While originally performative in nature, Gangavane has shifted Chitrakathi’s focus towards handiwork. Pic/Nishad Alam

In 2006, Gangavane started the Thakar Adivasi Kala Angan (Museum and Art Gallery) as a way of popularising the art, the museum over the years attracting tourists and fine art students from cities like Mumbai and Pune who travelled to Sindhudurg to work on projects on the art form. He says over the years, he has received letters from the government asking for the Chitrakathi paintings and puppets that has been in his family for close to 400 years, but has refused to give them up. The Thakars, says Gangavane’s son Chetan, have traditionally practised 11 different performative arts of which Kalsutri Bahulya (string marionette), the Dayati (shadow puppetry), Chitrakathi and Pangul Bael, a ritual form of theatre around the figure of the sacred bull of Lord Shiva, are a few. “Although, traditionally, all of these fall under the performance arts, my father realised that Chitrakathi can also be promoted as a handicraft where we can make paintings and sell them. He used the performance art to promote craftwork, thereby shifting the art’s emphasis from performance to handiwork, and reintroducing it as such to people,” says Chetan, who along with his brother Eknath has taken the baton from their father. In recent years, they have also learnt to customise the tales they depict, creating, for instance, paintings on social distancing and COVID-19 warriors during the pandemic. Moreover, he says that they started promoting the art as ‘Pinguli Chitrakathi’ after the village, as they travelled all over the country to conduct exhibitions, workshops and seminars. “It was a tribute to the artisans who practice this art form, so that along with the art, the name of the village too reached people.”

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In the last two years of the pandemic, with artisans out of work, the brothers also started online Chitrakathi workshops with their father, teaching people about the craft and discussing its history and association with the community, along with virtual tours of the museum and string and shadow puppetry shows, conducting them for organisations around the country. 

Gangavane, who is elated after the reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan, now hopes to expand the activities of the museum which he started 15 years ago in a small cowshed. But he also feels relieved. “I have passed on this art to my sons, and even my grandson has now taken it up. Had I not done anything, Chitrakathi would have simply died out.”