Baua Devi | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | |
| Style | Mithila or Madhubani painting |
| Awards | Padma Shri (2017), National Award (1984) |
Baua Devi is aMithila painting artist fromJitwarpur village ofMadhubani District inBihar. Mithila painting is an ancientfolk art that originated in the region. It is recognized as a series of complex geometric and linear patterns traced on the walls of a house's inner chambers. It was later transferred to handmade paper andcanvases.[1] Baua Devi won theNational Award in 1984 and received thePadma Shri in 2017.
Baua Devi has been practising the Mithila art form for almost 60 years.[2] She got married at the age of 12, and was encouraged by her mother-in-law to pursue painting. In 1966,Pupul Jayakar, then director of the All India Handicrafts Board, an advisory body of theMinistry of textiles, sentMumbai artist Bhaskar Kulkarni toMadhubani to find art and artists. Baua Devi was a teenager when she met Kulkarni and was the youngest of the group of artists who formally transferred Mithila art from walls, where it was traditionally practised asmural art, to paper. Bhaskar Kulkarni took their works to museums and later encouraged Baua Devi to come to theNational Crafts Museum. She was paid Rs.1.50 per painting for the first year that she worked for Kulkarni.[3] Her work has since travelled to galleries and museums inSpain,France andJapan.[4] In 2015, one of her paintings was gifted byPrime MinisterNarendra Modi to the Mayor ofHanover,Stefan Schosstok on his visit toIndia.[5]
Over the past five decades, Madhubani art has grown in prominence and Baua Devi's work has won critical acclaim[6][7]—she was the onlywoman artist from India to show at theMagiciens de la Terre in 1989 at theCentre Pompidou.[8] Her work ranges in scale from a small sheet of paper to murals up to 20 feet high.[9] Her paintings tell the mythological stories ofLord Krishna andRam and Sita, while emphasising on Sita's narrative of the story.[9][10] Baua Devi uses handmade paper and natural colours for her paintings, predominantly using black, yellow, red and white in her palette.[6][9][11]