Bihar Quiz: Madhubani, Manjusha and Other Art Forms

Madhubani painting is also called Mithila painting because it grew in the Mithila region of northern Bihar, chiefly in the districts of Madhubani and Darbhanga, and the form takes its common name from the first of these districts.

Manjusha art belongs to Bhagalpur and the Angika-speaking country around it. The paintings are made on the manjusha, a temple-shaped box built of bamboo strips and jute paper, which is carried in procession during the Bihula-Bishahari festival of the rainy season, and the panels tell the story of Bihula and…

Kalamkari is the pen and dye work on cloth of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, practised at Srikalahasti and Machilipatnam, and has nothing to do with Mithila.

The kohbar ghar is the room in which the bride and bridegroom are brought together after the wedding, and its wall carries the kohbar painting, a composition of the lotus with its ring of leaves, the bamboo grove, fish, parrots and the sun and moon, all of them symbols of…

Tikuli takes its name from the tikuli or tikli, the decorated dot worn by women on the forehead, which was once made at Patna out of thin glass fused with gold foil and coloured enamel.

Sujni is a quilted embroidery in which layers of old cloth are held together with rows of running stitch, and the stitches themselves build figures of women, animals, trees and village scenes.

Sikki is a reed grass of the wetlands of north Bihar whose stalks turn a bright golden colour when dried.

The Patna Kalam was made by families of painters trained in the Mughal manner who left Delhi and Murshidabad in the eighteenth century and settled at Patna.

Manjusha is called snake painting because the serpent of the Bishahari legend is its ruling motif: snakes fill the panels, and the borders carry a continuous wavy line that reads as a serpent, one of the border patterns being named lahariya, the wave.

Bhagalpur on the Ganga has woven tussar silk for centuries and is called the silk city of Bihar; its handloom weavers produce the coarse golden silk from cocoons reared on forest trees, and the city is a cluster for silk furnishing and sari weaving.