Hillol Sen is a documentary photographer based in Kolkata, India, whose work explores culture, identity, memory, and the fragile relationship between tradition and change. His practice is grounded in intimate, observational storytelling, focusing on people, communities and the everyday spaces where personal and collective histories unfold. Rather than treating culture as something fixed or preserved in isolation, he is interested in how traditions are lived, inherited, questioned and transformed. He photographs the quiet gestures, relationships, rituals, and moments of everyday life through which stories pass from one generation to another. His approach is deeply human and attentive, seeking to move beyond documentation toward photographs that hold ambiguity, emotion and a sense of lived experience. For him, documentary photography is a way of listening to people, to places, and to the stories that continue to shape them.
Project Statement
WHAT WILL THEY CHOOSE TO INHERIT?
A photographic exploration of Bengal’s Patachitra tradition and the generation deciding what comes next by Hillol Sen
For generations, Bengal’s Patuas have carried stories through painted scrolls. Unfolded frame by frame and brought to life through Pater Gaan, the scroll is both image and performance – the artist paints the story and sings it into being. Mythology, folklore, history and contemporary events have all entered this moving visual language.
In Naya, a village in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district, this tradition continues among a community of Muslim Chitrakars whose inherited repertoire includes the painting and narration of Hindu mythology. Bengal Patachitra received Geographical Indication status in 2018, but its identity is not confined to a fixed historical form. The scrolls can carry new subjects and social concerns, while artists have also adapted the tradition to changing markets and new materials and products.
What makes the inheritance especially tangible is the knowledge behind the finished image. Patachitra artists make natural colours from locally available materials such as leaves, flowers and stones and knowledge of colour making is passed from one generation to the next. The songs are also composed by the Patuas themselves, linking the painted narrative to an oral tradition that is performed rather than simply displayed.
But a living tradition does not remain alive simply because it is preserved.
I spent several days photographing the community, looking beyond the finished scrolls to the life around them – artists at work, children learning, families sharing the practice, materials being handled and young people growing up between an inherited visual language and an increasingly different future.
Children encounter Patachitra almost as part of everyday life – watching, listening, painting and participating. At the same time, education, technology, social media and new creative possibilities are expanding the choices available to them. For this generation, inheritance is therefore not simply a question of preserving the past. It is a negotiation between what they receive and what they imagine for themselves.
One young artist I photographed, Surya Chitrakar, loves Patachitra but dreams of becoming a photographer and social-media creator. He hopes that selling his paintings will eventually help him buy a camera.
His ambition stayed with me. A camera does not necessarily mean leaving an inherited tradition behind. It could become another way of seeing, recording and carrying that inheritance forward.
‘What will they choose to inherit?’ follows Patachitra at the point where tradition becomes a choice. For the young people growing up within this community, inheritance is no longer simply about learning an art passed down through generations. It is about deciding which parts of that inheritance – its stories, skills, ways of working and cultural identity – they will carry into their own futures and which they may reshape or leave behind. The project asks a simple question – when the next generation has more choices than the generations before them, what will they choose to carry forward?
The future of Patachitra may not depend on whether the next generation preserves the tradition exactly as they received it, but on what they choose to carry forward and what they choose to change.
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