Rice Grain Calligraphy

[Thanks to UC#1-SU for pointing us towards today’s topic!]

Rice Writing is a thing….

Rice writing is the art and skill of being able to write small enough to write on a grain of rice.

History
Rice writing originated in ancient Anatolia in Turkey and India. Many rituals and rites use rice as a medium, but at some point in ancient Anatolia artisans who were skilled in making miniature paintings decided to turn their skill to making art with what had always been an ancient symbol of prosperity, the oldest example of which lies in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey. The artisans would inscribe messages or names on a single grain of rice after it was treated and polished. Grains that were long and flat were favorites as they offered proper surfaces for writing. Apart from Turkey, India also had a large number of artisans skilled in making miniature art including rice art.
Wikipedia

By Brian Sterling – https://www.flickr.com/photos/bsterling/4887264416/, CC BY-SA 2.0

If you would like to try this yourself, it is recommended that you do not use cooked rice.

But don’t let that stop you. Try it at home!

From The Japan Times

Enthusiastic artist gets granular with Taiwan’s president-elect

REUTERS: TAIPEI –Apr 21, 2016

A Taiwan artist has refused to see the big picture and instead captured the likeness of president-elect Tsai Ing-wen, to celebrate her inauguration next month, on a single grain of rice.

Rice Writing Records

Some records (via Google AI):

Surendra Kumar Apharya from Jaipur holds the Guinness world record for writing 1,749 characters on a single grain of rice. He also wrote the names of 168 countries and regions on a single grain of rice.

Other Guinness Book of World Records related to letters on a grain of rice include:

249 characters on a strand of human hair: Also written by Surendra Kumar Apharya
5,000 characters on a grain of rice: Featured in the ancient Pataleshwar caves on JM Road in Pune
Ramayana written on rice grains: Written by Karumuri Moulya Padmavathi Srivalli in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India
Mahamrityunjaya mantra on a rice grain: Written by Aalisha Bafna in 4 minutes and 14 seconds

Hanuman Chalisa written on rice grains

The record for writing the Hanuman Chalisa on rice grains was set by Vishakha Ajinkya Bansod (born on May 7, 1991) of Pune, Maharashtra. She wrote the entire Hanuman Chalisa on 425 rice grains in Hindi language, as confirmed on August 10, 2021.
India Book of Records

The Hanuman Chalisa is a Hindu devotional hymn in praise of Hanuman. It is an Awadhi language text attributed to Tulsidas, and is his best known text apart from the Ramcharitmanas. The word “chālīsā” is derived from “chālīs”, which means the number forty in Hindi, as the Hanuman Chalisa has 40 verses. – Wikipedia

Happy passion: Woman writes Bhagavad Gita on 4,042 rice grains

A Hyderabad law student has written Bhagavad Gita on 4,042 grains of rice. It took Ramagiri Swarika 150 hours to write create the micro-art.

“In my most recent work, I have written the Bhagavad Gita on 4,042 rice grains which took 150 hours to finish. I work with various products to create micro arts,” Swarika told ANI.

Swarika doesn’t use a magnifying glass to create her micro artwork.

She also does milk art, paper carvings and has drawn on sesame seeds too.
Indians In Gulf

Excelling at art on grains to exhibit faith

14-year-old girl from Vijayawada inscribes gist of seven kandams of Ramayana, along with ‘Sri Rama’ in 22 languages, on 1,916 rice grains.

VIJAYAWADA: Karumuri Moulya Padmavati Srivalli, a Class 10 student from Vijayawada, has inscribed the gist of seven ‘kandams’ of Ramayana, along with ‘Sri Rama’ in 22 languages, on 1,916 rice grains to prove her unflinching devotion to Lord Rama. Srivalli’s miniature artwork was recently recognised by the Worldwide Book of Records and Triumph World Records.
New India Express

A Little Background

The Mahābhārata (Sanskrit: महाभारतम्, Mahābhāratam, pronounced [mɐɦaːˈbʱaːrɐt̪ɐm]) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India revered in Hinduism, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. It narrates the events and aftermath of the Kurukshetra War, a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas.

It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four “goals of life” or puruṣārtha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Shakuntala, the story of Pururava and Urvashi, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devayani, the story of Rishyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right.
….
The bulk of the Mahābhārata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE. The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).

The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as “the longest poem ever written”. Its longest version consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.… W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare.
Wikipedia

Rice and The Seven Samurai

I recall a scene from Seven Samurai, where the good guys go to save a village of very poor farmers from the bad guys. The movie takes place in 1586. The samurai gripe that they are being feed millet, rather than rice. Before seeing the movie, I had always assumed that rice had been a staple in Japan for a long, long time, but it turns out not to be the case.

Here’s an excerpt from a site that looks at historical aspects of Kurosawa films:

Another a-historical matter mentioned is white rice. So far as I know Japanese peasants did eat white rice, but not very commonly, it was considered a delicacy so was generally sold to the better off. The early Imperial Japanese Navy specifically used white rice as a selling point to young men to join the navy (this ended up causing Vitamin B1 deficiencies, but that’s another story ^[1]). The story probably does exaggerate the horror of having to eat millet – millet and barley I think would have been the standard daily gruel of peasants around that period. Its actually a much healthier mix than white rice, one reason why historically Japanese peasants were often a lot healthier than the upper or urban classes.

Akira Kurosawa Info

At the time, the film was the most expensive film made in Japan. It took a year to shoot and faced many difficulties. It was the second-highest-grossing domestic film in Japan in 1954. Many reviews compared the film to westerns.
Wikipedia

For reference, here are the top 10 all-time grossing Japanese films. All Anime!

^[1] Here’s the other story….

Work on beriberi [Takaki Kanehiro]

At the time, beriberi (considered endemic to Japan) was a serious problem on warships and was affecting naval efficiency. Takaki knew that beriberi was not common among Western navies. He also noticed that Japanese naval officers, whose diet consisted of various types of vegetables and meat, rarely suffered from beriberi. On the other hand, the disease was common among ordinary crewmen, whose diet consisted almost exclusively of white rice (which was supplied free, whereas other foods had to be purchased). Many crewmen from poor families, who had to send money back home, often tried to save money by eating nothing but rice.

In 1883 Takaki learned of a very high incidence of beriberi among cadets on a training mission from Japan to Hawaii, via New Zealand and South America that lasted for 9 months. On board, 169 men out of 376 developed the disease and 25 died. Takaki made a petition to Emperor Meiji to fund an experiment with an improved diet for the seamen that included more barley, meat, milk, bread and vegetables. He succeeded, and in 1884, another mission took the same route, but this time only sixteen beriberi cases among 333 seamen were reported. This experiment convinced the Imperial Japanese Navy that poor diet was the prime factor in beriberi, and the disease was soon eliminated from the fleet. Takaki’s success occurred ten years before Christiaan Eijkman, working in Batavia, advanced his theory that beriberi was caused by a nutritional deficiency, with his later identification of vitamin B1 earning him the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Wikipedia