Kudos To This 18-Year-Old For Being Felicitated By Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik!

Kudos To This 18-Year-Old For Being Felicitated By Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik!

The desire to know about various art forms of the state motivated Prateek Patnaik to collect information and document them to conserve for future. However, the 18-year-old had no idea that his efforts would receive a word of appreciation from the Chief Minister himself! Prateek was recently felicitated by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for his documentation work on ‘Prahallad Nataka’.

Six months back, the young lad decided to work towards preservation of the 200-year-old folk theatre form of Ganjam. ‘Prahallad Nataka’ which owes its existence to Ramakrusna Chhotaraya, the erstwhile King of Jalantara in south Odisha, narrates the story of Vishnu’s Narshingha incarnation where he is half man and half lion, who killed Hiranyakasyapa to save Prahallad. The folk art is almost on the verge of extinction as now only a few people know about it.

Prateek formed a team and started collecting all the information to document the performances. His initiative of saving the dying art received appreciation from all corners of the society including the Chief Minister, who has assured to help Prateek in his research and documenting work.

While interacting with MCL, Prateek said, “I have been studying about traditional music of Odisha for quite some time. Such was my interest that I even started singing old songs like Chhanda, Champu and Odissi. But when I started looking through books for lyrics of all those old songs, unfortunately I could not find any. It was then that I started scanning books, 300-400 years-old which had information about these old songs.From those books, I studied about the local music of Puri, Parlakhemundi and other parts of the state. Thereafter, I collected information about folk art and came to know about Prahallad Nataka, which has a unique music.”

On getting to know about such a traditional art form, Prateek decided to audio-visually document an entire performance. “Earlier the play used to be performed over seven days and seven nights. Later it was compressed to 24 hours. Now, all that exists is a mere 12 hours of the original week-long performance. A major chunk of what used to be a part of the play has unfortunately been lost,” he informed.

While Prateek was researching, he also realised that not many of the existing troupes have the ability to stage a week-long or even a 24-hour performance. Lack of sufficient funding for such performances was another problem for the troupes and its artists to grow further.

On realising that the art form might eventually vanish, Prateek tweeted about it requesting people to fund for his project and protect the art form. “Fearing what exists now might get lost in a few decades; I tweeted and asked people if they would be willing to financially assist this project. As most people were unaware of Prahallada Nataka, I educated them by extracting a small section from a 1994 recording at the National Cultural Audiovisual Archives, and posted it. Soon, about 30 people agreed to help me. Within two weeks, we had enough funds to undertake the project.”

To record the play, a team was formed with DK Patnaik, Arjuna Samantray and Avinash Pradhan and a village was identified where Prahallad Nataka was to be performed during Dola Purnima. “Our plan was to completely record a 12-hour performance in an actual village set-up during Dola Purnima, so we identified a village named Baghila. Days before, we also came to know about another performance in a place not too far from our original site and three of us agreed to start immediately that night. Hence, we got not 12 but 24 hours of multicam footage,” said Prateek.

The documentary is still in process but a trailer has been released last week. “The editing work is in process. All the footage will be edited with subtitles. We plan to release it in 1-hour chunks, releasing a video each month,” he further informed.

Prateek, who has just given his first year examination at BJB Autonomous College, is keen to continue his work on documenting folk arts of the state. “I have also documented Bharat Leela, Chau and have recorded the Puri Sahi Jatra. I also assisted in a documentary on Bonda language for National Geography. Most people don’t understand the language, so for their convenience, I translate them into English,” concluded Prateek.