Mithilanchal · Middle & Lower Gangetic Plain
Dance
Women dance balancing an earthen pot perforated with dozens of holes and lit from inside, moving in a circle to a fast rhythm. It is explicitly a protective ritual against black magic, addressed to the goddess, and the pot is made afresh each year.
Performed by: Women, unmarried and married. Occasion: Dussehra and Durga Puja
A sung dance-drama about a husband who has gone away to work and the wife who waits, quarrels and reconciles with him. It is the region's own account of labour migration, performed as comedy and understood as autobiography.
Performed by: Women in pairs, one playing each role. Occasion: The monsoon and the sowing season
A night-long women's performance with role reversal, mock marriages and bawdy songs, held in the courtyard when the men have gone.
Performed by: Women of the household. Occasion: Weddings, after the baraat leaves
Dance and narration of the Raja Salhesh epic at the god's earthen shrines — a Dalit devotional tradition that also produced the Godna style of Mithila painting.
Performed by: Dusadh performers. Occasion: The Salhesh festival and shrine gatherings
Music
The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century songs of Vidyapati, sung as living repertoire rather than recited as literature — Radha and Krishna songs, and the Nachari and Mahesvani addressed to Shiva.
Two Maithil devotional genres addressed to Shiva, sung in a plaintive descending line, and among the very few folk forms still routinely performed at village gatherings.
The farewell song sung as a bride leaves her parents' house, and the long wedding-song repertoire around it — sung by women, unaccompanied or with a dholak.
The songs of the Chhath fast, sung on the way to the water and through the night — a repertoire that has moved almost entirely into recorded form in the last thirty years without losing its ritual place.
Birth songs, and the sister-brother songs sung over the clay bird figures of Sama-Chakeva through the Kartik nights.
Theatre
A medieval Maithili sung drama, performed by a troupe with a narrator and set to classical ragas — one of the oldest surviving vernacular theatre traditions in eastern India, now performed rarely.
Night-long narration of the Salhesh epic with song and enactment at village shrines, in the Dusadh tradition.
Crafts
A women's wall-painting tradition of the wedding chamber, moved onto paper during the 1966–67 famine when a handicrafts officer suggested it as relief work. Within a decade it was in Delhi galleries and abroad, and it is now the best-known folk art of India — and one of very few in which the artists are named.
Material: Handmade paper, cloth and mud walls; natural and now acrylic pigment. Technique: Line drawn with a bamboo nib or a cloth-wrapped twig and filled in flat colour, with every space occupied — the double-line kachni style, the filled bharni style, the tattoo-derived godna style, and the tantric style, each historically attached to particular communities.
Boxes, containers and figures made by women, historically for storing a bride's belongings. The mauni — a lidded ritual basket — is given at weddings and used to carry offerings.
Material: Sikki golden grass and moonj. Technique: Grass split, dried to a natural gold, and coiled and bound into closed forms with a metal awl; dyed grass is worked in for pattern.
A quilting tradition turned into a narrative medium by rural women's collectives, whose panels record dowry, migration, health and violence as often as they record deities.
Material: Layered old cotton, coloured thread. Technique: Running stitch quilting over layered cloth with chain-stitch outlines.
A decorative-arts tradition that began as forehead ornament manufacture and survives as painted panels in a Mithila-derived idiom.
Material: Glass, and now hardboard with enamel and gold leaf. Technique: Fine painting in enamel on a lacquered ground, once applied to glass discs worn on the forehead.
The bird figures made by sisters for the Sama-Chakeva festival — a seasonal craft that exists for eight days a year and is then destroyed.
Material: Clay, straw, paper. Technique: Modelled by hand and painted, made new each year and immersed at the end of the festival.
Mithila Makhana holds a geographical indication registered in 2022. The region produces the overwhelming majority of the world's supply, and the work — diving and popping — is done by specific communities, chiefly the Mallah.
Material: Euryale ferox seed. Technique: Diving, drying, grading, roasting and hand-striking to pop the kernel.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Mithilanchal, from classical forms to village traditions. (17)