or centuries, the women of the Mithila region of northern Bihar and southern Nepal have done wall and floor paintings on the occasion of marriages and other domestic rituals. These paintings, inside their homes, on the internal and external walls of their compounds, and on the ground inside or around their homes, create sacred, protective, and auspicious spaces for their families and their rituals
. Although the images were similar, women of different castes developed distinctive styles of painting. In the aftermath of a major earthquake in 1934, William Archer, the local Collector, inspecting the damage in Mithila’s villages, saw these wall and floor paintings for the first time and subsequently photographed a number of them. Recognizing their great beauty, he and his wife, Mildred, brought them to wider attention in several publications. In the 1950s and early 1960s several Indian scholars and artists visited the region and also became enamored of the paintings. But it was not until 1966, in the midst of a major drought, that the All India Handicrafts Board sent an artist, Baskar Kulkarni, to Mithila to encourage the women to make paintings on paper that they could sell as a new source of family income.
