New Delhi, April 4 -- Sundari tram amader, Sundarban (Our beautiful trams, our Sundarban).

As Swarna Chitrakar sings about crouching tigers and trundling trams at the Esplanade tram terminus in Kolkata, she unrolls the scroll she has painted. Tigers pounce on a flock of fleeing deer. Snow-white cranes fly over blue waters and kingfishers swoop to catch fish. A rishi sits in prayer at an ashram in Gangasagar while boxy tram cars run along the edges of the scroll, the passengers sitting by the windows engrossed in newspapers.

It seems an odd juxtaposition. Tram lines do not run through the mangrove forests and waterways of the Sundarbans.

But Chitrakar, a folk artist who paints patachitras, isn't selling a tiger-safari tourist-brochure v...