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Journalism of Courage
(By Ashutosh Kumar Thakur)
I have always been fascinated by the places where poetry and visual art intersect. Where the ordinary, the everyday, and the overlooked is transformed and reframed. Into something that endures, something that continues to hum with life long after the moment has passed. Recently, I read Ashwani Kumar’s poem Pablo Neruda in Gaya, and it lodged itself in my mind like a persistent echo.
The image of Neruda, walking along the dusty streets of Bihar, performing Pinddan in Gaya, his head bowed, the wind carrying the dust of the riverbeds and the cries of crows, moved me. It moved me not because it was extraordinary, but because it was intimate, human, and quiet in its enormity. And it made me wonder: what if Neruda had wandered east, further into Bihar, into Madhubani, into the heart of Mithila, where women with hands stained in turmeric, soot, indigo, and cow-dung, transformed mud walls into living tapestries, daily labor into devotion, silence into color?
What would he have seen, what would he have written? This essay is my attempt to follow that imagination, to honor the women of Mithila, and to consider how art survives, persists, and speaks in places that are too often overlooked.
Mithila is a land that refuses to be contained on modern maps. It exists in fragments, in the memory of elders, in songs whispered at dawn, in rituals enacted at dusk, and in the cracks of mud walls that hold together homes and stories alike. Bihar, the state in which Mithila resides, is easier to locate, easier to name, but its older cultural geographies have been overshadowed, folded into administrative boundaries and lost in the modern hurry. What survives are stories: the epic of Sita, the memory of scholars and poets, a thousand-year-old rhythm of learning and devotion. Yet the most visible, most immediate presence of Mithila today is through the art of its women, who take mud, cow-dung, pigments, and bamboo twigs and turn walls into a living record of ritual, memory, and imagination.
In villages such as Jitwarpur, Ranti, and Rashidpur, women continue practices handed down through generations. What the outside world now calls ‘Madhubani painting’ is not a brand, not a technique stripped from context; it is life, it is prayer, it is survival.
Government emporiums, exhibitions, and international tourism have brought recognition, but behind the brochures, the framed awards, and the photographs in magazines, lies a reality that is far from romanticized rural idylls. Mud walls are not only canvases; they are archives of resilience, patience, and continuity, written in lines of indigo, vermilion, lampblack, and ochre.
To imagine Pablo Neruda in these villages is to imagine two worlds colliding: the Chilean poet, Nobel laureate, and diplomat, whose odes celebrated tomatoes, onions, socks, ordinary workers, the unnoticed, the overlooked, and the women of Mithila, who with quiet insistence, sanctify what surrounds them. Neruda believed poetry must nourish, that it must be sustenance as much as beauty; and these women, using mud, cow-dung, soot, turmeric, leaves, and indigo, turn ordinary materials into universes on fragile walls.
Gods and goddesses appear, not as distant, untouchable beings, but as recurring presences, summoned annually in festivals, weddings, and seasonal rituals. Fish swim endlessly, lotuses bloom, peacocks stride along borders, the sun and moon shine in careful symmetry. These images are not decoration, they are rhythm, continuity, devotion, a subtle insistence that life itself, ordinary life, is sacred.
Neruda would have recognized this instinct: the transformation of the mundane into the eternal, the making of poetry out of what surrounds us, the act of making the ordinary speak, repeatedly.
Until the 1960s, Madhubani painting was ephemeral. A wall painted for a wedding or a festival would fade with the rains and sun. Its impermanence was part of its meaning: life is fleeting, rituals must be renewed. The act of painting was devotion, a claim to continuity, a private act of creation. Commerce was absent.
But drought struck Bihar. Poverty deepened. And women, encouraged to paint on paper to sell their works, transformed ritual into livelihood. Practices once contained within courtyards and walls now crossed continents. Names emerged: Sita Devi, Ganga Devi, Mahasundari Devi, Boua Devi, Dulari Devi, Rani Jha. Delhi, New York, London, Tokyo, exhibitions followed, awards were won, and these women’s works became globally recognized. Devotion entered the market, impermanence was crystallized, and yet, paradoxically, survival became possible. Painting was no longer only a prayer; it was also bread, dignity, and recognition.
Madhubani painting is not one thing. Bharni and Kachni, historically practiced by Brahmin and Kayastha women, depicted gods, epics, and ritual scenes with heavy, vibrant pigment or fine, delicate lines. Godna, originating in Dalit communities, carried geometric patterns reminiscent of tattoo art, narratives in abstracted forms.
Even as the market blurred distinctions, traces of caste, identity, and social hierarchy remained. To draw a fish, a lotus, or a peacock is to participate in a language that is centuries old, a memory encoded in pigment and line. The art is never simply aesthetic; it is social, political, ritual, and historical all at once.
Walking through Mithila is to see a life shaped equally by beauty and adversity. Cracked roads, unreliable electricity, seasonal migration defines the daily rhythm. Men leave for work in distant cities or countries. Women remain, managing households, tending fields, raising children, and sustaining family economies. Amid this, they paint. Their art is not leisure; it is an assertion, an insistence on order and beauty against uncertainty, a rehearsal of survival.
Courtyards and walls become stages where the universe is recreated. Fertility, devotion, prosperity, these are not abstract ideals, but acts of survival encoded in visual form. Every stroke carries meaning. Every line is memory.
Recognition has transformed this art. Exhibitions, buyers, awards, and market pressures have created hierarchies. Paper painting requires discipline different from wall painting. Buyers’ demands reduce imagination to repetition fish here, lotus there, borders filled with peacocks, patterns repeated endlessly.
Yet what may seem formulaic to an outsider is, for the painter, ritual and continuity. Repetition is not mechanical; it is devotion. To paint the fish again is to call fertility; to draw the lotus is to repeat creation. The innovation of novelty is secondary to the preservation of memory.
Madhubani painting has become a global emblem of folk art, collected by museums and galleries far from Bihar. Poverty and art coexist in an uneasy intimacy: women who often have little formal education produce work that circulates across continents. Their colours, forms, and devotion are now celebrated as heritage.
Yet the local realities remain. Recognition is double-edged. Some women gain independence and income, while others face pressure to reproduce patterns, meet deadlines, and conform to external tastes. Art becomes a negotiation between creativity, ritual, and economy.
In their act of painting, the women of Madhubani enact something akin to poetry. They do not write with words but with line, colour, and pattern. They inscribe devotion, continuity, survival, and memory onto walls, paper, and cloth.
Walking through Mithila, one sees the local and the universal: the Andes of Neruda and the Himalayas of Mithila, distant yet connected by the same human impulse to make ordinary life meaningful. Songs sung during festivals, images drawn for rituals, the patterns repeated year after year, these are all forms of poetry, insisting that life, in its quietest forms, matters.
To romanticise Mithila is easy: vibrant colours, intricate patterns, laughter, the presence of gods. To confront its hardships is harder: poverty, hunger, social constraints, migration. The truth of Madhubani lies in the tension between beauty and want, hymn and hunger, continuity and change.
Poetry, here, is not metaphor; it is life made visible, tangible, enduring. The fish swimming on clay, the lotus blooming on walls, the peacock strutting along borders, all are acts of devotion and survival. Art and life are inseparable; continuity and creativity coexist in delicate balance.
What, then, is poetry? For Neruda, it was the tomato bursting red. For the women of Mithila, it is the fish swimming on clay, the lotus unfolding on mud, the peacock tracing eternity along a border. For us, it is the recognition that behind every act of beauty lies endurance, memory, and history.
If Neruda had come to Madhubani, he might have left with new odes, poems spun from colour and devotion, tracing lines between ordinary life and the eternal. We, observing today, inherit a chronicle of survival written not only in words, but in colour, ritual, and devotion. In Madhubani, silence becomes colour, absence becomes presence, and ordinary life becomes something that defies time itself.
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur hails from the India–Nepal border region of Madhubani and Janakpur. A management professional, he writes regularly on society, literature, and the arts, reflecting on the shared histories and cultures of South Asia. He can be reached at ashutoshbthakur@gmail.com. )
