Madhubani painting

Madhubani is the wall and floor painting of Mithila, done by women on the mud walls of a house for weddings and festivals, and particularly in the kohbar ghar, the nuptial chamber. It was almost entirely domestic and unsigned until the 1960s, when a drought relief programme suggested the women paint on paper for sale, and within a generation it became an export art with named artists. The imagery is dense and flat, with no empty space, filled with line, hatching and pattern, and the figures have the enormous outlined eye that is its signature.

Natural pigments traditionally: lampblack, ochre, turmeric, indigo, the juice of leaves and flowers, bound with gum. Applied with a twig, a nib of bamboo or a cloth wrapped matchstick. Every space is filled, which is the rule that gives the style its look. Five styles are usually named by the technique or community: bharni, filled with colour; katchni, fine hatching in one or two colours; tantrik; godna, derived from tattoo patterns; and the gobar style on a cow dung wash. The kohbar, with its lotus and bamboo, is the central wedding image and is read as explicitly fertile.

Learnt at home from mothers and aunts, from about six, by being given a corner of a wall. The hand control for an unwavering line comes from years of it. There was no formal teaching at all until the paper market created workshops and then institutes, and now Mithila Art Institute at Madhubani teaches it to a syllabus over two years. Many of the best known artists are women with no schooling who learnt it as household work and became professionals in middle age.

The tradition is attributed in Mithila to the wedding of Sita, which is a claim of antiquity rather than a documented one; what is documented is wall painting observed in the early twentieth century and the transformation to paper after the 1966 drought, driven by the All India Handicrafts Board and by William Archer’s earlier documentation. Ganga Devi, Sita Devi, Mahasundari Devi and Baua Devi are the names that made it an art with authors. The shift from an anonymous caste and gender bound household practice to a signed market art also made caste visible in it, with Dusadh artists developing the godna style as their own.

Mithila

Madhubani and Darbhanga districts are the home, with the kohbar painting still done for weddings and the paper work the district’s cash art.

Nepal

The Mithila of the Nepal Terai keeps the same tradition, with Janakpur a centre and a women’s art collective there since the 1980s.

Bengal

The Bengali alpana is the nearest relative in technique, though the imagery and the occasion differ.

Deities

• Rama
• Krishna
• Durga
• Ganesha

Festivals

• Vivaha Panchami
• Chhath Puja
• Durga Puja begins · Maha Shashthi

Related arts

• Kolam