Urvita on mission to revive fading art of Jharkhand

Mail News Service

Jamshedpur, Feb 2: Jharkhand is a land of the children of the soil who love and worship nature and define the beauty of what they worship through their songs, dances and art and crafts. These features have held the people on a lofty pedestal but the pursuit to quench hunger pangs have seen an erosion of the artists famed for their craftsmanship in traditional paintings and statuettes. With no support from government sources or from other socio-cultural organizations, hunger has overtaken their motivation to create and almost all of these families, a large segment of who are concentrated in Ghatshila Block’s Amadubi village have opted to to join the migrant workers’ force to look for other modes of sustenance.

Socio cultural organization, Urvita has taken up the cudgels for these languishing artists and their families who were famed for making stone idols with paints extracted from natural resources like flowers, roots, leaves and clay. These artists are traditional and generations were nurtured through these art forms and their sales as visitors never missed their art creations and invariably carried away many statuettes to add to their showcases of pride. But that was a fairytale ‘once upon a time.’ At present only a few remain to carry tradition forward while others have moved out to carve a living through other laborious avenues. Creativity is a past tense where their traditional art form is concerned.

Urvita is seriously bent on not only recreating the zeal and zest among these natural artists known for their magnificent and distinctly different traditional creative brilliance. The organization’s secretary, Nina Sharma said, “We are making a two-way approach to revive this unique art form and artists. We will urge the government to provide these traditional artists stimulants in the form of incentives and on the other hand create markets for their works of art so that the traditional artists regain their enthusiasm and dedicate themselves to their unique creations as their forbearers before them had done. The marketing outlets will help them to earn respectable living as they had done earlier. We urge individuals and organizations to join in this move of discovery and rehabilitation of this fading tribe of sculptors.”