Bowa Devi: The Mithila Painter Who Picked Up a Brush at Twelve

Bowa Devi was twelve when she picked up a brush and began to paint the mud walls of her village. That same year, she was married. In Jitwarpur, in the Madhubani district of Bihar, women had painted their homes for generations, but the work was made for the family and rarely seen by anyone beyond it. Her earliest paintings were never meant to leave those walls.

A little over a decade later, drought brought an unlikely gift to the village in the form of handmade paper. It would change the course of her life, and the course of Mithila painting along with it.

In her first year of painting on paper, Bowa Devi was paid Rs 1.50 for each piece. Today her work is offered at international auctions, with estimates that run into hundreds of pounds and thousands of dollars. 

The journey between those two figures is the story of one woman, one remarkable village, and an art form that learned to travel far beyond the walls where it was born.

Art That Was Never Meant to Be Sold

Long before anyone thought of selling it, Mithila painting was part of the rhythm of home life. Writings from the region suggest that women were painting gods and goddesses on their walls as early as the 14th century, and the practice passed from mother to daughter, one generation to the next.

Each painting had a purpose. Women decorated their homes for weddings, festivals and family rituals, and they saved their finest work for the room where a newly married couple would begin their life together. The images carried hopes for love, children and good fortune.

Because they were painted on mud, these works were never meant to last. Walls were replastered, and old images faded beneath new ones. The painters did not sign their names, and the world beyond the village had little idea the paintings existed.

That began to change after a major earthquake struck the region in 1934. As walls came down, a British officer named William Archer saw the paintings hidden inside and photographed them. His article in 1949 introduced the art to a wider readership, yet for years afterwards it remained what it had always been, a private art made by women for their own homes.

The Drought That Changed Everything

The real turning point came with the drought of 1966 and 1967. 

As harvests failed and families struggled, Pupul Jayakar, who led the All India Handicrafts Board, saw a way to bring income into Mithila homes. She sent the Mumbai artist Bhaskar Kulkarni to the region to encourage women to paint on paper and sell what they made. According to the Sainsbury Centre, the first works he brought back to Delhi in 1967 caused a sensation.

Bowa Devi was the youngest painter in that early group. Born in the early 1940s into a Jitwarpur family of traditional painters, she had been decorating walls since childhood. 

After her marriage, it was her mother-in-law who urged her to keep painting, and that encouragement shaped the rest of her life. When the paper arrived, she already had years of practice in her hands. What she lacked was an audience, and the drought programme gave her one.

What Changed When the Wall Became Paper

On the surface, moving from wall to paper looks like a small shift. In practice, it reshaped almost every part of the art. A painting on paper could last. Where a wall might be replastered within a year, a sheet of paper could be framed, kept and handed down.

It could also travel. Paintings that once belonged to a handful of villages were carried to Delhi, and from there to Paris, Tokyo and Madrid, reaching people who had never heard the word Mithila.

Most importantly, the work now carried a name. On a wall, a painting belonged to the household. On paper, it belonged to the woman who made it. For the first time, many Mithila women earned money from their art, and a few, Bowa Devi among them, came to be recognised as artists in their own right.

A Painter With Her Own Voice

Mithila painters draw on a shared world of gods, stories and patterns. Bowa Devi’s gift lies in the way she has made certain images entirely her own. 

The most striking is the nag kanya, or snake maiden, a figure with the upper body of a woman and the coils of a snake. She is close kin to Manasa, the snake goddess linked with both destruction and renewal. 

Curators at BAMPFA have seen in this figure a reflection of Bowa Devi’s own story of survival through a difficult early life. Her range reaches well beyond the snake maiden. She has painted the ten avatars of Vishnu, the fierce goddess Kali, Surya the sun god and the many tales of Krishna. 

In her paintings of the wedding of Ram and Sita, it is Sita whose story takes centre stage. She has also brought in modern touches, from red hearts to scenes drawn from current events, and her work moves with ease from small sheets of paper to canvases as tall as 20 feet.

Like much folk art, her work has been shaped by more than one pair of hands. Museum records note that her husband, Jagannath, has done much of the colouring in her later paintings.

Colour Drawn From the Land

For most of her career, Bowa Devi has relied on colours made from the world around her. Black comes from soot mixed with cow dung, green from leaves, white from rice powder and red from vermilion. Her palette favours black, yellow, red and white, laid onto handmade paper.

Each shape is filled with flat, even colour, without shading, and the paint is applied with brushes, fingers, twigs, matchsticks or nib pens. Together, these choices give Madhubani painting its bold, crowded and joyful character, a style that is recognisable at a glance.

A Village That Kept Winning

Jagdamba Devi

Few villages anywhere can claim what Jitwarpur has achieved. Two of its painters, Jagdamba Devi and Sita Devi, had already received the Padma Shri when Bowa Devi became the third in 2017. According to Sarmaya, no other village in India has won as many Padma awards.

Her road to that honour was long and steady. She received the National Award in 1984, and five years later her work was shown at Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 

The exhibition placed artists from around the world beside celebrated Western names, at a time when village art was often dismissed as mere craft. Bowa Devi