Ganga Devi (1928–1991)
The oddity of gender roles become apparent when a specific gender becomes the prefix to a profession, such as ‘woman artist’ of ‘female artist’, as opposed to just merely ‘artist’, implying that the default is that a man assumes the profession. Matters get further complicated in the case of traditional arts when the term becomes ‘women folk artists’ or ‘rural women artists’, the implied default here being that artists are supposed to be urban artists. These questions of gender, class and caste can be explored quite wonderfully when one looks at Mithila Artists from Bihar, and Ganga Devi’s story.
Traditional Hindu classification shows that each group of professional artisans or craftsperson’s would form a separate community based on their craft, be it castes of carpenters, blacksmiths, potters. Typically the male members would be involved in aspects of production, marketing and selling, while women would take part in production or the making of art but in a way that was mostly confined to ‘decorative’ practices, and relating to domestic, ritualistic and religious practices. Their work was never considered for sale, hence was considered worthy or artistic or commercial value, and was never considered worthy of awards or exhibitions. So in a sense, the public professional space by occupied by men who enjoyed positions of the ‘creator’, while women were relegated to the domestic space. This was true for Mithila Art as well, till a series of government-led initiatives in the 1960s created a platform for women artists to emerge as commercially important members of that community, and Ganga Devi was one of these women.
But to explain how and why this art was popularized it is necessary to understand what Mithila art is and a look at its history in terms of how it was first recognized and what led to the shaping of mainstream discourse around it.
Mithila, which refers to a broader cultural region than a distinct geographic entity, includes the districts of Darbhanga, Madhubani, Bhagalpur, Saharsa and Purnea in North Bihar and some districts in the Terai region of Nepal. From ancient times, women of the region practised their own rites and rituals, and as part of their traditions would make floor and wall paintings known as aipanas and bhittichitras respectively. Kohabar’s were particularly elaborate wall paintings made on the occasion of marriage to adorn the walls of the conjugal room.
These paintings, which were made inside the inner rooms of Maithil households, were not really documented or spoken about in the mainstream till a British Civil servant named W.G. chanced upon them in 1834. He was a scholarly administrator and an art lover, and did an extensive survey of the tradition by photographing and collecting samples, and traveling through the region over the next few years. The outcome of his research was published in the form of an article titled ‘Maithil Painting’ in the art journal Marg in the year 1949, and this article became the basis of what was popularly known about Mithila art for a long time. Till then, most of the ancient texts of the region were silent about the contributions of women in the socio-cultural life of Mithila. Archer’s article too did not acknowledge the role women played in the tradition, and also painted the picture that Mithila art was only practised by upper-caste communities. Pupul Jayakar had read Archer’s writings on Mithila and wanted to see the art for herself. While describing her first visit to the region said, ‘I visited Mithila in the early fifties and was dismayed to find that the glory to which Archer referred had seemingly vanished. The bleak dust of poverty had sapped the will and the surplus energy needed to ornament the house. The walls were blank or oleographs and calendars hung in the gosainghars. There were only traces of old painting here and there — fragments that bore testimony to the existence of powerful streams of inherited knowledge of colour, form and iconography.’
Ms. Jayakar, who was the Chairperson of the Handloom Handicrafts Export Corporation (HHEC), then took on the task to revitalize the craft industry of the region as a way to creatively respond to the drought crisis of Bihar at the time. The government used to distribute food grains and cash to women as a drought-relief measure instead of unproductive labour of breaking stone. In the early 1960s, under the advice of Indira Gandhi, this mindless practice was stopped and the women of Mithila were provided with sheets of paper to paint on. The idea was to make help the paintings evolve from floor and wall paintings to those made on paper, so that they could be then sold in urban markets. Pupul Jayakar was one of the women at the time, apart from Kamala Devi Chattopadhaya and Indira Gandhi, who was instrumental in trying to include women in handicrafts policies of India at the time, and was known to always replace the term ‘craftsman’ with the more inclusive alternative ‘craftsperson’ wherever possible.
This shift to paper was not only pivotal in establishing women as potentially earning members of the household but it also eventually meant women who earlier painted just for traditional and ritualistic purposes could now also paint as a means to express themselves and articulate their inner lives. Ganga Devi’s incredible journey is a testament to this. A lot of her evolution as an artist is deeply connected with the socio-cultural norms of the Kayasth caste to which she belonged. But a series of tragic events also contributed in art becoming very important means of solace and survival for Ganga Devi.
Born in 1928, in Chatra village of Madhubani district, Bihar, she was raised in a fairly wealthy Kayastha (upper-caste) family in which her father was a rich landlord, and her mother was a religious woman who was a deeply gifted painted. As it was customary for Kayastha women learn to how to read and write, Ganga Devi learnt the alphabet enough to be able to read the panchanga calendar, the traditional lunar calendar of Mithila. Mithila women would often observe vrats, or fasts on important religious days. Each month had at least one sacred day on which aripana, the sacred floor painting, was done by using rice paste for pigment and a twig for brush. Ganga Devi grew up creating these floor paintings. Specific paintings were made for specific events such as events that marked puberty, conception, birth, sixth day rites after birth, tonsure ceremony, initiation into learning, betrothal, marriage, etc., and so a lot of her early work revolved around religious symbols and motifs. But it was the kohbar ghar paintings that later became her speciality. How ironic it was she excelled in creating paintings meant to celebrate the union of marriage when she herself had a deeply troubled married life. After a couple years into married life, Ganga Devi was still unable to conceive a child. This resulted in her husband throwing her out of the house penniless; as he went on to marry another woman. She then turned to painting to not only survive and earn a livelihood but as a means to channel her sorrow. She worked hard to support herself only to be then exploited by a fellow painter and childhood friend who marketed her paintings under her own name, and paid Ganga Devi a pittance despite the large profit she herself made.
Around this time, Yves Vequad, a French writer and journalist who was part of group of Europeans who later became interested in Mithila Art, became familiar with Ganga Devi’s work and played an important role in promoting it in New Delhi. This lead to wide acclaim and the All India Handicrafts Board’s interested in her work. When she became part of the running in being considered for a National Award, a man named H.P. Misra stepped in to help. H.P. Misra, the then Assistant Director of the Marketing and Service Extension Centre, Madhubhani, Bihar, run by the Ministry of Textiles, Govt. of India, offered his home for her to work in peacefully to prepare for the award. Ganga Devi’s estranged husband who had already started to live with his new wife took great issue with this. As she recalled, “Around this time a thought was given to consider me for a National Award. Misra Sahib of the Madhubani Office obtained a large sheet of paper and asked me to paint on it. I told him that I had no place to sit and paint. There was no peace at home. Misraji invited me to stay in his house and paint there. On this, my husband’s brother said: ‘You have got our nose and ears chopped’, (downgraded the family’s honor by staying in another man’s house). My husband said: ‘I will tear the paper to pieces.’ They said they would not allow me to go to Madhubani and live with Misra Sahib’s family. Badridas, my sister’s relative, intervened and I just left for Madhubani. Misra Sahib and his wife were very kind to me. … I painted day and night. My husband knew this much, that I was not a woman of bad character. My co-wife was also quiet after she learnt that I had a grant of Rs. 1500.”
She went on to be awarded the National Master Craftsman Award, and then later won the Padma Shri in 1984. Not only did paintings on paper help spread and popularize her work, but as mentioned earlier, it also helped a breaking away from Maithil art being confined to religious and ritualistic art into new terrains. Ganga Devi had begun to experiment with new vocabularies of symbols and images, and also started exploring drawing with fine lines and new compositions. For instance, she solved problems of perspective and how to depict the three-dimensional world by completely eliminating the depth dimension, and this ‘apersectival’ approach to pictorial depictions became one of her signature marks. In other instances, to tackle the issue of representing temporal sequences of legends spatially, she would divide up space into various squares or rectangular compartments by means of cross bands, like a comic strip, with each compartment having a complete painting which represented a pictorial narrative. According to Dr. Jain , the best phase of her art practice began in 1982 with her epic work — ‘Cycle of Life’, where she ‘crossed the threshold of convention to excavate fresh grounds hitherto untouched by any painter from Madhubani tradition or by herelf.’ This painting which was conceived in epic scale depicted a series of Samskams, coming of age or initiation rituals practised in Madhubani. With this work, she began her journey of was painting themes that related to everyday life and her immediate human surrounding. In this, the entire ‘cycle of life’ has been rendered by her in 24 scenes, each marking a significant event in the process of being born and growing up in Mithila.
Ganga Devi’s practice continued to evolve as she got the opportunity to travel extensively because of her work. She traveled to Japan, thanks to Japanese interest in Mithila art which was sparked by a man named Tokio Hasegawa who had set up ‘The Mithila Museum’ in Japan. But the most important international trip she took was to America in 1985 as part of an exhibition of Indian folk culture and art in Washington. She created a series of paintings in the two years after she returned which were later titled the ‘America Series’. This series showed that she did not remain aloof during her visit to a foreign country, but engaged with it artistically and the result was a unique narrative style with minimal graphic symbols and her reading of American motifs such as the American flag, her interpretation of a rollercoaster, and the wonderful fusion of her Madhubani style with what she stay in the way she rendered people wearing half American half-Indian costumes carrying shopping bags.
Tragedy struck again when in mid-1987 Ganga Devi was struck by cancer. She spent most of her last few years, starting from September 1987 till her death on 21 January 1991, in the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, apart from a few trips and some time spent in AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) for treatment of her illness. Even in this difficult time she continued to paint and created her first series of autobiographical work, ‘The Cancer Series’. The series comprised of four paintings, the first which showed her struggles of dealing with a quack or fake doctor in Madhubani, the second dealt with her visit to Chatara where she faced the sudden death of her elder brother, the third dealt with her long and difficult journeyfrom Chatara to Madhubani, and from there to Delhi via Patna amidst heavy rain and floods, and the fourth depicted Ganga Devi’s arrival in Delhi and her treatment at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Her paintings showed both the physical pain and loneliness that she endured during the time of her diagnosis and treatment. Some of the symbols from her hospital visits featured in her paintings, such as ceiling fans she stared at while bedridden, bleak hospital lights, the mundane doctor’s handbags, spittoons she spotted place under the patient’s beds, temperature charts hanging on the walls and the painful moments of being given injections or blood transfusions.
