After coming home from school, 10-year-old Avinash Karn would fill in colours on Mithila or Madhubani paintings that his mother or aunt would make in Ranti village of Madhubani district, Bihar. He would be amused by the pointy nose of the “funny” characters depicting the epics and the “garish” colours. It would take him more than decade—when he started studying Fine Arts at the Banaras Hindu University and learnt about Mithila artists such as Sita Devi, Ganga Devi and Mahasundari Devi—to develop an appreciation for the art form. Today, the 30-year-old is popularising it by conducting workshops under the first-ever Madhubani collective, Kachni-Bharni.
“I set it up during the pandemic. It was more a response to the solitude brought on by Covid.
I missed community life and wondered if I could encourage others from my village take to art,” says Karn, who in 2016 started experimenting with clay as the base for his works, a marked departure from the conventional use of paper or fabric like cotton, jute and silk.
As part of his collective, the artist set up Aks, a workshop for Muslim girls in association with Artreach India, a Delhi-based NGO that uses art to connect to young people living in marginalised communities. “Generally Madhubani painting is practised by women of Brahmin or Kayastha families. When I set up Kachni, I came across many girls from the Muslim community who wanted to learn it,” he says. Last month, Aks’s third batch began training. While Karn teaches the girls traditional styles, he stresses contemporising it. So, you have Ram and Sita in an airplane, Radha and Krishna riding a scooter, and the traditional Khobar style (paintings with symbols of the sun, lotus and snakes made on the walls during weddings in the villages) painted on the pallu of a sari.
“My aim is to popularise Madhubani, so that it is easily relatable. I want these girls to be able to paint commercially,” says Karn, who has tied up with Delhi-based apparel brand Talking Threads to market the products like saris, dupattas and kurtas painted on by the members of Aks. While he rues the fact that there are hardly any art schools that teach the Mithila style, the educator adds that things are changing. “Artists like Santosh Kumar Das and Malvika Raj are working on modernising the imagery while staying true to the basics of line drawing and colour palette. Last year, an art school, Mithila Chitrakala Sansthan, was set up in Madhubani. The first group of students has just graduated. We need more such institutes to preserve this art,” says Karn.