The huts in the village are small and neat but non descript. Mud walls. Some roofs are thatched, some corrugated. Roosters crow. A line of ducks waddle down the road, the dust red like bricks. This village Pearson Pally in Bengal seems an unlikely locale for an art biennale.
This is Sandip Roy in Bolpur and this is artist Mithu Sen is telling us about her project I am Ol Chiki
MS1: I can only saying dong ol chiki I am ol chiki
Ol Chiki is the name of a script. The mud walls of some of the houses are painted black like a blackboard. And the letters and numbers of Ol Chiki are drawn in white on them. It’s as if the whole village is a school and the houses are the blackboards says Sen.
MS2: Gota graamta school barir moton blackboard ba school barir building…
I am Ol Chiki is an art installation that’s part of the first ever Bengal Biennale which open in Bolpur, Santiniketan, a few hours outside Kolkata. Festival curator Siddharth Sivakumar says the first ever biennale has a clear focus
SS1: the focus was more to bring people to Bengal and to also expose our art to the visitors.
And while Bengal has its own schools of art, I am ol chiki is alphabet not art. It would be like covering a house in San Francisco with A B C D. Cool perhaps but is it groundbreaking art?
Well Ol Chiki is different.
The Santals are one of the oldest indigenous tribes of India. They have been here thousands of years. Their language is spoken by 7 to 8 million people. But when it came to writing it was written in Bengali or Roman or other scripts. Sen says the dominance of languages like English was huge.
MS3:the hierarchy of language, the lingual politics and how we are dominant by the, you know, the colonizers language, like English,
But not all the sounds of the Santal language could be captured by English or Bengali letters. So a Santhli scholar named Raghunath Murmu came up with the Ol Chiki script in 1925. A 100 year old script for a language that’s thousands of years old. But even now very few Santals can read the script.
By painting it on the houses, Sen says she is hoping to help them reclaim their own script from cultural loss
MS4: it is a cultural loss. If they don't revive, it's a reclaiming because it's already there. So therefore they need a reclamation.
Sen is not a Santhal but she worked with some young women from the village. Her co-artist Sanyasi Lohar born in a village nearby, says they kept it very indigenous. He says they mixed clay with the local materials wood, the stalks and husk of paddy and sand to get the perfect smooth finish on the wall
SL1: kaathey guri diyechi, bali misrito, matita best koyekkta layer tarpor smoothness aunty perechi
The correct black was trickier says Sen. She says Laskar called her in a panic. The black was looking too ashen. But I had committed to only using organic materials says Sen.
MS5: ami stongly bolechi we múst use only organic. Kono chemical use na hoy.
Well can we cheat a bit pleaded Laskar. If I add some tyre parts we can get a more blacker black, Well perhaps we can cheat a bit laughs Sen. Lets just call it artistic licence.
MS6: tu khaani cheat kora jaay maajhe maajhe. Artistic licences er moton.
The best thing about this art project says Sen is that its audience isnt just city people like us visiting art biennales. The people of the village are excited trying to read their own language on their own walls.
MS7: Already villagers coming and trying to read, asking adults, can u read it for me (cock crows), taking help of others,
Nobody wanted her to draw pretty patterns like flowers and vines. Instead now people tell her will you do our houses too?
MS8: Speaker3: Now, after doing these things like other houses coming, they say like, can you make my. Day? So it was wonderful,
That she says was her biggest reward.
An even bigger reward might be to come back and find that next time the houses are painted not just with the letters but with entire lines of poetry.
But one step at a time. As two young women from the village Mungli and Lakshmi read letter by letter. The writing as they say is on the wall.
MUNGLI: Alphabet reading
This is Sandip Roy in Bolpur for KALW