Asura, demon or Bhairava?

For centuries, Hindu women around Madhubani, in the Mithila region of Bihar, India, have decorated the walls of their village homes with vivid paintings to ward off evil, mark festivals, and commemorate passage rites. This longstanding tradition, however, remained largely unknown to outsiders until the late 1960s, when a severe drought, lasting up to two years, had a devastating impact on the region’s predominantly agrarian society. To provide the community with a non-agriculture-based income, the All India Handicrafts Board then urged the women to create their paintings on paper for commercial purposes and introduced the world to Madhubani or Mithila painting.

Baua Devi is one of the most highly celebrated painters of Madhubani painting and was the only Indian woman artist to be shown in the ground-breaking exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, at the Centra Pompidou in Paris in 1989.

Despite growing up in a patriarchal and class-based society where women’s life choices were governed by their fathers and husbands, as a teenager Baua Devi moved to work at the National Crafts Museum in New Delhi. Like her contemporaries from the region, she adapted Hindu epic narratives usually painted on the walls of village homes into studies of single scenes with a focus on goddesses and female protagonists. Princess Sita, known for dedication, courage and purity was an especially popular subject among Mahbubani painters due to her mythological birth in the region. Baua Devi is known for her painting of large figures in bright yellow, orange, red and white with dark bold lines as seen in this painting.