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.”