Mithila Painting and the Twentieth-Century Cultural Economy

Detailed chapter description

Mithila painting entered a new historical regime in the twentieth century. The domestic ritual practice discussed in Chapter 47 did not suddenly begin when administrators, craft officials, collectors or museums noticed it. What changed was the social life of the image. A painted wall or floor was tied to a house, ceremony and cycle of renewal; a sheet of paper could be counted, priced, signed, packed, retailed, exhibited, collected and archived. This chapter therefore studies cultural economy rather than origins. It asks how institutions, markets, biographies and new media changed who could paint, who could earn, what counted as a work, how artistic reputation was produced and how a regional women’s practice came to circulate in national and international art worlds. The Bihar–Nepal earthquake of 1934 is a crucial event in the modern archive because damaged houses exposed painted interior walls that were normally difficult for an outsider to see. W. G. Archer, then serving in the region, encountered the paintings during inspections connected with the disaster. The earthquake should not be narrated as the birth of Mithila painting. Its historical importance lies elsewhere: it disrupted domestic architecture and created an accidental window through which a colonial official could see and later document an art practice embedded in women’s interior spaces. A cultural economy begins partly with such acts of visibility, because documentation can detach a practice from its local context and present it to new audiences who possess different categories of value.