Seventy-four year old
master puppeteer Gobindo Naskar is a self-taught string puppeteer and a clay idol maker. It was Gobindo’s natural aptitude towards sculpting with clay and wood that led him to start honing his skills on the rustic puppets that used to lie around the house. About ten years old at that time, he was encouraged by his father, who had once owned a string puppet group, but was a singer and not a puppeteer himself.
The puppets that the young Gobindo would see around the house were all made of indigenous "cheshko" grass which would be rolled up, tied up with string to shape it and create a head and torso. It would then be coated with clay and finally painted. The arms would later be tied to the body with string or wire. Gobindo later experimented with materials like straw, shola pith and even the wood of the moringa tree. Not completely happy with the results, he laboured on until he finally found satisfaction with the wood of the parijat tree.
String puppetry or Taarer Putul first came to Nadia district in West Bengal via migrant artists from the erstwhile East Bengal. The popularity of this form soon spread to other districts in the state and this was probably how Gobindo’s father first acquired his puppets. Indigenous to 24 Parganas district was rod puppetry or Dang Putul.
Fascinated by the travelling puppet shows from Nadia visiting his village, Gobindo decided to focus on string puppetry, being already familiar with the string puppets in his home. Puppeteers those days kept their craft a closely guarded secret and he was unable to even catch a glimpse of how the Nadia string puppeteers fashioned their shola (sponge wood) puppets. He however managed to sneak into local rod puppeteer`s workshops and thus his wooden string puppets were styled on what he managed to observe there. More than the performance aspect, it was the crafting of the puppets that intrigued him the most.
Working with very basic tools, Gobindo taught himself the craft and by the time he was 20, he became quite adept at string puppetry. Around this time, Gobindo revived his father`s string puppet group and renamed it Debendra -Sarala Putul Nach company after his parents` names. But it was all of 30 years later that he caught the eye of the renowned artist and pioneer of modern puppetry, Raghunath Goswami (1931-1995) at a seminar he had been invited to at Jelepara. Goswami had with him a small model of a bug and Gobindo sought permission to replicate it. So pleased was Goswami with the result that he invited Gobindo to meet Dr Sisir Majumdar, a professor at Rabindra Bharati University. Amazed at the quality of work achieved with only a "
daa" (kind of chopper), a knife and a skewer heated over a kitchen fire, Dr Majumdar gifted him about Rs 4000 - a generous amount that enabled Gobindo to buy a set of proper tools for his work, for the first time in his life.
He plunged into work with renewed energy, innovating and developing as he went along and now working solely on wood. For instance, the hands of his puppets are sculpted in a more lifelike manner. He began to incorporate more movements to his puppets by adding joints at the ankles, wrists, knees and eyeballs even. A minimum of 4 strings are required for a simple puppet - Gobindo uses up to 12 strings sometimes.
Gobindo has passed on his skills to his sons and to his elder grandson as well. It his elder son, Amarendra, who now carries on the tradition. Being the sole string puppet master in his district, Gobindo made puppets for at least 8 to 10 puppetry groups in South 24 Parganas and taught them puppeteering and acting skills. Only a handful of these groups survive today.
The string puppet groups of Nadia, which numbered to around a 100, several decades ago, have suffered the same fate. The demand for such forms of rural entertainment has dwindled and most puppeteers have turned to other occupations. It is only a handful of people like Gobindo and his family who with difficulty, manage to uphold their art and somehow sustain themselves. But all that changed from March 2020. The lockdown as a result of the coronavirus has brought their art to a grinding halt. Gobindo and his family have been forced to resort to other measures like farming and idol making in order to sustain themselves.