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Madhubani Magic of Gangadevi

By Aditi De; Illustration by Sudheer Nath

Gangadevi remembers that her mother handed her first brush to her when she was still a child. It was a piece of rice straw and a few threads drawn from the hem of her sari. For ink, she used soot scraped from the bottom of a cooking pot, or from the chimney of a hurricane lantern.

Like her cousin sisters and aunts, their mothers and grandmothers, Gangadevi learnt to mix the soot with cattle urine or gum arabic dissolved in water, or sometimes even goat's milk. Since they didn't have enough paper in the village, pages from her school notebook were often glued onto cloth to give her a large canvas to practice on.

But usually, the women of Mithila painted on the walls of their homes, made of mud applied to a framework of branches. Their villages, some still without a school or electricity, often grew up around a pond. Whenever there was a wedding in the family or a celebration like Holi or Diwali, the women would draw a kohbar or ceremonial picture.

"During a wedding," Gangadevi narrated, "first a kohbar drawing on paper would be sent to the boy as a proposal of marriage. Each gift of cloth, jewellery or spices exchanged between the families would be wrapped in a kohbar paper. "We painted leaves and trees, flowers, birds and auspicious fish on miniature huts of papier-mâché." A Mithila painting done with prayer and art was said to attract the blessings of the gods into the house.

Scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata appeared under the spell of the Mithila women's fluent fingers. Traditionally, they were done on walls, on papier-mâché objects, or on sheets of paper. But today, because we in the cities demand it, Mithila paintings with their sweeping lines and bright colours, crop up on clothes at crafts bazaars, on greeting cards and pen-stands, something that the villagers of Mithila would never dream of using.

Gangadevi is no more. She spent her last years battling cancer. Her last history is depicted in a room at the Crafts Museum in Delhi. Fine, exquisite lines sketch her visits to doctors, the stretcher she lay on, even the medical tests she underwent. None of these picture stories are like photographs - for they are all in the Mithila style that Gangadevi brought into our lives.

Gangadevi lives on through the paintings she left behind for us. Like her, hundreds of women in Mithila continue to depict our myths and religious symbols through delicate lines and bright earthy colours. And maintain the continuity of tradition by handing down their art to another generation.