The Mithila Murals Project

Partners: Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu, Dr. Sasanka Perera, Dr. Pooja Kalita, Sapana Sanjeevanai

December 2024

In December 2024, HaP principal investigators, Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu and Dr. Sasanka Perera, along with research fellow Dr. Pooja Kalita co-organized an outreach program with Sapana Sanjeevani, one of the founding members of PayalSapanaPaints, a Nepal-based feminist art collective. This project spanning over two days from the 8th to 10th December brought together 10 Mithila and Madhubani art practitioners from different districts around the Mithila region in Nepal and India. The residential workshops were held at the Cultural Village in Janakpur. After the workshop the women-led group of artists also collaborated in a placemaking project where they painted the walls of the Janakpur Railway Station, which is also the station that connects India and Nepal.

Centrally the workshop was able to address a crucial impasse one ongoing reluctance among the younger generation to take up this art form. And secondly the challenge of bringing in newer themes. For example its confinement to religious themes, has resulted in the “over-dependence on monotonous forms to meet the market needs or is under the direct appropriation of institutionalized politics or religion or a combination of the two”. In this workshop the artists tried to address these problems and to create a space for personal narratives and collaborative work.

Below are impressions from their workshop alongside snippets from a report detailing the Mithila Murals Project.

PayalSapanaPaints

Artists at work. Photo: Sabin Ninglekhu

PayalSapanaPaints, is a Nepal-based feminist art collective. Sapana’s deep reservoir of knowledge, ideas and insights rooted in the lived everyday circumstances provided us the intellectual and creative direction in putting the outreach program together. Sapana is a practicing Mithila artist and is quite well-known in Nepal for experimenting with the art form as a political narrative inspired by personal subjectivities of womanhood, or more specifically Madhesi womanhood rooted in the Mithila heritage. Sapana also comes from a family of Mithila artists – her mother and her aunt, her mother’s sister who is no more, are considered pioneers in the art form, who have inspired other artists that helped put together the Janakpur Women Development Centre – a collective of Mithila artists

“Well known Mithila artists like Sita Devi, Ganga Devi, Pano Das, Revati Mandal have been able to represent their own everyday circumstances through the interpretation of personal stories in their art and are well recognized for this ... The aim of this outreach was to bring artists from different backgrounds 4 along the lines of caste, region, ethnicity as well as different districts of the Mithila region in both India and Nepal to help break the monotony of repetitive themes and motifs and explore together, with a sense of community, various themes that are relatable to the artists vis-à-vis their personal stories.”
“December 8th and 9th 2024 were focused on mural painting by the artists, a first in the history of the city of Janakpur given the mixture of artists representing geographic, caste and cultural diversity in general. With critical attention to the socio-cultural locations of the artists, we used the outreach also as an opportunity to ignite public conversations around caste-based and place-based narratives that dominate the art form, and the necessity to challenge this domination for the creative, and at times even radical, growth of the art form.”
“A first of its kind, the women-led mural painting project was able to incite dialogue between the artists and the public, in the short and long term, and in ways that are direct and indirect, particularly around culture, religion and patriarchy as they intersect with gender and sexuality, and in the process, added to Janakpur’s placemaking.”
“We felt from the inception that painting the wall served many purposes. This is why we envisioned this project in the first place. The very act of ‘doing’ art collectively and in public space along with the legacy that follows in the form of the murals on the walls of an iconic heritage site of a religious town such as Janakpur, is symbolic to us, in bringing a form of art and the artists hitherto not taken too seriously by the state, into the public domain and closer to public attention. Such a collaborative act also reframes the state-society relationship, with women as protagonists, beyond borders. To note, it is the railway station that connects Nepal with India.”
“We believe strongly that through the space we co-created through the outreach, the artists were able to mobilize their agentive capacity to interpret and articulate art rooted both in the fixed nature of traditional forms and the mutating everyday life. In this sense, of followed through by them and others, this effort will mark the beginning of an epistemic break in Mitila and Madhubani art.”

PayalSapanaPaints also co-hosted HaP’s 2024 Winter School, read the blog posts here.

Jal, Jungle, Jameen: Nature as Culture in Kirat Heritage

Lead partner: Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu (Social Science Baha)

January–June 2024

In collaboration with SOAS University of London (Dr. Stefanie Lotter), the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) in Ahmedabad, India, University of Southampton (Prof Bryony Whitmarsh), the action-research NGO “Indigenous without Borders” (collaborators: Niranti Tumbapo, Kailash Rai, Govinda Chhantyal), and place-based collectives of heritage and identity activists in the following four districts in the eastern provinces of Nepal: Terhathum, Panchthar, Khotang and Sankhuwasabha

The initiative’s title—Jal, Jungle, Jameen—translates in English into “water, forest and land”: the three sites central to indigenous Kirat heritage in Nepal and India.

This outreach project brought together a team of seven researchers and activists representing five different academic and research institutes in India, Nepal and the UK to strengthen networks with Indigenous without Borders (IwB). Through the partnerships formed, “Jal, Jungle, and Jameen” organized a series of traveling workshops conducted in Province 1 in Eastern Nepal, creating grassroots-level outreach with locally based collectives of activists, artists, heritage preservationists and oral historians in the four districts. The goals of the initiative is to engage in indigenous coalition building through trans-regional and international partnerships, while strengthening intellectual and political conditions for the future that will arrest the project(s) of erasure and strengthen the project(s) of decolonization through a series of timely, everyday interventions.

In addition to its series of traveling workshops, “Jungle, Jal, Jameen” will produce four multi-lingual essays and a documentary to reflect on the initiative’s work and to preserve its teachings for both local and international audiences. The excerpt below, by Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu, is one of the aforementioned essays produced as part of the project.

Publication by Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu in The Internationalist Newsletter, for issue #98

This post is an excerpt of a longer piece. It has been republished with permission and was first published in The Internationalist Newsletter for issue #98. The entire version can be found here.

Poster credit: The Internationalist Newsletter, Issue #98

For issue #98 of The Internationalist, Dr Ninglekhu writes on the "No Koshi" movement in eastern Nepal which resists the erasure of Indigenous identities by rejecting the province name "Koshi" and fighting against imposed development projects like a cable car on sacred land.

History bears witness to a universal truth: The inauguration of the colonial future begins with the erasure of the Indigenous past. In March 2023, as part of an ongoing federal restructuring of the Nepali state, the provincial government of as-yet-unnamed “Province No. 1” of eastern Nepal made the parliamentary decision to name the province “Koshi.” 

The Indigenous Kirat, predominantly the Rai and Limbu ethnic communities, rejected this name on a few important grounds. First, with its mythological origins rooted in Hinduism, “Koshi” represented neither the history nor heritage of the geographic territory. Second, the ruling government had deceitfully deployed their electoral advantage in the provincial parliament to sidestep deliberative dialogue necessary in something as historic as naming a province. In doing so, they had reneged on the promises made to the Indigenous people during the election time. 

This was how the “No Koshi” Indigenous movement was born; negligible to the state in its nascent phase, but less so after their more-than-expected showing in a recent by-election in one of the important constituencies in eastern Nepal.

At the heart of this ongoing movement is a demand for the right to name one’s territory and land according to the heart’s desire. To put it pointedly, the movement has declared “Enough!”; enough with the project of erasing and replacing Indigenous names of places, landscapes, rivers, forests, graveyards, hills and rocks, with Hindu names, as a primary and preliminary form of neocolonial domination and control. The resurgent “No Koshi” movement is persistent and relentless, not violent but also not peaceful, and filled with creativity deemed necessary to deal with uncertainty. 

A motley crew of activists and anthropologists, architects and geographers, photographers and writers, many of us of the Indigenous background, embarked on a journey of eastern Nepal to document the resurgent Indigenous movement carried out in the spirit of critical solidarity with the movement. On the journey, we passed many rivers and their tributaries, hilly mounds and graveyards, ponds and forests. We spoke with young students and activists, political leaders and local historians, returning migrants and farmers who never left. Through their telling, we have come face-to-face with histories, stories and anecdotes that spoke of the sacred bonds people in these parts have historically shared with nature. 

So, when names are erased, it is not just the names that are lost. Remembering and forgetting are powerful tools for exerting domination and control. New names remove old traces. And when the past is no longer remembered, what is lost is the legitimacy necessary to make claims over the present time. In turn, what is ultimately taken away, seized under broad daylight, is the power to chart a future. 

During the journey, each day left behind an impression that made this clear — after a decade of dormancy, the indigenous movement in eastern Nepal is back at the forefront. And reclaiming the names — of water, forest, and land — that were lost or stolen, effaced or erased, through stealth and by force, was the first fight to be fought, and won, in this permanent war of attrition for reclaiming power. 

Images from left to right:

In Phalaicha, Panchhar, the protestors of the 'No-Koshi Struggle Committee', discussing the ups and downs of the ongoing movement; Photo credit: Sabin Ninglekhu.

Many like the protestor pictured, member of the ‘No Cable Car Struggle Committee’, keep guard  along the trail to discourage the Armed Police Force (APF) from setting up camp in Mukkumlung; Photo credit: Sabin Ninglekhu.

Trees, including Rhododendron, cut down following the government’s order; Photo credit: Kailash Rai.

Funeral procession of the cable car; Photo credit: Sabin Ninglekhu.

Mask carrying the rings of a tree trunk that was cut into two by the Nepal government; Photo credit: Mekh Limbu.