Design
Chano Devi
Life Story
The Mithila region covers a part of the northern state of Bihar in India and extends into the Terai lowlands of southern Nepal. Most Mithila artists today live in the Indian town of Madhubani and its surrounding villages, so Mithila art is sometimes termed Madhubani art. Literary references indicate that Mithila’s women were painting gods and goddesses on their homes’ interior walls at least as early as the 14th century. The images created for domestic rituals promoted fertility, abundance, marital felicity and family wellbeing. Mithila’s women used colours made from organic and mineral pigments, applying them to cow-dung and mud-plastered walls with simple bamboo and raw cotton brushes.
In 1934, following an earthquake near Madhubani, collapsed walls in the region revealed interior murals to the British colonial official William G Archer. Archer photographed many of these paintings through the 1930s, and in 1949 published an article about them in the Indian art journal, Mārg, bringing wider attention. In 1966-67, in the midst of a drought in Mithila, Pupul Jayakar came up with the idea to commission Mithila women to paint on paper, for sale, to support dwindling family incomes. Jayakar, at the time director of the All India Handicrafts Board and also Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s cultural advisor, employed Bhaskar Kulkarni, a Bombay-based artist, to encourage Mithila’s women to transfer their wall paintings onto paper. This formed the genesis of what is known as Mithila art today. While initially centered on women from the upper castes (Kayastha and Brahmin), today, the practice extends to male artists and to many castes, including especially the oppressed Chamar and Dusadh castes.
Note: This text draws upon an essay by Aurogeeta Das and David Szanton in Das, Aurogeeta et al (2017) Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India, Washington D.C.: International Arts and Artists (IA&A), pp. 18-25
Chano Devi is credited with being Mithila’s first Dusadh* artist to have initiated a tattoo idiom within the region’s contemporary painting. Dusadh artists initially painted in the idioms of the Brahmin (priestly) or Kayastha (scribe) castes, predominantly depicting the Hindu pantheon, rituals and related narratives (e.g. moments in the epics Mahabharata or Ramayana). They were often reprimanded for doing so, as they were considered hors caste. In the 1970s, Erika Moser-Schmitt, a German anthropologist from Heidelberg University, encouraged Dusadh artists to explore their own idioms. Artists such as Chano Devi pointed out that they did not have a traditional mural aesthetic to draw upon as with upper caste Mithila artists. So, Moser – who had observed that Dusadhs sported body tattoos – suggested they turn to their decorative and protective tattoo symbols and motifs.
The sociologist Sandali Thakur, who conducted a series of interviews with Chano Devi and her husband Roudi Paswan, refers to natin, itinerant tattoo-makers belonging to nomadic tribal groups. “The natins were deft at inscribing tattoos on bodies and had a huge repertoire of imagery at their disposal. Godana iconography emerged as a result of the collaboration between the natins Jayda and Reshma and the Dusadh artist[s] Chano Devi and Roudi Paswan in Jitwarpur village.” [1] (2024: n.p.; also see Nair 2018: 80) [2]
Gradually, Dusadh artists began to incorporate Dusadh legends and deities, gaining agency to challenge and subvert caste hierarchies through their artistic voice. Today, they tend to depict their own legends and deities more than Hindu subjects. Godna paintings tend to be filled with intricate lines, curlicues, concentric circles and motifs of flora and fauna, densely composed to cover the entire surface of the paper. Here, pairs of birds, flowers and leaves are arranged in a labyrinth around a central tree topped with a pair of birds, seemingly with a merged head. This motif of a pair of birds with a unified head (or a single head visible, so possibly canoodling) is quite common in Mithila art but is also seen as far afield as the western state of Gujarat, for instance in toran (domestic embroideries hung from lintels).
Chano Devi received a National Award for her excellence in godna (the tattoo style of Mithila painting) in 2007. She had previously received a Bihar state award in the 1980s.
*Dusadh: As with many oppressed peoples, the preferred terminology for self-identification has changed over time, reflecting the continuing struggles for equality and social justice. Various terms have been used historically: Harijan (from the Sanskrit, meaning ‘children of god’, introduced and popularised by Mahatma Gandhi to refer to such castes); Dalit (deriving from the Sanskrit, meaning ‘divided, split, broken, scattered’, first used to refer to such castes in the 1880s by the Marathi social activist Jyotirao Phule). Although specific sub-groups in Mithila now reportedly prefer the term Paswan, Dusadh (a term that has now come to mean ‘watchmen’) is used more widely.
This work was previously reproduced in Szanton and Bakshi [3] (2007: 63).
Aurogeeta Das, 2024
References:
[1] Thakur, Sandali (2024), “Nomenclature, Categorization, Canonization: Godana and the Creation of ‘Authentic’ Mithila Art” (unpublished paper, under review for publication)
[2] Nair, Sunita (2018), Indigenius Artists India, Mumbai: Sunita Nair
[3] Szanton, David and Malini Bakshi (2007) Mithila Painting: the Evolution of an Art Form, Berkeley: Ethnic Arts Foundation in association with Pink Mango
Selected exhibitions (that the artist’s work has featured in, not this particular artwork per se):
Raja Salhesh’s Garden: Contemporary Dalit Art and Ancient Myths of Mithila, India, Covington Gallery (Radford University Art Museum), Radford (USA), 2022
Martine le Coz: A French Homage to the Ancient Myths and Contemporary Artists of Mithila, Tyler Gallery (Radford University Art Museum), Radford (USA), 2022
Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India, multiple venues in the USA and Canada, 2017-2020
Histoires de Voir, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris (France), 2012
Mithila Painting: The Evolution of an Art Form, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco (USA), 2005
Expéditions Indiennes: Art tribal et art populaire Indiens contemporains, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (France), 1998
Not on display
Title/Description: Design
Artist/Maker: Chano Devi
Born: 2004
Object Type: Painting (mithila)
Materials: Ink and natural colours on handmade paper
Measurements: h. 558.8 x w. 762 mm
Inscription: Signed ‘Chano Devi’ in Devanagari script, in ink, verso, top centre. Annotated or signed ‘Chano Devi’, titled ‘Design’ and dated 2004, in Roman script, in ink, verso, bottom.
Accession Number: 50890
Production Place: Bihar, India
Credit Line: Donated by The Ethnic Arts Foundation
