Geetanjali Krishna: Tradition versus novelty

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Recently, a Madhubani painting that I saw in Dilli Haat made me realise just how many colours black and white could evoke. It was a painting of a tree brimming with life, with birds and animals that partook of its fruit and shade. I stood admiring it, wondering at the extraordinary skill of its artist. A woman sat nearby, bent low over another sheet of paper. "Have you painted this?" I asked her. "No," she said, "my mother did. But she's very old, so I've come in her place."

I continued to look at some of the other paintings on display as two other people came up to the stall. Oblivious to the woman sitting at their feet and painting, they began talking about the pros and cons of gifting a Madhubani painting to a friend. It all depended upon how much it would cost them, they eventually decided. So they looked at painting after painting, arguing over each one's price. Eventually they walked off without buying anything. "Actually one has seen too many of these Madhubani paintings...," sniffed one, "they don't have novelty value any more!"

"I don't understand what they mean," muttered the Madhubani artist after they left, "we've grown up making these paintings on our walls. The skill has been passed down from mother to daughter for tens, maybe hundreds of generations "" yet the beauty of these paintings hasn't yet palled for us!" Since I was interested, she told me a little about Madhubani paintings. I was surprised that there were many aspects of this art form from Bihar that I didn't know of "" although the paintings with their age-old motifs were familiar enough for me to empathise with the ladies who'd thought they had no 'novelty value'.

Originally, Madhubani paintings were made on freshly plastered mud walls. When the theme of the painting was religious, the painting was a prayer in itself. "When we paint the picture of a god or goddess, we believe that the deity actually comes to reside in the painting," explained the Madhubani artist. "Traditionally, we always used colours that we made," she said. They mixed soot with cow dung to get black, and derived blue from indigo. Yellow was made from turmeric; red from the juice of the kusum flower or red sandalwood; green from the leaves of the wood apple tree; white from rice powder and orange from palasha flowers.

I asked her why Madhubani paintings never suggest any sense of depth. She thought for a minute and said, "Maybe because these were originally made on walls...instead of trying to suggest depth, we try fitting as many motifs as we can into one small sheet of paper. That's why our paintings characteristically have no gaps!"

She saw me looking at the black-and-white painting and said, "We can even deduce the artist's caste from the colours in her paintings." Brahmins use yellow, orange, blue and black and the paintings made by Kayasthas are usually just black or deep red. Other than this oblique reference to the artist's identity, most Madhubani paintings are anonymous. "We don't sign any of our paintings," she shrugged, "we recognise different artists by their work, that's good enough."

That, I mused, might just be the fillip Madhubani art needs. If good Madhubani artists are encouraged to display signed works in galleries instead of on the pavements of Dilli Haat, they'd probably receive the critical attention they merit. And if in turn, this spurs them to experiment, go beyond the traditional motifs that we've all been seeing for years now, all the better for it.