Power to the Women: Emancipation through Art

It was not that long ago that a woman in a small village in Northeast India had a kerosene lamp smashed[1] in her face by her husband during a quarrel about her art career, the assault nearly took out her eye, gave her a permanent scar, and left her unable to paint for three years. From the moment women artists in North Bihar started getting international recognition for their art, struggles with the men in their life erupted as the sequestered existence these women led was being dismantled before the men’s eyes.

Up until the 1960’s, when the international art market discovered Mithila painting in India, the upper caste women who made the art were living in an extremely patriarchal society. Married at a very young age, they were carted off to live in their husband’s family compound, closed off from contact with the outside world, and valued for their womb and little else. Not even the meticulously tracked genealogies of their caste (some going back 24 generations[2]) mentioned a single woman’s name, only fathers, sons, grandfathers existed in this world.

It is not surprising then that the aid workers who spearheaded the effort to get the women to create their art on paper[3] (see A History of Mithila Art) had difficulty convincing these women to participate. Fortunately, a few widows[4] with little to lose seized on the opportunity and it was their paintings that won the recognition of the international art world.

With this international recognition came local acceptance and soon more women were establishing themselves as artists, stepping outside gender barriers, travelling, expanding their world view, and earning enough money from their art to be the primary bread winners for their families. This gave them an unprecedented level of independence which was helped along by a foundation that helped the women sell their art and keep their own money by developing an inventive pay scheme which kept the men from taking everything.

Soon scholars started coming to the area to figure out the history and meaning of the art, but here the men intervened and spoke for the women and so a plague of misinterpretation of the art as having some relation to tantric symbols and sexual themes came about which was readily accepted by the male scholars from the West with their Freudian lens (intentional or not). The real themes of Mithila art were in some ways as foreign to the local men as they were to the scholars because this was a woman’s domain and of little interest to the men before foreigners started visiting.

It took a female anthropologist[5] to question this accepted narrative and to actually talk to the women artists about the meaning of their work, which so happened to revolve around themes of fertility and hoping for a good and loving marriage for the most part (see Themes of Fertility, Love and Nature in Mithila Art).  

The popularity of Mithila Art has also ended up helping lower caste women too as a few visiting anthropologists, wanting to help them better their lot, encouraged them to create their own version of the art based on their elaborate tattoos which has sold well. Arcane Hindu rules prohibited lower caste women from wearing any fine jewelry, so they wore tattoos as a form of adornment.

In the nearly 60 years that Mithila painting has been on the international art scene the women artists have marched their way toward emancipation and set an example for younger generations of women that a life outside the complete control of a man is possible.

While Mithila remains an intensely patriarchal society where most women will pass from the control of their father, to the control of their husband, to the control of their son and spend most of their life cooking, cleaning, child bearing and rearing, the example of the artists has ignited a spark of possibilities.

[1] David L. Szanton, The Politics of Mithila Painting, 2017

[2] Carolyn Henning Brown, Contested Meanings: Tantra and the Poetics of Mithila Art; American Ethnologist 23(4):pp717-737, 1996

[3] Neel Rekha, From Folk Art to Fine Art: Changing Paradigms in the Historiography of Maithil Painting; Journal of Art Historiography Number 2, June, 2010

[4] Carolyn (Henning) Brown Heinz, Documenting the Image in Mithila Art; Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp.5-33, 2006

[5] Carolyn (Henning) Brown Heinz, Cultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Chico