Ganga Devi

Ganga Devi was born in 1928 in Mithila, in Bihar, into a Kayastha family. Her mother gave her a first brush made of rice straw and a few threads pulled from the hem of a sari. The ink was soot scraped from a cooking pot or a lantern chimney, mixed with gum arabic, cattle urine or goat’s milk. There was no paper in the village, so she practised on school notebook pages glued onto cloth.

She worked in kachni, the line style of Mithila painting, making whole pictures from fine linework. Her marriage was unhappy: her husband left her because she had no children and married again. Then a French collector commissioned several paintings, and her career began to grow.

She painted what happened to her. The Ramayana series is in subtle colours. Manav Jivan, the Life of Mankind, follows the whole life of a village woman. She travelled to Russia and Japan, and to the Festival of India in the United States, and brought back an America series in the same line she used for the gods, among them Festival of American Folk Life and Ride in a Roller Coaster.

She received the National Master Craftsman Award and, in 1984, the Padma Shri. In the 1980s, while undergoing chemotherapy in Delhi, she spent three or four months painting a kohbar ghar, the bridal chamber of Mithila, on the walls of the Crafts Museum. The museum removed it during a renovation in 2015, saying it was deteriorating, and was widely criticised. She died in 1991.