Phad painting, carried from village to village by Bhopa singers who sing the epic it illustrates, belongs to

The correct answer is A, Bihar. Madhubani painting, also called Mithila painting, belongs to the Mithila region of north Bihar around Madhubani, Darbhanga and Sitamarhi, and is also practised in the Terai of Nepal. Women painted it on freshly plastered mud walls, above all in the kohbar ghar or nuptial chamber, and the style is known for flat figures and a field packed with lotus, fish, parrot and bamboo motifs. Option B is wrong because Odisha is the home of Pattachitra and of Saura wall painting. Option C is wrong because Maharashtra is the home of Warli painting, the white geometrical wall art of the Warli tribe. Option D is wrong because Jharkhand is known for Sohrai and Khovar painting, made at harvest and at marriages.

The correct answer is A, two triangles joined at their tips with a circle for the head. The Warli painter builds everything from three shapes: the circle for the sun and the moon, the triangle for the mountain and the pointed tree, and the square for the sacred enclosure. A body is an upper triangle and a lower triangle meeting at a point, with a small circle above and stick limbs, so a group of figures reads as a crowd in motion. Option B is wrong because a square body belongs to no part of the Warli vocabulary; the square is reserved for the ritual chauk. Option C is wrong because a plain circle with four lines describes a child drawing, not the triangle-based Warli figure. Option D is wrong because squares joined at a corner are not used for figures at all.

The correct answer is B, cloth and picture. Patta means cloth and chitra means picture, so Pattachitra is literally painting on cloth, made on a canvas of layers of cloth pasted together with tamarind seed paste and chalk and rubbed smooth with a stone. Option A is wrong because the temple is the subject of Odisha Pattachitra, with Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra and the vesha of the deity, but it is not what the word means. Option C is wrong because palm leaf engraving is the sister craft called Talapattachitra, where tala stands for the palm; mixing the two is the commonest error in this question. Option D is wrong because wall painting is a different family altogether, to which Madhubani, Warli and Saura belong.

The correct answer is A, Raghurajpur. Raghurajpur, with the neighbouring Dandasahi, is the village of the Chitrakar families who paint Pattachitra, engrave palm leaf and make the painted masks and the Jagannath vesha panels; almost every house in it is a workshop. Option B is wrong because Pipli, also in Odisha, is famous for applique work in bright cloth, not for Pattachitra. Option C is wrong because Konark is the site of the thirteenth century Sun temple, a monument rather than a painters settlement. Option D is wrong because Nathdwara is in Rajasthan and is the home of Pichwai, the cloth hung behind the Shrinathji image; placing a Rajasthani centre in Odisha is the trap this question sets. Raghurajpur is also remembered as the village of the Odissi guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, a detail papers sometimes use to frame the same question.

The correct answer is D, Pichwai. Pichwai is not a Madhubani style at all; it is the painted cloth hung behind the image of Shrinathji at Nathdwara in Rajasthan, showing the seasons and the festivals of the deity. The recognised styles of Madhubani are Bharni, with the outline filled in solid colour, Kachni, built of fine hatching and line, Tantrik, which uses religious symbols and the forms of the goddess, Godna, drawn from tattoo patterns, and the Kohbar painting of the nuptial chamber. Options A, B and C are therefore wrong as answers because Bharni, Kachni and Godna are each genuine Madhubani styles, and a question of this shape is answered by spotting the one name that belongs to another region. Remember that the five Madhubani names are regional styles of one tradition, while Pichwai is a separate craft of a separate state.