Tradition · wall & paper painting tradition

Madhubani / Mithila painting

Also known as Mithila painting, Madhubani, Mithila

Function

Arts & performance

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

26.350, 86.070

Worth knowing

The drought of 1966–67 is the hinge: the All India Handicrafts Board sent the artist Bhaskar Kulkarni to Madhubani to get famine relief money into women's hands by buying paintings on paper. A domestic ritual art became a cash income within a decade, and named artists — Sita Devi, Ganga Devi, Mahasundari Devi — emerged from a practice that had been anonymous.

Connections (2)

• AnalogueSohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh

  Two wall-painting traditions of the middle Gangetic and Jharkhand country, both made by women on mud walls for a fixed occasion — marriage and harvest — and both surviving now largely as paper and canvas work sold outside the village. Madhubani made that transition in the late 1960s through a famine relief scheme, and Sohrai much later and much less completely, which is why one has internationally known named artists and the other is still mostly anonymous.

• Craft tradition ofMithilā / Janakpur

  Madhubani painting belongs to Mithila, the old Videha country whose capital tradition places at Janakpur, and its commonest subject is the marriage of Rama and Sita — which is Mithila's own story, since Sita is the daughter of its king. The kohbar, the painting made on the wall of the marriage chamber, is a fertility diagram before it is an illustration, and it is made by the bride's female relatives.

On these journeys

• Craft and industry — where things are made and why there

Sources

Wikipedia, “Madhubani art”. Geographical Indications Registry (Government of India) filings; Ministry of Textiles and Sangeet Natak Akademi craft documentation.

• Wikipedia — Madhubani art