I will be out of town from July 11th to 20th. The gallery will not be open but the website will be working away as usual. Orders will be shipped after July 20th. I will be checking email mesages and should be able to repy to inquiries.
Indigo Arts has moved upstairs to a space on the fourth floor of the Crane Building. I am still arranging things up here but I am open on a "by appointment or by chance" basis. I am usually in the building from Wednesday through Saturday from 12 to 6, but it is definitely best to phone or email first. Meanwhile, the Indigo Arts online gallery is operating as usual.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions in the mean time.
Tony
The jadupatua scrolls are a very old tradition among the aboriginal Santhal people of Bihar and West Bengal. The Santhal people, one account tells us, speak their own pre-Dravidian language of Santali, worship their own Santal bongas or spirits, regulate their village life in a democratic manner and celebrate their own santal festivals with dancing and feasting. The scrolls are painted by itinerant minstrel/healers known as jadupatuas, or 'magic painters'. They earn their living by wandering from village to village showing scrolls and chanting the traditional tribal stories of creation, death and life in the underworld. The scrolls consist of twenty or more indivdual story panels arranged vertically, which are unrolled and rerolled as the story is sung. Older scrolls were painted on fabric. Those shown here, dating from the last sixty years, are painted in natural paints on paper - generally a series of individual sheets sewn together.
