By Chandrashekhar Tewari
In Kumaon, Shri Krishna Janmashtami has never been merely a religious festival celebrating the birth of Lord Krishna. It has also been an occasion that brought together folk life, religious faith, and the distinctive tradition of mountain painting. During the month of Bhadrapada, on the occasions of Biruda Panchami, Amuktabharana Saptami, and Shri Krishna Janmashtami, the practice of making religious paintings along with performing rituals was prevalent in many parts of Kumaon. In particular, on the lime-washed walls of the chakh (sitting room) and prayer rooms of houses in areas such as Dug, Nakuri, Gangoli, Sor, Kali Kumaon, and villages along the Uttarakhand–Nepal border, various scenes associated with the birth of Krishna and his childhood exploits were painted using locally available and other natural colours.
This tradition of wall painting was not merely a form of household decoration. It was a living medium through which local memories, religious beliefs, and narrative traditions were passed on to the next generation. Such paintings could still be seen in many villages until the 1970s and 1980s. In the ‘Chakh’ of my maternal uncle’s village house at Kholigaon, Bageshwar district, beautiful wall paintings associated with Satun-Aanthu and Shri Krishna Janmashtami used to remain on the walls. The village women and girls created these paintings with their own hands. Green, red, pink, and yellow colours were used to depict the birth of Krishna, Vasudeva carrying Krishna across the Yamuna, the subduing of Kaliya Nag, Krishna’s playful episodes with the Gopis, Radha-Krishna, Nanda and Yashoda, and various childhood images of Krishna. Gods and Goddesses such as Ganesha, Shiva-Parvati, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Rama-Sita, and Hanuman were also given a place in these paintings.
These paintings were also closely associated with the folk tradition of storytelling. On the occasions of Satun-Aanthu and Janmashtami, village women and children would gather and listen to stories of Gaura-Maheshwar and Krishna in the local dialect. While listening to the stories, the audience would respond from time to time with sounds such as ‘hun’, ‘haan’, ‘ho’, and ‘hoy’, known as ‘hungara’. These were not merely sounds of agreement; they served as a lively means of interaction between the storyteller and the listeners. Depending on the episode being narrated, the rhythm and intensity of the hungara would also change. Thus, paintings, storytelling, and collective participation together created a distinctive folk-cultural atmosphere.
This tradition of Kumaon needs to be understood in the wider context of the region’s folk-painting traditions. Aipan, Jeeva-Matrika Patta, Navadurga Patta, Shiva ki Chauki, Lakshmi ki Chauki, Saraswati ki Chauki, Dussehra Dwarpatra, and Rangwali Pichhora are different forms of this ritual painting culture. In all of them, lines, colours, and symbols are not merely decorative elements; they are associated with religious meanings. The inclusion of local symbols such as Khoriya-Chauki, Jyonti, Jeeva-Matrika, Naula, Biruda, Kakudi-Makudi flowers, animals, and birds in Janmashtami pattas makes it clear that the Krishna narrative was not viewed separately from the local religious world of Kumaon.
The most distinctive feature of Janmashtami patta paintings is their narrative character. On a single patta or wall, different episodes from the life of Krishna were presented sequentially in separate panels and bands. In this way, the entire wall became a kind of visual book. For people who possessed an oral knowledge of the Krishna story, these paintings provided a means of seeing and understanding the narrative. From this perspective, colours, lines, and symbols became effective means of preserving the collective memory of the folk community.
Later, as society and lifestyles changed, the practice of painting directly on walls was gradually accompanied by the growing use of Janmashtami paintings prepared on paper. This made such religious images more easily available from house to house and also relieved people of the labour of painting the walls every year. However, the traditional wall-painting heritage itself began moving towards extinction.
Printed pattas produced by printing presses increasingly incorporated scenes of Krishna’s birth and his divine exploits, along with numerous gods and goddesses, the Dashavatara, local religious symbols, and scenes associated with festivals, all within a single composition.
Descriptions by NR Upreti, a scholar of folk culture, from the 1960s provide information about one such traditional patta. It depicts various episodes from Krishna’s life along with Shiva, Ganesha, Parvati, Mahalakshmi, Vishnu, Brahma, the Saptarishis, the Dashavatara, Rama-Sita, Hanuman, Rukmini, Radhika, a Naga mardan, Kaliya Nag, Nanda-Yashoda, and Vasudeva.
A digitally enhanced version, created using AI technology, of the original black-and-white image of the patta obtained through the reference to NR Upreti shows a remarkable combination of the birth of Krishna, Devaki and Yashoda, Nanda, the Chhathi ritual, Jyonti and Jeeva-Matrikas, Vasudeva carrying Krishna across the Yamuna, the subduing of Kaliya Nag, Radhika, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Brahma, and the Saptarishis, together with various local religious symbols. This clearly shows that in the folk-painting tradition of Kumaon, different religious traditions were naturally integrated with one another.
Another important example is a Janmashtami patta believed to have been printed at a printing press approximately 80 years ago. The original copy is preserved in the Jugal Kishore Petshali Museum of the Doon Library and Research Centre. The words “Chitrashala Press, Pune No. – 2” are printed at the bottom. The patta appears to have the form of a temple-like structure with seven ascending tiers. It mentions Nag Panchami, Durvashtami, and Amuktabharana Saptami. From the bottom upwards, it depicts the birth of Krishna, Vasudeva carrying Krishna across the Yamuna, Sheshanaga, the subduing of Kaliya Nag, the episode of the disrobing of the Gopis, the Dashavatara, Govardhan Puja, Kansa, the slaying of Putana, Yashoda, child Krishna, the cowherd boys, Dwarka, and Vaikuntha. At the top are Siddhidata Ganesha, Radha-Krishna, Mahadev-Parvati, and Lakshmi-Narayan.
This patta, besides being a religious image, is also a document of the market culture of its time. At the bottom is an advertisement for the shop of Lala Chiranjilal Om Prakash Sah in Almora’s Lala Bazaar. It states that the shop sold crowns and articles for weddings, sacred-thread ceremonies, and adornment, as well as flour, rice, pulses, spices, Pahadi-ghee, oil, honey, dry fruits, and other goods. This shows that religious picture pattas served as an effective medium connecting religion, household requirements, and commercial publicity.
The historical role of Chitrashala Press, Pune, is also noteworthy in this context. Printing presses of this kind, established during the late nineteenth century, played an important role in taking images of deities, religious material, and forms of fine art in print to a wider section of society. Lithographic printing, thick black outlines, bright pink and orange colours, and captions written in the popular form of Devanagari are distinctive features of this patta.
Today, this tradition has almost disappeared. The major reasons include changes in the architectural style of traditional hill houses, the replacement of the chakh and traditional sitting spaces by modern rooms, the decline of lime-washing walls with kamet, the breakdown of joint families, the interruption of the transmission of knowledge of folk arts from one generation to another, and the growing influence of colourful posters, calendars, and digital prints in the market.
There is now an urgent need to conduct a systematic survey of the surviving Janmashtami pattas and wall paintings. Their high-resolution digitisation, documentation of the oral memories of artists and elderly people, and detailed study of their colours, symbols, compositions, and printing techniques should be undertaken. It is also important to search for surviving examples of this tradition in old printing presses, bookshops, private collections, libraries, and museums in Almora and Nainital.
To regard Kumaon’s Janmashtami pattas merely as old religious pictures would be to limit their significance. They are rare visual documents that bring together folk memory, religious beliefs, domestic architecture, traditional knowledge of colours, storytelling, the history of printing, and market culture. The preservation of these paintings—once brought to life in the colours of Gaura-Maheshwar and Krishna stories on the bright walls of village chakhs during Satun-Aanthu and Janmashtami—is, in fact, an effort to preserve that cultural memory of Kumaon in which religion, folk art, and rural life once existed as an integral part of a single living landscape.
(Chandrashekhar Tewari is a Programme Officer at the Doon Library and Research Centre, DLRC, Dehradun.)
