, but for them it's a way of life in an agrarian is habitual to call them variously: Jogi, Hasalaru or Deevaru, Budubudake, Maley or plain shikari. Among them, the Deevaru and their art Chittara is waiting to go national. Chittara is an embodiment of the Deevaru community's intrinsic socio-cultural framework. As the only indigenous mural folk art of Karnataka, Chittara deserves to be recognised as Karnataka's pride and India's heritage, say Geetha Bhat and Smitha Tumuluru in their 200-plus-page lavish tome titled Deevara The beauty of folk art lies in the ability of artists to interpret and reinterpret it. This is also key to its preservation and evolution, aver the is the catalyst, with her Centre for Revival of Indigenous Arts (CFRIA) in her hometown Bengaluru. She was mad and possessed about Chittara long before the word entered the lexicon of Unesco or the jargon of the Delhi sarkari culturatti. Her interface with the art form started 25 years ago and she has done yeoman service ever since in helping reach it as far as Japan and France, besides parts of India that still don't know where the Western ghats are!Geetha has done something practical for a dying art form of a region of Karnataka, and of India. She is doing for Chittara what Vallathol did for Kerala's theatre arts in the 1940s, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay did for the crafts in the 1950s, Pupul Jayakar did for weavers in the 1970s, Mohan Khokar did for dance in the 1980s, ITC and India Today did for music in the 1990s, and Sachchidanand Joshi of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), created by Kapila Vatsyayan, did for multi-disciplinary institutionalised right hand in this madness is Smitha, whose photography is a form of art. Here is a documenter with depth and substance. Namrata Cavale has given the overall design and branding tinge. Together the trio—call them the teen devian—has documented this lesser-known art form, the people and their culture in Deevara Chittara, published by Prism, whose Pranesh Sirivara is another low-key, high-quality lived and worked in all the Indian metros over the past 40 years, and some internationally too, I have found no other metro in India with such highly accomplished people as Bangalore, with the least attitude or arrogance. They don't need to show off or pretend, as they are secure in themselves. These are solid do-gooders like Geetha and Smitha whose role models were Vimala Rangachar, an educationist and art conservationist who passed away on February 25, or Chiranjiv Singh, the former Ambassador of India to Unesco in authors had got the most Jnanpith awards among all languages until 2005, when Hindi surpassed it. Need more be said of the literary or cultural quotient of this state? Among all Indian cities, Bengaluru has the most bookshops. It has been the science capital of India much before the IT and biotech boom, but it is also home to a rich cultural palette. All forms of classical, folk and modern dance exist here, not just one or two, as in the other metros. Theatre, both regional and national, films and architecture, the latest and maximum museums and libraries, cultural spaces and aquariums and theme parks. No wonder the traffic is a mess! The administration has not kept pace with the tremendous growth in the past decade alone. Still, it is a metro in a hill station!advertisementChittara is a symbol of the Malenadu region's rich culture and when a builder of the city—Aslam Zackria Sait, chairman of Rocklines—supports indigenous art, then it shows the high social and cultural index of the city. Add Redington Foundation and the Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation (KSTDC).The government of Karnataka should make Deevara Chittara available to every library in the country and in every embassy abroad in order to take cultural pride in a process unique to it. That the state's top folklorist, Padma Bhushan and Jnanpith awardee Chandrashekhar Kambara, was at hand to do the honours of unveiling the book on a cool Saturday morning (in May which other metro can boast of 3o degrees at noon?) in one of the oldest cultural halls of Bengaluru—the Indian Institute of World Cultures—showed the strength and pull of this team supported by many more artivists, artists and artocrats. Textile-lover Pavithra Muddaya opened the exhibition, which was first-rate in detailing, mounting and display. One has rarely seen a better exhibition aesthetically done with academic content in Bengaluru in the past the main artist, Shirvala Gowramma, had taken the first flight of in her life to reach the function showed the organisers' large heartedness and respect for an indigenous artist. A state award and a national award ought to follow for Geetha, if the government is at all serious about tribal cultures. Joining her were Gademane Padmavathy, Hecche Vishwanatha G. and Radha Sullur. All those senseless seminars and symposiums in Delhi and Mumbai are of no use if they don't help the real artists on ground.A dynamic three-term Prime Minister Narendra Modi has everything going for the country—all his government now needs is a cultural policy to help those who truly brand India. Not Bollywood or cricket but real, indigenous artists. That's when we would have truly arrived on the world writer is India's ace cultural historian, critic, arts policy expert and editor, attenDanceSubscribe to India Today Magazine- End
