Transports of Delight: The Ricksha Arts of Bangladesh (review)

Combining more than 1,000 brilliantly colored photographs with video clips, music, natural sound, and text, this CD-ROM is an ethnographic study of Bangladesh's ricksha art, a major component of its folk art. Joanna Kirkpatrick documented it in depth from 1975 to 1987, and thereafter updated her study until 2002, relying on her last visit in 1998 and Kevin Bubrisk's pictures and notes of 2002. Thus, her minute and accurate documentation of ricksha art covers different phases of change spanning twenty-seven years.

The ricksha (rickshaw in English) is a human-propelled conveyance on three wheels. Moving through the thick, turbulent streets of crowded cities in Bangladesh, rickshas are decorated with paintings that are mobile exhibitions of urban folk art. Kirkpatrick refers to these rickshas as transports of delight. Ricksha art images, she holds, express varieties of desire—for wealth, sex, power, one's village home, religious blessings, and consumer goods. Although desire is a constant factor in ricksha art, ricksha art images are not timelessly the same. Their expressions, as Kirkpatrick's work reveals, change in response to events. She has highlighted the particulars of history and change in a panoramic view.

Folk art is not necessarily stable and repetitive. The wider a trade becomes, the broader becomes its thematic and aesthetic effects through the proliferation of designs and decorative features. Kirkpatrick has admirably proven this theory in her study of the regional styles of the ricksha arts of Bangladesh. She vividly explains why the Dhaka style is the most varied, elaborate, and expensive of the three major regional styles and why it tends to produce the most gorgeous ricksha arts in the country.

Kirkpatrick's most spectacular finding is that animal figures became rampant in ricksha art after the accession to the presidency of Major General Ziaur Rahman on April 21, 1977. The country was then passing through a period of increasing Islamization, as Ziaur Rahman excluded secularism from the constitution and even portrayed himself as a pious Muslim in the media. During this period of religious fervor, ricksha artists, under pressure from radical Muslims, largely stopped depicting human figures and began painting animals in various postures. Sexual desires were channeled through two thematic modes: animal fables and fantastic birds.

Human imagery returned to ricksha art in full vigor in 1982. Immediately after the emergence of Bangladesh, a common scene was a Pakistani soldier being blown up by freedom fighters hiding nearby. As movies are a continuing passion for people in Bangladesh, movie stars dominate human imagery in ricksha art. Khudiram, a Bengali hero hanged by the British in 1908, appeared on rickshas in 1982. Phulan Devi, India's bandit queen, appeared on rickshas in 1987 as her movie became very popular in Dhaka. She was depicted holding an AK-47 weapon. Saddam Hussein's picture became common on rickshas in the 1990s, after he became a hero among the urban folk during the First Gulf War.

Referring to the ricksha arts of Bangladesh and the truck arts of Pakistan, Kirkpatrick poses a pertinent question: why is vehicular art so lavishly decorative in Bangladesh and Pakistan, but not in India? She contends that this bias toward decorative pleasure and exuberance in the two Muslim countries, where contemporary surroundings are marked by an absence of public imagery, may have been reinforced by the oppression associated with socialization of children in religiously conservative anti-iconic norms. In Bangladesh, this view does not hold ground for two reasons: (1) Bangladeshi ricksha artists are both Muslims and Hindus, so ricksha art cannot be identified with the Muslims alone, and (2) ricksha art is more secular than religious. It is also necessary to point out that Islamic art tends to be decorative even without human imagery. On the other hand, in India some areas of Hindu art, such as woodwork, stone inlay work, and painted pottery, are prolifically decorative. Therefore, the absence or presence of human imagery as a cultural norm is...