Sasanka Perera — Current Outreach and Engagement Initiatives — Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia

August 2025

Between August 4 and 11, 2025, the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences (CI) hosted a pathbreaking outreach initiative focused on transnational folklore, visual culture, and the politics of heritage in South Asia. Anchored around the donation and institutionalization of Prof. Roma Chatterji’s personal Patua scroll collection on Ramayana-Ravana tales. It was led by Dr. Sasanka Perera and Dr. Pooja Kalita from CI. the event comprised four integrated components:

Institutionalization of the Roma Chatterji Patua Scroll Collection

Five-day exhibition of Patua scrolls at MIAC

Three-day teach-in by Prof. Roma Chatterji

Concluding dialogue session with participants.

Together, these components formed an inclusive, accessible, and richly layered program aligned with the Heritage as Placemaking (HaP) project that highlighted how heritage is not simply a matter of a tangible monumental past but of active, negotiated, and sometimes contested placemaking.

The heart of the initiative was the formal establishment of the Roma Chatterji Patua Scroll Collection at the Colombo Institute. Comprising around 50 scrolls painted by the Patua artisan community of West Bengal, these works represent an intricate blend of mythology, daily life, and political commentary; rendered in vibrant visual narratives. By becoming the repository for this collection, the Colombo Institute has transformed into a distinctive site for the study of folklore and visual culture in Sri Lanka. This marks a significant moment in placemaking, as the Institute becomes a discursive and physical space for exploring a specific form of Indian folk art in a Sri Lankan context. Importantly, this complicates the notion of placemaking in productive ways.

These scrolls, though geographically displaced from their original context, now serve to open up new spaces for cross-cultural understanding and academic inquiry. They allow us to explore how different communities imagine place, from the Patua creators to the diverse viewers encountering them in Colombo. In this sense, the Institute now functions as a bridge between Sri Lanka and the folk heritage of India, opening up long-term possibilities for the study of folk traditions within Sri Lanka itself.

The Exhibition

The five-day exhibition from 4th to 8th August curated and hosted at Millennium Art Contemporary (MIAC), displayed a selected set of scrolls. The exhibition included guided tours, gallery talks, and walkthroughs by Prof. Roma Chatterji for students and general audience. Participants noted the visual and narrative power of the scrolls and appreciated the rare opportunity to engage with regional art forms often excluded from mainstream heritage platforms. Feedback consistently reflected an appreciation for the exhibition's accessibility, storytelling depth, and its capacity to challenge dominant narratives around epics and identity.

The Teach-in

Following the exhibition there was a three-day teach-in with Prof. Roma Chatterji. CI collaborated with Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) in Colombo on this front. The Teach-in series was attended by scholars, students, artists, and educators. Prof. Chatterji drew from her extensive fieldwork and scholarship to explore the visual politics of Patua scrolls, reinterpretation of epics like the Ramayana in popular culture and cartoonification of mythology in Indian comics, decolonial representation of heritage. Each session emphasized the HaP themes of placemaking, erasure, transnational solidarities, and bureaucratic interventions. the politics of representation. A notable outcome was the genuine democratization of knowledge, many expressed that the teach-ins challenged their assumptions and offered new tools for thinking about culture beyond geographical borders.

The Dialogue Session

The final session of the outreach event was a dialogue session. It was a participatory deliberation session among participants of the teach-in and interested parties. The participants had the opportunity to reflect on what they had learned and actively shape the intellectual outcomes of the program. This session also offered a more egalitarian space for sharing ideas. This further aligns with HaP’s commitment to inclusive knowledge production and challenges hierarchies in how heritage is discussed and theorized.

Partners: Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu, Dr. Sasanka Perera, Dr. Pooja Kalita, Sapana Sanjeevanai

December 2024

In December 2024, HaP principal investigators, Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu and Dr. Sasanka Perera, along with research fellow Dr. Pooja Kalita co-organized an outreach program with Sapana Sanjeevani, one of the founding members of PayalSapanaPaints, a Nepal-based feminist art collective. This project spanning over two days from the 8th to 10th December brought together 10 Mithila and Madhubani art practitioners from different districts around the Mithila region in Nepal and India. The residential workshops were held at the Cultural Village in Janakpur. After the workshop the women-led group of artists also collaborated in a placemaking project where they painted the walls of the Janakpur Railway Station, which is also the station that connects India and Nepal.

Centrally the workshop was able to address a crucial impasse one ongoing reluctance among the younger generation to take up this art form. And secondly the challenge of bringing in newer themes. For example its confinement to religious themes, has resulted in the “over-dependence on monotonous forms to meet the market needs or is under the direct appropriation of institutionalized politics or religion or a combination of the two”. In this workshop the artists tried to address these problems and to create a space for personal narratives and collaborative work.

Below are impressions from their workshop alongside snippets from a report detailing the Mithila Murals Project.

PayalSapanaPaints

PayalSapanaPaints, is a Nepal-based feminist art collective. Sapana’s deep reservoir of knowledge, ideas and insights rooted in the lived everyday circumstances provided us the intellectual and creative direction in putting the outreach program together. Sapana is a practicing Mithila artist and is quite well-known in Nepal for experimenting with the art form as a political narrative inspired by personal subjectivities of womanhood, or more specifically Madhesi womanhood rooted in the Mithila heritage. Sapana also comes from a family of Mithila artists – her mother and her aunt, her mother’s sister who is no more, are considered pioneers in the art form, who have inspired other artists that helped put together the Janakpur Women Development Centre – a collective of Mithila artists

“Well known Mithila artists like Sita Devi, Ganga Devi, Pano Das, Revati Mandal have been able to represent their own everyday circumstances through the interpretation of personal stories in their art and are well recognized for this ... The aim of this outreach was to bring artists from different backgrounds 4 along the lines of caste, region, ethnicity as well as different districts of the Mithila region in both India and Nepal to help break the monotony of repetitive themes and motifs and explore together, with a sense of community, various themes that are relatable to the artists vis-à-vis their personal stories.”

“December 8th and 9th 2024 were focused on mural painting by the artists, a first in the history of the city of Janakpur given the mixture of artists representing geographic, caste and cultural diversity in general. With critical attention to the socio-cultural locations of the artists, we used the outreach also as an opportunity to ignite public conversations around caste-based and place-based narratives that dominate the art form, and the necessity to challenge this domination for the creative, and at times even radical, growth of the art form.”

“A first of its kind, the women-led mural painting project was able to incite dialogue between the artists and the public, in the short and long term, and in ways that are direct and indirect, particularly around culture, religion and patriarchy as they intersect with gender and sexuality, and in the process, added to Janakpur’s placemaking.”

Collaborating artist Sapana Sanjeevani in conversation with Sasanka Perera in the during their visit to the mural site, two days prior to mural painting began. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu

Artists arrive from Bihar, India and various districts of Nepal. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu

Artists with researchers of the Janakpur International Winter School, discussing the origin and evolution of Mithila art form. Photo: Sabin Ninglekh

Artists brought their work to the table to shed further light on the art form. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu.

Inauguration. Photo: Sapana Sanjeevani

An extroverted sense of place in the making. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu.

Artists at work. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu

Janakpur women preparing for the arrival of a new morning, with the freshly painted mural from the night before, in the background. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu

Downtime. Photo: Sapana Sanjeevani

“We felt from the inception that painting the wall served many purposes. This is why we envisioned this project in the first place. The very act of ‘doing’ art collectively and in public space along with the legacy that follows in the form of the murals on the walls of an iconic heritage site of a religious town such as Janakpur, is symbolic to us, in bringing a form of art and the artists hitherto not taken too seriously by the state, into the public domain and closer to public attention. Such a collaborative act also reframes the state-society relationship, with women as protagonists, beyond borders. To note, it is the railway station that connects Nepal with India.”

“We believe strongly that through the space we co-created through the outreach, the artists were able to mobilize their agentive capacity to interpret and articulate art rooted both in the fixed nature of traditional forms and the mutating everyday life. In this sense, of followed through by them and others, this effort will mark the beginning of an epistemic break in Mitila and Madhubani art.”