Madhubani, Manjusha and Other Art Forms of Bihar: Styles and Facts

Bihar's art is village art that became national art. Two painting traditions carry the state's name in examinations, Madhubani from the Mithila region in the north and Manjusha from the Anga region around Bhagalpur in the east, and a third, the Patna Kalam, grew in the city for a colonial clientele. Around them sit a set of crafts, each tied to one or two districts. The questions are almost always about the pairing of a form with its region, its material and its best known artist, so learn them in that order.

Madhubani or Mithila painting

Madhubani painting belongs to the Mithila region of northern Bihar, above all to the districts of Madhubani and Darbhanga, and takes its name from the first of them. It was traditionally made by women on the mud-plastered walls and floors of the house for weddings and festivals, never for sale: the wall of the kohbar ghar, the nuptial chamber, carried the lotus and bamboo symbols of the marriage, and the floor carried the aripan designs. The colours were made at home from soot, turmeric, the bark of trees, flowers and indigo, and the brush was a nib of bamboo or a matchstick wrapped in cotton. No space is left empty: the gaps between figures are filled with birds, fish, the sun and the moon, the serpent and the tortoise, and the whole is closed with a double line border.

The form moved from wall to paper and cloth after the drought of the 1960s, when officials encouraged the women of Mithila to paint on paper for sale, and it carries a Geographical Indication tag. Sita Devi, Ganga Devi, Jagdamba Devi, Mahasundari Devi and Baua Devi are the names most often asked, and several of them hold the Padma Shri.

Manjusha, the narrative art of Anga

Manjusha art belongs to Bhagalpur and the Angika-speaking country around it, and it is the one folk painting of India that tells a continuous story in sequence, like a strip of panels. The story is the legend of Bihula and the snake goddess Bishahari, and the paintings are made on the manjusha itself, a temple-shaped box of bamboo strips and jute paper carried in procession at the Bihula-Bishahari festival of the rainy season. Only three colours are traditionally used, pink, green and yellow, and the serpent runs through the borders in a wavy line, which is why the form is also called snake painting. Its borders have their own names, among them lahariya, the wave, belpatra, the leaf, and tribhuj, the triangle. Neglected for decades, the art was revived by local artists and state patronage from the late twentieth century.

Patna Kalam

The Patna Kalam, or Patna school of painting, was made by families of painters who left the Mughal and Murshidabad courts in the eighteenth century and settled at Patna. Working for British officers and merchants, they dropped court portraiture for the life around them: artisans at their trades, fairs, servants, festivals and processions, painted on paper and on mica in small sheets. The painters worked with the brush alone, laying in the figure without a drawn outline first, and their palette is sober beside Mughal work. Sewak Ram, Hulas Lal, Shiva Lal, Shiva Dayal Lal and Ishwari Prasad Verma are the names of the school, and because it served European patrons it is counted among the Company styles of painting.

The crafts of Bihar

The Upendra Maharathi Shilp Anusandhan Sansthan at Patna, named after the artist who revived Tikuli work, trains craftspeople and documents these forms, and the Bihar Museum at Patna displays them. Several of the state's products carry Geographical Indication tags, Madhubani painting and Sujni embroidery among them, which protects the name of the region against imitation from outside.