Pat paintings by Uttam Chitrakar, depicting nautch girls in beard and man looking into mirror to find the reflection of a woman resurface the matters of queer identities.
A self-taught artist, Chitrakar has been working on many commercial projects on pat painting besides selling his works in Hosto Shilpo Mela in Kolkata, a handicraft fair run by the state of West Bengal in past.
Bengal Pat is relatively young tradition of art inspired from Kalighat paintings when the scroll painters switched from painting in a narrative style to single pictures depicting the stories that were sung on the streets the songs that balladeer sung on the streets about the past events and incidents of the places and also about the wars, fights, Kings and their kingdoms, incidents, and tragedies, artists use the colours made from spices, leaves, flowers, earth, soot, etc. Most of the paintings only used the traditional colors of Bengal. The traditional colors of Bengal are red, green, black, indigo, deep yellow to orange, and brown.