She Paints Her Body as a Tree

I come from a land where stories are painted before they are written. Where gods arrive on walls before they are sculpted into temples. Where the morning light first touches fingers dipped in natural dyes, not to sign documents, but to draw dreams.

This land is Mithila, and the art is Madhubani Painting, also known, more widely and rightfully, as Mithila Painting.
Growing up in a village near Madhubani town in north Bihar, I would often ask my grandmother, 'Why do we call it Madhubani Painting when the whole region paints like this?' She would smile and say, 'Because when outsiders came looking, they stopped at Madhubani. But the art was always all around.' And that's the truth.

Madhubani and Mithila: One Art, Many Names

Madhubani Painting is the world's window into the artistic soul of Mithila. But the name, 'Madhubani,' comes from a single district, one of several in the ancient region of Mithila, which spans across north Bihar and parts of Nepal.

The more inclusive and accurate term is Mithila Painting, as it represents a civilizational aesthetic, a tradition carried by women (and now men too) across villages and castes, where walls, courtyards, pots, and prayer spaces have long been transformed into canvases of devotion, defiance, and daily life.

But when the 1934 earthquake devastated the region and British officer W.G. Archer stumbled upon murals on the broken walls of homes in Madhubani district, the art was named after the place where it was first documented for the outside world.

Thus, 'Madhubani Painting' became the popular term, not because the rest of Mithila did not paint, but because the gaze paused there first.

And so, even today, what the world calls Madhubani Painting is, in essence, the art of Mithila's people, an unbroken, evolving tradition that belongs to women across castes and communities, from Brahmins and Kayasthas to Dalits and Muslims. It is an art that speaks not in a single dialect or colour, but in a thousand hues and silences.

Ritual, Resilience, and Reinvention

The story begins, as many in Mithila do, with Sita, the daughter of the land. It is said that King Janaka commissioned artists to decorate the town with murals to celebrate Sita's wedding to Rama. Whether myth or memory, the ritual of painting walls during marriages and festivals continues, the Khobar Ghar (nuptial chamber) still covered with fertility symbols, lotuses, fishes, and bamboo trees.

This wasn't art for museums. It was lived. It was sacred. It was feminine.

The 1934 earthquake became an unlikely turning point. Archer's documentation, followed by the tireless efforts of cultural advocates like Pupul Jayakar, Bhaskar Kulkarni, Ray Owens, and Kapila Vatsyayan, encouraged women to move their art from mud walls to handmade paper and cloth. This not only helped preserve it but provided livelihoods to drought-stricken households in the 1960s and 70s.

Women with Brushes and Backbones

In our region, the names of women like Jagadamba Devi, Ganga Devi, Sita Devi, Godawari Dutta, Karpoori Devi and Mahasundari Devi were uttered with reverence, not because they had won national awards (which they had), but because they had done something extraordinary. They had taken what was once confined to courtyard walls and turned it into something the world could not look away from.

Jagadamba Devi, the first national awardee, painted with bold Bharni strokes, her gods and goddesses filled with colour and command. Ganga Devi, who received Padmashree, used Kachni style to tell her own journey, from social discrimination to international exhibitions in Japan and the U.S. She painted her battle with cancer on hospital bedsheets in Delhi. Every line a prayer. Every dot a rebellion.

These women didn't ask permission. They simply painted what they knew, and the world came to watch.

Forms, Colours, and the Heart of the Art

Mithila Painting is not one style, but many dialects of visual speech. The Bharni style is filled and vivid, the Kachni style more intricate and linear. Godhana draws from traditional tattoo art, and Kohbar paintings celebrate fertility and union.

What unites them is their rootedness, in nature, in ritual, and in a woman's gaze. The recurring imagery of lotus ponds, peacocks, fishes, and elephants isn't decorative. It's symbolic of fertility, grace, endurance, and memory.

Traditionally, artists used natural colours, black from soot, yellow from turmeric, red from Kusum, green from leaves, and white from rice paste. Brushes were made from bamboo sticks or twigs. Today, many still follow these practices, while others adapt to synthetic colours, especially for commercial buyers and exports.

The Struggle to Stay True

But with recognition came new challenges.

While Madhubani Painting, or Mithila Painting, was awarded a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, and national platforms began acknowledging master artists, the ground realities remain difficult. Middlemen exploit. Market access is limited. Artisans struggle to balance tradition with trend.

In my own society, I have seen women hesitate to sell their paintings. 'Will they understand what we drew?' an artist asked me once. The paintings, for them, weren't just products they were prayers, memories, stories handed down from mother to daughter.

The commercialization of Madhubani art risks stripping it of context. When a painting meant for a wedding ritual is hung in a hotel lobby in Paris, something essential, a pulse, a breath, can be lost.
And yet, there is hope.

A New Generation, A New Story

Contemporary artists like the esteemed Santosh Kumar Das and Rani Jha, both towering figures in the Mithila art tradition, whose contributions deserve the nation's highest honours, including the Padma awards, continue to inspire and innovate. Alongside them, a new generation of artists such as Mahalakshmi Karn, Shantanu Das, Ram Bharosh, Sanjay Kumar Jaiaswal, Prateek Prabhakar, and countless rural women, many of whose names now grace gallery walls across India and beyond, are reshaping the visual language of Mithila Painting.

They are not merely repeating inherited motifs; they are reimagining an ancient grammar to tell the story of a fractured present. In their hands, the art no longer rests solely on mythological deities or ceremonial rituals, it speaks of climate collapse, female infanticide, migration, mental health, and caste injustice. Yet within this visual vocabulary of struggle, they also inscribe resilience.

And in doing so, they offer something rare and urgent, hope, drawn in colour, line, and spirit. A hope that grows quietly from the soil of tradition and reaches out like a vine toward the future.

Where once a lotus symbolized fertility, now it can also suggest strength in drought-ridden lands. The fish no longer swims in a sacred pond but through polluted rivers gasping for survival. Gods are still there, but now they share space with masked nurses, cremation fires, or a girl child staring back defiantly.

This is not a betrayal of tradition, it is the truest form of continuity. Because Mithila Painting was never only aesthetic; it was always an act of remembering, resisting, and surviving. Every brushstroke was a prayer. Every wall was a diary. Every motif, a memory disguised as design.

When a woman paints her body as a tree, her eyes like rivers, and the gods seated beside her, she is reclaiming a place in the world that has historically denied her visibility and voice. She's saying:

I exist - not as muse or subject, but as creator.

I remember - the histories, wounds, and silences that the world wants to erase.

I belong - not just to a tradition, but to this land, this struggle, this moment.

To paint in Mithila has never been neutral. It has always been political. It is a language born from the margins, of caste, of gender, of geography, and wielded with extraordinary grace and precision.

So, when today's artists push the form beyond the sacred and decorative, they're not abandoning its spirit, they're amplifying it. They are telling the world, our art evolves, just as our lives do. Our lines may be rooted in centuries-old rituals, but they stretch forward, fearless, fluid, and unbroken.

And somewhere in a village in Madhubani or in Janakpur, a woman sits quietly, dipping a brush into black soot, sketching a tree across the chest of a female figure, and through that act, she places herself, and her people, back into history.

Holding Fast, Letting Go

As global art festivals showcase Madhubani, as online stores sell Khobar paintings on coasters and cushion covers, the paradox deepens.

Will this global fame preserve or dilute the art?

Will we honour the village women who made this possible, or simply appropriate their work into fashion?

The future depends on this tension, between preservation and reinvention, between pride and profit.

And yet, I remain hopeful.

Every time I return home and see a young girl sketching a lotus on the wall during Chhath Puja, or painting the feet of Lakshmi at her doorway, I know the art is alive. Not just in museums or galleries, but in the mud, in the memory, in the moment.

Mithila Painting, born of the land, nourished by women, and carried through centuries of change, is not a forgotten folk art. It is a living, breathing archive of who we are and what we hope to become.

(Prity Jha is an artist, researcher, and writer from Madhubani, Bihar, documenting women - led art traditions. She believes that in Mithila, every river, every flowering tree, and every line drawn in mud and colour carries the heartbeat of its art and its people.)