Under the category of learning new things everyday: another bit of informantion from today’s (Sunday’s) Daily Yomiuri concerning patuas, or West Bengali painter-muralists. These people sing rhyming couplets as they exhibit paintings done by their families of current events and traditional stories, using paper or cloth and special vegetable dyes. The poets are illiterate in the strict sense of the word, but create oral literature just the same. This reminds me of the Japanese kamishibai–a form of recitation/exhibition usually reserved for teaching children about washing their hands, brushing their teeth and keeping away from strangers these days, but also used for the transmission old stories. In addition, experts speculate that the more cartoon-like Monte Alban, Pre-Columbian books were set up as backgrounds before which shamans sang and danced the stories told in the text.

Bahar Chitrakar, a 52 year old patua includes the story of 911 in his stock of performance materials.