An Enduring Legacy In Lines And Lore: The Art Of Baua Devi

Photo: Arushi Arts

India-West Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI – Baua Devi is a Mithila painting artist from Jitwarpur village of Madhubani District in Bihar. Mithila painting is an ancient folk art that originated in the region. It is recognized as a series of complex geometric and linear patterns traced on the walls of a house’s inner chambers, and it was later transferred to handmade paper and canvases.

Baua Devi has been practicing the Mithila art form for almost 60 years. She got married at the age of 12, and was encouraged by her mother-in-law to pursue painting. In 1966, Pupul Javakar, then director of the All India Handicrafts Board, an advisory body of the Ministry of textiles, sent Mumbai artist Bhaskar Kulkarni to Madhubani to find art and artists. Baua Devi was a teenager when she met Kulkarni and was the youngest of the group of artists who formally transferred Mithila art from walls, where it was traditionally practiced as mural art, to paper.

Baua Devi won the National Award in 1984 and received the Padma Shri in 2017.

For most of its life, Madhubani or Mithila painting was an intimate art form, meant for a small audience even within a family. Making this art was an intrinsic part of a woman’s household chores: tend the hearth, sweep the yard, paint the walls. A mother-in-law would welcome the bride marrying into her home with precisely drawn geometric patterns on the walls of her new bed chambers or ‘khober-ghar’. These paintings came to be known as ‘khober’ and besides being things of beauty, they were believed to have the power to enhance fertility.

Till the Thirties, the world had never seen a Madhubani painting. In 1934, during the terrible Nepal-Bihar earthquake, the walls of the homes in Jitwarpur collapsed, exposing the inner chambers and the stunning artworks that snaked all over them like lush vines. William G Archer, a British officer, took photographs of the paintings and wrote about them in 1949 for Marg magazine. Another disaster in the form of a drought in 1966 would nudge the artists out from within those painted walls and into the marketplace.

It is believed that Mithila art originated during the time of the ‘Ramayana’. Sita’s father, King Janaka asked the women of Mithila, a region that encompasses portions of present-day Bihar and Nepal, to paint the walls of their homes to celebrate the wedding of his daughter with Lord Rama. It later came to be called Madhubani art for the district where the practitioners of this art are concentrated. Common themes include the wedding of Rama and Sita, the courtship of Lord Krishna and Radha and scenes from the ‘Mahabharata’.

Baua Devi uses handmade paper and natural colors for her paintings, predominantly using black, yellow, red and white in her palette. She uses modern motifs like red hearts and topical issues to make her canvases brim with urgency and life. There is a strong feminist perspective to her  work, whether she’s depicting the raw power of ‘Kali’s roar’ or articulating the interior life of the ‘Nag Kanya’, a creature with the head and torso of a woman and the lower body of a snake.