At The South Asia Collection, we are celebrating the New Year with our new acquisitions! Our latest acquisition is this kaawad, a portable painted wooden shrine which is used to narrate mythological or religious stories. Measuring 2 feet high and 7 feet long when completely opened, it is our biggest example among five other kaawad in the collection. It has been crafted by Sathyanarayan Suthar and his wife, Kausalya Suthar who are craftspeople from Bassi in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, India. Kaawad are traditionally made by the suthar community mainly in and around Bassi village.
Crafting the Kaawad
The word kaawad is derived from kiwad which means doors and is a direct reference to its form, which has a box structure and panels attached to it. Each panel that opens is called a paat which is painted separately and then assembled. A kaawad is made from locally available wood called aadu and semal (bombax tree), on which the various illustrations are painted. In the past, the paint was made by mixing ground stone, brought from parts of Bhilwara in Rajasthan, and the sap or edible gum of gond ka ped (Acacia plant). More recently, acrylic paints are used. Collectively, the paintings represent mythological or religious stories, which could either be one story or multiple short stories.
Kaawad katha
Once a kaawad is made, it is used by a community called kawadiya bhat who travel to villages to narrate the kaawad katha (stories) to the people or the patrons who support the craft practice. Sathyanarayan Suthar tells us that a kaawad is opened with utmost devotion with prayers offered to the deities and the patrons. The text on the two front panels of this kaawad say, if the person opening the kaawad does so by making offerings, seven generations of their family will be blessed. The narration of the story proceeds as the wooden panels are opened one by one. When all the panels are open, they reveal carvings of deities in a small niche in the box. The deities shown in this kaawad are Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana. A typical feature of the kaawad is the painted sun god on the top rail. The base of the kaawad accommodates a daan peti (donation box) used to store the donations given by the audiences.
Sathyanarayan Suthar calls this kaawad a ‘Marwari kaawad’ as the representations are typical of the traditional examples that were used in the Marwar region in Rajasthan. They are a combination of mythological representations and everyday scenes from the region.
Knowledge transfer
The knowledge of making these shrines have been passed on in Sathyanarayan Suthar’s family for the past eight generations. Sathyanarayan Suthar says that during a time when forms of communication were limited to oral stories, kaawad played a pivotal role in spreading awareness of cultural stories, educating and entertaining people. He also makes non-ritualistic kaawad, which have gained significance as souvenir objects and are often seen in craft bazaars and melas in India. These have narratives of everyday life or educational writing such as alphabets on them.
