The art on Dhaka’s rickshaws has enjoyed a stint of attention both in popular culture and academia. This ‘non-motorised vehicle’ and cultural elements associated with it still hold a lot of interest among practitioners and scholars of art history, urban planning, and transport. Despite policy prescriptions to bring down the number of rickshaws, there are, according to some generous estimates, eight million rickshaws in the capital. And despite the dismissiveness of the guardians of the city—the city corporation, ministries of transport and culture, the university, and the media—along with gentrification and cultural appropriation, rickshaw art is yet to die. There is commodity fetishism around the vernacular art form, and out-of-context handicrafts featuring rickshaw painting are sold at prices unfair to the struggling community of rickshaw-makers. This is not only about the political economy of rickshaw art in Dhaka; it is essential to consider how rickshaw art represents the ethos of Bangladesh’s cultural identity.
The discourse on rickshaw art is almost always focused on the painted back panel of the vehicle. Adherence to certain ideas of authorship and narrative, along with a postcolonial impulse in understanding the psyche of the native mind—expected to be revealed through a fictional work—might have shaped the discourse in this way. However, the hand-painted panel is only a quarter of the surface of a rickshaw. In an ideal condition, the entire vehicle is heavily decorated, with the hood being the most visible part.
It is interesting to analyze a certain decorative scheme of rickshaw hoods prevalent in Dhaka. This scheme, known to the rickshaw-making community as Lata Hood, epitomizes some basic underlying principles of Islamic decorative arts. Interviews conducted to map an oral history include those of Md. Sahabuddin aka Tekka Mistree, Hood Mistree (Bangshal, August 2018); Yousuf Nabi, Artman (Lakshmi Bazar, January 2019); Alauddin, Sewing Machine Operator (Narinda, January 2019); and R.K. Das and Prasanta Das, Artman (Rhisipara, January 2019), Shamsu Mahajan aka Ekota Mistree, Hood Mistree (Narinda, February 2019).
Hood
Hoods of Dhaka rickshaws are rounded on the top, a shape that differentiates them from the paddled rickshaws of most other regions. They are bamboo-structured vaults wrapped with rexine and have a metal visor (locally called a “cap” by rickshaw artisans) attached to the upper front. In architectural terms, one may evaluate whether the hood, when fully expanded, bears similarities to iwans typical of Islamic buildings; at a glance, it might.
The Hood Mistree
The word mistree comes from Portuguese, a language Bengal was exposed to as early as the 15th century. It means master-craftsman. In the context of rickshaw building, the hood mistree leads the assembly of the rickshaw, instructs the painter, and most noticeably, decorates the hood himself. In most cases, he owns the workshop and employs or hires everyone necessary.
The Artman
The hood mistree has a lead painter in the team: the artman. This artman is usually, but not always, male. S/he is the most celebrated of all rickshaw artisans. No artman has ever had formal education in fine arts. The craft is transferred through guru-shishya parampara—from master to disciple. Artmans paint the back plate, seat cover, and backrest. For other parts requiring brushwork, the artman may do it personally or assign assistants to complete the task.
Typically, the “artist” in rickshaw decorative art is the artman, not the hood mistree, likely due to the higher recognition of painting as an art form, whereas appliqué work is seen as mere decoration. There can be seven categories of rickshaw hood decoration in Dhaka.
Boro Chand appliqué scheme—meaning, twelve schemes.
Lata Hood / Lata-pata appliqué scheme—meaning, vine hood or vegetal hood.
Teer Paan appliqué scheme—meaning, literally, arrow-betle leaf, resembling a “heart and arrow”, but the heart is inverted vertically, evoking an image of betel leaf or paan as it is called in Bengali.
Other schemes of appliequé work are Painted Hoods, Bare and Branded.
Each of these has its genealogy and technicality. Variation in hood designing has been overlooked so far and deserves a comprehensive study. However, in short, Baro Chand and Lata Hood are essentially schemes of Dhaka, whereas Teer Paan has come from outside of the district. Rickshaws are prevalent across Bangladesh, and there are several other schools of decorating the vehicle. I can assume other schemes of appliqué too are not novelties of Dhaka.
There is no documentation of the scheme (or any other schemes). As with most folk-art traditions, artisans are little concerned about preserving meaning (as per the modern understanding of the term, fulfilling some epistemological queries around etymology/origin, semiotics, and syntax of a material culture specimen) of their works and are forgetful in remembering details.
Lata design scheme is also known as lata-pata by artisans outside the circle of Lata Hood makers. While lata means creeper, the visual description does not fit the category. Latapata literally means twigs and tendrils, which too does not reflect the design. The vegetal form is growing out of a pot, which for most local respondents is a tub. However, some are unsure whether it is a tub or a flower vase. There is no flower in the design, but two medallions, not organically part of the stem. The pot has a Bangladeshi riverboat with an open sail. Though appliquéd, the design evokes the imagery of relief work on a terracotta vase. “It has been there from the beginning,” said Alauddin, a senior appliqué artisan.
All the elements now found in Lata Hood could be seen in the earliest known documentations of it. There has been little evolution of the scheme. The scheme emerged after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. Rickshaw painters seemed to know little about hood decoration, as it was never their task. R.K. Das, a legendary rickshaw painter now in his seventies, said, “The design was less ornamented before, the alpana (decorative ornaments like ritualized floor painting) was a later improvisation.” What he meant by alpana was flourishing; the design has little similarity with alpana, which is characterized by unmodulated brush strokes and a hieroglyphic lexicon.
Regarding the origin of the motif, respondents seem to be in the dark, except for Shamshu Mahajan, the most famous of the Lata Hood makers. He sounded definite about the origin being an “artwork” (“It was probably drawn somewhere here,” he said, then pointed to a wall plastered flat with cement) on Bhakt Binat’s mosque, popularly known as Binat Bibi’s mosque, the earliest surviving mosque in Bangladesh. The pre-Mughal mosque, built in 1457, is just across the narrow lane from his workshop. It was first renovated in the 1960s, and it cannot be known whether the outer walls were completely revamped at that time. It can be assumed that the “artwork” was likely a terracotta panel, a common feature in pre-Mughal mosques in Bengal. One example of an expressive vine coming out of a vase can be seen in Rajbibi’s mosque at Chapai Nawabganj, built in 1480.
When asked about the name of the plant, no definitive answer could be traced. However, different parts of it have distinct names. One pair of leaves is called Kumirillata (literally, crocodile-vine) because they are shaped like a crocodile. Another pair of leaves is called Kauwa (meaning crow). This zoomorphism may be a personal interpretation, but it indicates the aesthetic system adopted by the Bengal Muslims as discussed below.
The traveling of motifs from one technique to another is commonplace in Islamic art. Islam has spread to diverse lands where visual memories transferred, but techniques changed. Just like stucco in early Islamic art, polymeric appliqué works on rickshaw hoods today serve as a cost-effective, less time-consuming, and more plastic means of surface decoration.
The urge for ‘total covering’ (demonstrating horror vacui, which is said to characterize much of Islamic art) and enthusiasm for surface decoration is not exclusively Islamic or unique to the Muslims of Bengal. For example, Nakshi Katha (hand-embroidered quilt) and alpana (floor painting), two common folk art forms of Bengal, are heavily influenced by Hindu mythology and rituals. However, both products of folk creativity are archetypically part of the vrat system—a set of rituals performed predominantly by women as a means for wish fulfillment through the completion of certain artistic and non-artistic tasks (a detailed discussion on Nakshi Katha and its meaning system can be found in Dutt, 1990). This is why rickshaw decoration, devoid of any ritualistic function, stands distinct from the non-Islamic arts of Bengal.
Thus, what looks bizarre at first glance appears to be an exciting play with revered motifs in rickshaw hood decoration. It becomes a strong example of subaltern secularism and the subversiveness of working-class art. With these characteristics, the art form has preserved the essence of Islamic art.
What these rickshaw hood designs propose is more than a limited focus on the ornamental; rather, they push the boundary of it to a peculiar scale. I will conclude here by raising two aspects.
One aspect is the arbitrariness of the composition. This ‘free recomposition,’ a great example of what can be termed vernacular deconstruction, makes Lata Hood a notable specimen of Islamic material culture. While we can still ascribe iconographic significance to some motifs (the crescent on the top, for example) or the “negatively iconographic” in the absence of representations of living beings as a response to conservative city governance policy in the mid-1970s, Lata Hood has successfully transcended the realm of meaning in creating pure visual pleasure.
The second aspect is related to this arbitrariness, but not at the level of composition—rather, in the rendering of small design elements. Zoomorphic features are introduced in the already bifurcated elements. Zoomorphic plants, though not as prevalent as other forms of vegetal ornamentation, are a noticeable tendency in all sorts of conveyance art in Bangladesh. The crow-vine and crocodile-vine (as described by artisans) may not be a conscious reaction, but rather a derivative and a corruption—perhaps of some textile motifs of the Ottoman era, a reinterpretation of Mughal book illustration, or, as mentioned earlier, a copy from pre-Mughal mosque ornamentation that lost its primary shape in the transition to a new medium. However, the way the makers of Lata Hood perceive it tells much about how the artistic psyche may have operated.
