Historical Context
The origin of these drawings can be traced to the Madhubani region of India and Nepal that includes the towns and villages of Jitwarpur, Madhubani, Darbhanga and Saharsa in India and Janakpur in Nepal.
Mithila (or Maithili) — the language spoken there — includes linguistic features from Hindi and Bengali.
This region is replete in history with the birth of Gautama Buddha in Kapilavastu, his enlightenment in Bodh Gaya and the teaching of his first sermon in Sarnath just north of Varanasi. Lord Ram and his wife Sita — the central figures in Valmiki's great Hindu epic, the Ramayana — were both born here. Mithila artists draw inspiration from their geographic and historical closeness with these epic characters.
The drawings are highly symbolic in that they illustrate scenes from everyday life, from anecdotal myths and from the epics. Tantric principals (focusing on female forms of divine power and on the primacy of the feminine principle that infuses energy into otherwise lifeless matter) are also depicted. Some scholars have speculated that Mithila wall and floor drawings and tantric arts and rituals involving wall and floor drawings go back to some common source. Observers familiar with Freudian symbolism lend a Freudian interpretation to the Kohbar drawings of Mithila. Awareness of details of the lives and settings in which the artists have created their works is however considered to greatly enrich the interpretation process.
Written by Ed Vermue, November 2017