Picture scrolls (pats) were used by rural itinerant storytellers (patuas or scroll painters) in Bengal who entertained their village customers by singing devotional tales of deities and saints while unrolling scrolls depicting their biographical events and legends. The principal subjects of Bengali scrolls are the mythological deeds of Hindu deities, such as Krishna (see M.71.1.32) and Rama (see M.2006.180.1). Hagiographies of revered Muslim and Hindu saints are also venerated in Bengali scrolls. (For example, see The ‘Gazi’ Scroll honoring Gazi Pir and Manik Pir, attributed to the Murshidabad District, c. 1800, now in the British Museum, London, 1955,1008,0.95).
This scroll illustrates episodes from the life of the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1534), who was born in Nabadwip (formerly Nadia), West Bengal. Regarded as a combined avatar of Radha and Krishna, his influential mode of worshiping Krishna featured ecstatic song, chanting, and dance as a form of Bhakti yoga (loving devotion to a personal deity). Here, episodes of Chaitanya’s life are portrayed in six registers (from top to bottom): his youthful excelling in Sanskrit grammar and rhetoric, a six-armed Krishna under worship, the death of his wife Lakshmi Devi from snakebite (shown supine beneath a bust of the goddess Manasa), his mother’s mourning, his initiation by the ascetic monk Ishvara Puri at Gaya, and the jubilation of his fellow pandits in Nadia at the public demonstration of his spiritual mastery.