Sita Devi

Figures and Birds Indian Mithila Folk Art

1960

Sita Devi was born in 1914, in the Jitwarpur, Madhubani district, India. She was famous for drawing in the Bjarni style, which involves outlining the subject in black and filling the areas with color. Sita Devi was the first to bring the intricate Bharni style of Madhubani painting out of village homes and into urban drawing rooms which had fetched her the Padma Shri in 1981. She was honored for the first time with a state award in 1969 and the national award in 1975. Sita Devi’s collectors included the first President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Babu Jagjivan Ram and Lalit Narayan Mishra. According to her eldest son, Ram Dev, she was regarded as the mother at Jitwarpur village for her social commitment. It was because of Sita Devi that the village first had a primary school. Madhubani painting, also called Mithila painting, is a unique style of painting, practiced in the Mithila region of Nepal and Indian States of Bihar. Painting is done with fingers, twigs, brushes, nib-pens and matchsticks, using natural dyes and pigments and is characterized by eye-catching geometrical patterns. Traditionally the paintings were drawn on interior walls in the village houses by Hindu women of the Brahmin and Kyshath castes who handed down their visual knowledge from one generation to the next. The folk paintings represent a variety of symbolic meanings mainly associated with the celebration of fertility in Madhubani weddings and seasonal rituals, but also include the major gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, in particular, Sita, the wife of the god Ram and a central figure in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Her artwork finds a place in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Mithila Museum in Japan and many other international institutions.