Beyond Pattachitra: Lesser-Known Visual Art Forms of Odisha

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By Vanirathi Nathani

6 min read

  • Art
  • Culture
  • India
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    Table of Contents

    Introduction

    Odisha’s artistic identity is often distilled into a single word: Pattachitra. While iconic and globally celebrated, this is only one thread in a much wider and vibrant tapestry of visual expression that spans centuries, communities, environments, and belief systems. Beyond Pattachitra lies a constellation of visual art forms that document tribal cosmologies, ritual aesthetics, seasonal practices, and deeply embedded cultural logics. These art forms — while less documented in mainstream discourse — have animated Odisha’s walls, floors, fabrics, palms, and outdoor spaces across generations.

    What follows is a detailed exploration of six such art forms whose visual languages reflect a unique synthesis of folk imagination, devotion, material ingenuity, and cultural memory.

    Talapatra Chitra: The Graphic Script of Myth and Memory

    Journey of Lord Jagannath in Talapatra by Purusottam Swain

    Long before paper became available on the Indian subcontinent, sages, scribes, and artists in Odisha turned to palm leaves as their primary medium for writing, recording sacred stories, and illustrating cosmological knowledge. This gave rise to Talapatra Chitra — an art form in which dried palm leaves were prepared and then incised with a stylus to form narratives, figures, symbols, and linear compositions that could be read both visually and textually.

    What makes Talapatra Chitra distinct is not merely the use of palm leaves but the fusion of engraving and painting — where narrative depictions from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Tigress lore are etched in relief and filled with organic pigments. These engravings acted as both visual storytelling devices and repositories of oral culture, where knowledge was stored, memorised, and transmitted over generations.

    This unique graphic tradition survived centuries of cultural change. While palm-leaf manuscripts gave way to paper in many parts of India, Odisha retained a living lineage of Talapatra artists whose engraved leaves are now valued as aesthetic objects and cultural archives. Unlike surface painting on cloth, Talapatra’s intimate scale and linear precision speak to a culture of reading and looking that predates the modern art object.

    Saura Painting: Tribal Visions in Mud and Earth

    Saura Painting Awakening Tribal Village Life by Apindra Swain

    In the southern hills of Odisha, among the Saura (Sora) people, lies a visual tradition that defies the canonical divisions of fine and folk art. Saura painting — also called Idital — is rooted in tribal cosmology and ritual life. Unlike salon art created for display or collectors, Saura paintings emerged from sacred occasions: rites of healing, season celebrations, clan rituals, and community invocations.

    These paintings are created on mud walls prepared with red ochre and earth pigments, and composed in rhythmic lines that map human figures, trees, animals, and celestial forms. The stylistic vocabulary of Saura shows resonance with the tribal ways of structuring lived experience: energetic repetition, symbolic minimalism, and an intuitive sense of time and space. Visual motifs in Saura works are not merely decorative — they are cosmograms, communicating ancestral presence, protection, and balance between the human and non-human world.

    Today, while some Saura artists translate this tradition onto paper and canvas for greater visibility, the original murals in village settings remain intimately woven into community life and ritual cycles, resisting commodification even as they gain scholarly interest.

    Pipili Appliqué: Cloth as Visual Landscape

    Jungle in Applique by Purna Chandra Ghosh

    When paintings and murals speak visually, Pipili appliqué speaks textually through stitches, fabric cutouts, and interlocking colours. Originating from the town of Pipili, this cloth art — locally known as Chandua — is woven into the fabric of Odisha’s religious and communal identity. Originally developed to adorn the chariots of Lord Jagannath during the annual Rath Yatra, Pipili appliqué work transforms flat fabric into vibrant visual maps of myth and devotion, combining colour, shape, and sequence.

    The technique involves carefully cutting coloured fabric pieces and stitching them onto a base cloth to form motifs that range from stylised animals and flowers to abstract geometries and celestial symbols. The bold primary colours — red, yellow, green — are not merely aesthetic choices; they are part of a visual grammar that anchors the art in ceremonial visibility. The sheer scale of some appliqué panels — used as temple canopies, umbrella covers, or festival parasols — reinforces its role as public visual theatre.

    While contemporary adaptations now include home décor and fashion items, the visual language of this art form retains its ritual origins, combining functionality with symbolic resonance.

    Jhoti-Chita: Ephemeral Patterns in Mud and Rice

    jhoti chita

    In the rural landscapes of Odisha, women’s work in the household courtyard often takes on artistic form long before it becomes recognized as art in galleries. Jhoti-Chita — a traditional white floor and wall painting made with rice paste or pithau — is one such example.

    Unlike permanent or portable art objects, Jhoti-Chita is ephemeral by design. Drawn at thresholds, in front of hearths, and on mud walls during festivals and life-cycle ceremonies, these white murals serve multiple functions: they are auspicious markers, ritual blessings, and communal announcements of celebration. Motifs range from spirals and dots to conch shells, flowers, and geometric grids — each pattern embedded with folkloric meaning and social etiquette.

    Why this art form matters is precisely because it doesn’t aim to be preserved. Its transience is a reflection of lived culture — where creation and dissolution are part of visual meaning. Jhoti-Chita shows Odisha’s visual arts not as static objects but as cycles of creation, performance, and renewal embedded in daily life.

    Rock & Temple Paintings: Mural Legacies in Stone

    BRAHMESWARA TEMPLE, BHUBANESWAR, ODISHA

    While Odisha’s temples are renowned for sculpture and architecture, they also house lesser-studied wall paintings and murals that extend the visual traditions of the region. From the cave complexes at Udayagiri–Khandagiri to temple interiors in Bhubaneswar and Ratnagiri, these painted surfaces represent a confluence of ritual design, protective iconography, and devotional imagery.

    These mural traditions are often overshadowed by stone reliefs, but they warrant separate attention for their colour schemes, compositional strategies, and integration with architectural space. They reveal a continuity of visual practices that link tribal and folk instincts with elite temple visuality.

    Examining these murals sheds light on how visual art in Odisha was not just portable or decorative — it was also embedded in public sacred spaces, animating temple narratives and community memory.

    Sand Art & Public Ephemeral Expression

    Finally, Odisha’s contribution to contemporary visual expression is visible in forms that adapt traditional sensibilities into public spaces — most famously through sand art on beaches and urban installations that use transitory materials. While not ancient in lineage like the other forms discussed here, sand art represents a modern continuation of Odisha’s visual spirit — rooted in natural materials, public engagement, and storytelling through patterns.

    This ephemeral visual practice resonates with rural traditions such as Jhoti-Chita: both are site-specific, community-oriented, and deeply kinetic in their work with material and form.

    Conclusion: Visual Art as Living Heritage

    What unites these six visual art forms is not merely geography but a shared ethos of visual thinking grounded in lived experience. From the engraved palms of ancient scribes to the monumental stitched cloths of Pipili, from murals on temple stone to white murals on mud floors, Odisha’s visual arts are not relics awaiting rediscovery — they are living, breathing practices.

    They remind us that visual art need not be confined to museums. In Odisha, art is embedded in ritual cycles, domestic activities, communal celebrations, and everyday encounters with colour, shape, and story.

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