I needed to come back to the blog on the occasion of the International Delhi Art Fair in New Delhi that took place Feb 2 – Feb 5, 2017. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the event and so missed the exhibition of Vernacular art curated by art historian Annapurna Garimella which included Gond, Mithila and Mysore artists. Though space was limited, the exhibition offered much needed exposure for India’s indigenous art forms.
Here I would like to present six artists whose work I think truly shows what is happening on the ground in Mithila art: the excitement of experimentation and the search for a personal artistic path in the face of social and technological changes.
Avinash Karn ‘Munna, Smile Please’, 36″x24″, acrylic on canvas, 2016.
Avinash Karn studied art at Banaras Hindu University and then spent the last couple of years sowing the seeds of Mihtila art in India: painting Mithila-style hotel murals in Gurgoan, teaching the basics of the art to tribals in Jharkhand, holding Mithila workshops in Goa. In this piece he photo-shopped a traditional photographer’s studio backdrop onto canvas and then painted the portraits in the areas left blank. Combining traditional photography practice with current day digital manipulation and finishing with a painted portrait in the Mithila style not only gives an engaging picture of a middle-class family in today’s India but also presents the options, choices and tools Mithila artists have at their disposal today.
Mahalaxmi and Shantanu Das, ‘Kohbar Monologues No 2′ , 22″x30″, acrylic on paper, 2016.
A chilling piece of theater. The husband in traditional bridegroom headdress chokes his wife as flames reach up her sari from the household cooking fire. The rich, thick, blood red color adds a quiet horror to the scene while the lotus pond wedding kohbar is deconstructed here as a wheel of torture, the lotus flowers the tearful faces of brides. Bamboo representing the male lineage becomes scythes that surround and further entrap the unfortunate young wife. On high, old women peer through their saris at a scene they are helpless to prevent.
The traditional kohbar symbols painted on the walls of the wedding chamber represent the hope of a fruitful and happy marriage. Here they become instruments of oppression and death. A powerful painting dealing with a reality that manifests itself in various guises in contemporary Indian society. Though this artist team had a large canvas work in the exhibition in Delhi, this painting is extraordinary and a must in any exhibition of contemporary Mithila art.
Shalinee Kumari . At age 23, via the Mithia Art Institute in Madhubani, Shalinee Kumari made the journey from the small village of Baxi Tola near the Nepal border to San Francisco for her one woman show. After a two week stay in the States she returned to India, married, and now lives in Hyderabad with her husband and daughter where she teaches and continues to paint.
Betiyaan Parayi Hoti Hai (Daughters Are for Others), 30″x22″, acrylic on paper, 2016.
The bride carried to the husband’s home loses not only her birth family but also has no rights in her husband’s family. This is the patriarchal tradition. Shalinee Kumari is not the first to ask why this must be so, as songs on You Tube attest, but she is the first Mithila artist to so elegantly limn this tradition. The footprints go in circles, in both directions. They point back to the old family and forward to the new. They search for an answer. And as in the songs there
Amrita Jha is an accomplished artist and a Mithila Art Institute graduate. Though currently at work on a series of bird paintings much of her art is informed by the problems of being a woman in a highly patriarchal society. Here her The Curses Begin, 40″x33″, acrylic on paper, 2016.
“Usually, a mother-in-law starts to curse the day she knows that herdaughter-in-law is carrying a girl child in her womb and becomes extremely happy if she is carrying a male child.” Amrita Jha
Unmatched in her attention to line,color and detail, Amrita Jha here gives us a stylized, formal portrait of two beautiful young women, facing each other, nearly identical mirror images except for the background behind each: one a wall of light purple lotus flowers while the other a field of undulating golden snakes. The gems in their perfectly coiffed hair, their golden earrings, the multiple colored bracelets on both wrists and their shimmering saris give them a somewhat haughty air which is softened by their clasped hands tenderly supporting their yet to be born son and daughter. Both mothers, both awaiting the birth of their child.
But note how, reflecting popular sentiment, the artist’s choice of the vertical gives the boy child’s mother a height and authority denied to the mother holding the daughter. The vertical rows of lotus flowers continue up to the heavens while the horizontal lines of snakes create a visual field that surrounds and entraps this mother and her future daughter. The sex of the child also reflects back onto the mother where the darker, contrasting colors of the figure cradling the boy give that figure, a presence, a self assurance that is lacking in the mother-daughter figure with its slightly anemic colors.
The Curses Begin is a well conceived and well crafted piece exhibiting the best of traditional Mithila Kachni Bharni (line and color) painting .
Naresh Kumar Paswan: To complete my selection of current Mithila Vernacular painters I must also include Naresh Kumar Paswan. He is a unique, self-taught talent whose work resembles no other. All in black pen and ink with geometric lines that make his work seem a handcrafted woodcut, he paints scenes from Indian stories as well as nature. If Surya the sun God appears a bit fierce in this piece, that is deliberate. Naresh says that in the middle of the Indian summer, out in the villages, the sun is anything but your friend.
Sun and Pond 22″x30″, acrylic on paper, 2014.
I suggest that these are some of the most interesting artists working in Mithila art today. Some already accomplished but still relatively unknown, while others are just ‘emerging’ as the galleries say. For now the Vernacular in Mithila/Madhubani art lies with them.