Tradition · wall painting tradition
Sohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh
Also known as Sohrai, Khovar, Hazaribagh painting, Sohrai and Khovar — Hazaribagh
Two seasonal wall paintings of the Hazaribagh plateau made by Kurmi, Santal, Munda, Oraon and Ganju women: khovar scratched through white over black for marriages, sohrai painted in earth colours at the harvest cattle festival.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.990, 85.360
Worth knowing
The animal forms — horned cattle, a figure between two beasts — repeat motifs in the rock shelters of the same valleys, which is the basis for treating the practice as very old rather than merely traditional. The paintings are renewed annually and the walls are mud, so nothing survives more than a season, and the open-cast coal mining of the Karanpura valley has taken several of the painting villages entirely.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueMadhubani / Mithila painting
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 ofIsko & Hazaribagh rock art
The Khovar and Sohrai painters of the Hazaribagh villages use motifs that also appear in the painted shelters in the hills above them — the same animal forms, the same filled geometric fields. Bulu Imam's surveys from the 1990s recorded both together. Nowhere else in India can a prehistoric and a living painting tradition be set side by side in one valley.
- AnalogueJadopaṭiā scroll painting
Jadopatia scrolls and the Khovar and Sohrai wall paintings are the two painting traditions of the Santhal Parganas and the Hazaribagh valleys, and they work in opposite directions: the scroll is made by a hereditary outsider community and sung to a Santhal household for a fee, while the wall painting is made by the women of the house for their own marriage and harvest.
On these journeys
- Craft and industry — where things are made and why there
- Forests, Adivasi worlds & craft
- Jharkhand — the Chotanagpur plateau
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sohrai and Khovar painting”. Geographical Indications Registry (Government of India) filings; Ministry of Textiles and Sangeet Natak Akademi craft documentation.
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