Tradition · wall painting tradition · India
Saurā icon painting (idital)
Also known as Saura painting, idital, ittalan, Lanjia Saora
The ritual wall paintings of the Saura of southern Odisha, called idital, drawn in white rice paste on a red-ochre mud wall inside a house to fulfil a vow or invite a deity. The figures are built as a bounded field entered through a drawn ladder or gate, and the composition is read as a house.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 19.100, 84.050 (approximate)
Worth knowing
The iconography looks superficially like Warli work eight hundred kilometres away but is drawn from the outline inward rather than from geometric units outward, and the Saura paintings name the spirit they are made for. They are commissioned by a ritual specialist rather than made for sale.
Connections (1)
- AnalogueWarli painting, Palghar
Warli in coastal Maharashtra and Saura idital in southern Odisha look alike to an outsider and are built differently: Warli assembles figures from triangles and circles, Saura draws a contour and fills inward, and the Saura field is enclosed and entered by a drawn ladder. Both are ritual commissions rather than pictures, and both now have a market that the ritual does not need.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Saura painting”. Verrier Elwin, Tribal Art of Middle India (1951); Odisha state museum and Crafts Council documentation of idital.
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