‘Ravan Wala Baba’ lives on in Titarpur

New Delhi: With a day to go before the nine-day period of Navratri begins, the stretch of Najafgarh Road between Tagore Garden Metro Station and Tilak Nagar Metro Station is lined with handwrought Ravan effigies, a craftsmanship introduced to Titarpur residents by the famous ‘Ravan Wala Baba,’ who died in 1998. Remembering the late artist, Pawan Kumar, one of his apprentices said, “Baba was our Ram. He taught us the techniques of Ravan making with a bamboo stick, and we revered him like a god.”

Over the years, the small locality of Titarpur transformed into a thriving hub of Ravan-making artists under Baba’s guidance, Kumar said. He said that the effigy craft has come a long way since the days of Baba. Now artists source green bamboo sticks from Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh for the effigy scaffolding and use waterproof papers from Japanese paper bags to drape them. “People come with different demands, some want a rotating one, some want the biggest.

The largest one we made was a 70-foot Ravan last year,” Shubham Singh, another effigy maker, told PTI. Singh, who is now a prominent Ravan exporter, has spent three months crafting 50 Ravan effigies for the Navaratri. “People get involved in the Ravan-making process just to learn the art in line with tradition, even if they get paid less than the usual labour rates,” he said.

Hussain, a 15-year-old effigy-maker from the same area, said making effigies is a part-time job he indulges in after eking out time from his father’s bicycle repair shop. “I am currently working on a 20-foot Ravan. I also work at my father’s cycle servicing shop. I learned this art last year when I made a 10-foot Ravan with my siblings, not for sale but for ourselves,” Hussain told PTI.