Lion

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.

Sita Devi is one of the most highly celebrated painters of Madhubani painting on paper and one of the first to receive national recognition for her contribution to society as both a painter and activist. In painting she championed the ‘bharni’ style of Madhubani painting that emphasises strong colours over fine lines and in public service she advocated for better public infrastructure in rural areas and volunteered to teach younger women in her community in the hope that they might achieve financial independence through painting.

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, but despite the change of format and medium the arrangement of pictorial space remained consistent. Later in her career she also took to painting scenes from everyday life and her travels to New York and Japan.