In ‘Bohu-Rup-Katha,’ Shrobona Das examines Bengal’s Bohurupi tradition, focusing on women’s hidden roles in this male-dominated art form. Using creative methods like reenactments and embroidery, she questions archival gaps and highlights the precarious lives of these folk artists, blending documentation with speculative storytelling to preserve their cultural legacy.
In Bishaypur, a remote village in Birbhum, West Bengal, shapeshifting is a way of life. The village is a hub of Bohurupis, Bengal’s itinerant folk artists known for portraying multiple identities through elaborate costumes, painted faces, masks, and performance. They bring mythological and religious figures such as Krishna, Kali, and Durga into public spaces, alongside characters drawn from ordinary life. Once a popular form of public entertainment, the tradition now faces mounting economic pressures as audiences and entertainment habits change. A 2021 report by Barnini Maitra Chakraborty in The Telegraph documented the precarity facing Bishaypur’s Bohurupis, and the efforts of government bodies and local theatre groups to support them through cultural programmes and public-awareness campaigns. While such initiatives offer Bohurupis (meaning ‘of many forms’ in Bangla) visibility, sustaining the tradition also requires addressing the conditions in which its practitioners live.
Lens-based multidisciplinary artist Shrobona Das’s ongoing project ‘Bohu-Rup-Katha’ (বহু-রূপ-কথা) asks whose histories these institutional archives record and whose they overlook, approaching the tradition through the uncertain presence of women in its cultural history. Using photography, reenactment, and oral histories, Shrobona constructs speculative narratives from the collective memories of women closely connected to this folk cultural tradition in Bishaypur. Instead of claiming to recover a definitive feminist history of the tradition, she asks what an inclusive archive might look like if someone had recorded their presence.
Shrobona came across the community during the Hidden Artist Residency in Santiniketan in 2025. Initially interested in the lives of Bohurupis outside their travelling performance, she spent time with their families in Bishaypur. Her conversations with women and elderly residents revealed surprising accounts of mothers and grandmothers who also performed as Bohurupis — a folk art form historically associated with male performers. Over the past year and a half, she has researched the tradition through archival work and extended fieldwork. The stories she encountered are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory, but their value lies partly in what they reveal about the limits of the existing record.
“I’m not trying to verify or establish a historical truth,” Shrobona says. She treats the community’s oral history as inherited, informal knowledge that formal archives have failed to preserve. “I’m trying to reimagine what the archive might look like if women’s participation was documented.” Through these encounters, Shrobona has found traces of women’s presence held in living memory and carried through local lore. As she continues to speak with the women and learn about their wishes, desires and imaginations, these conversations inspire temporal pockets of aspirational world-making, where the women imagine their own representations within the Bohurupi tradition through photography, staging, and reenactment.
This distinction sets ‘Bohu-Rup-Katha’ apart from other efforts to document the Bohurupi tradition. Shrobona is not inserting women into a fixed history and presenting the result as feminist reclamation. She is questioning how cultural histories are constructed and what their omissions conceal or reveal.
The project also frames women’s archival absence within the community’s social and material circumstances. Performing as a Bohurupi is rarely enough to sustain a household as they compete with modern mass media. While some are turning to social media, others appear at festivals or occasional events rather than performing regularly as Bohurupis. While many women in Bishaypur hold government-issued identification cards recognising them as folk artists, this does not mean they perform regularly, Shrobona says. Their lives are organised around household chores, raising children, and passing cultural knowledge between generations.
Through reenactment, she translates these memories into images, drawing on conversations with the women performers of Bishaypur about their lives and interests beyond the Bohurupi tradition, instead of attempting to reconstruct a definitive history. This emphasis on collaboration also informs her approach to the ethics of documentary practice. “I can speak with them, but not for them,” Shrobona says.
This tension between documentation and invention is central to the project. Shrobona’s photographs neither function as documentary evidence nor claim to resolve the uncertainty surrounding women’s historical participation in the Bohurupi tradition. Instead, she stays with the space for women’s stories that remain absent from the archives.
Costumes and masks add another layer to the relationship between identity and visibility within the Bohurupi tradition. For Bohurupi performers, transformation depends on the material act of becoming another character. Costume is fundamental to how they are perceived. As Shrobona explains, “Without a mask or makeup, they aren’t recognised as Bohurupis.” For her, examining the act of masking becomes a way to question who is seen, and under what conditions.
Shrobona is currently developing ‘Bohu-Rup-Katha’ into an installation including photographs, collective embroidery, and a material archive of masks and costumes. The collaborative embroidery will involve women from the community, extending the project beyond the artist’s individual interpretation, she says. ‘Bohu-Ru-Katha’ does not establish whether women’s participation in the Bohurupi tradition in Bishaypur was more widespread than the surviving record suggests. It interrogates why gaps and fragmentation always mark standard documentation of such ephemeral practices, and how speculative creative practices might engage with that absence without claiming to resolve it.
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