Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh

A Rickshaw in Dhaka city exhibits a blaze of colours. Every square inch of this transport is decorated just for the pleasure of the eyes. Tassels, tinsel and twirly bits hang from all parts. Plastic flowers sprout in the front and on the sides, and pictures and patterns are painted or pinned all over it. The overall effect is spectacular a set of moving pictures which emerge at random within a multi-dimensional perspective. It represents Bangladesh traffic art at its best. This book is about both rickshaw and baby-taxi paintings and as well as the artists who through joyful primary colours provide a moving picture gallery for the masses and record the socio-political history of Bangladesh for the cultural historian. The paintings used are taken from a workshop for rickshaws and baby-taxi painters held at the Alliance Francaise de Dhaka, in September 1999. Thus the book freeze-frames this particular folk art which has reached a unique status in Bangladesh and belongs to its collective living heritage. Among the thousands of painted rickshaw backplates in Dhaka, the same themes often recur - famous film stars, futuristic cities, exotic birds around lakes, wild animals at a water hole, religious symbols, and scenes from movies. The multiple images of rickshaw paintings, the wealth of each theme, their daily and familiar proximity and their permanent presence under our eyes in the streets, make rickshaw art an open book or a wide-angle lens on its past, its present, its symbolic fragments, its dreams and the aspiration of a significant segment of its people.