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On The Road in Madhubani

It’s the forgotten little things that catch Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s eye. Rusty public clocks, abandoned helmets, manual typewriters. Each of these has inspired a series of elegant, poignant images from this Mumbai-based photographer and author. So it was interesting to get his reactions to the pictures we brought back from our visit to Jitwarpur, where we shot our film on Madhubani. The subjects here are anything but forgotten—they’re bright, eyeball-grabbing artworks that enjoy celebrity status all over Bihar. Madhubani paintings are the state’s calling card, the art that has brought international fame and respect to this region. We were curious to hear what Chirodeep would see in these pictures, what his photographer’s eye and traveller’s instinct would discern beyond the obvious. Click through to see our photographs and read our curator’s sensitive commentary on art in public spaces, the meditative quality of indigenous art and the spreading stain of synthetic colour.

 

In his two-decade career, Chirodeep Chaudhuri has worn many hats – starting out in advertising as a visualiser, then switching careers as a photojournalist and later an Editor of Photography. His most recent avatar has been as the author of the critically feted book A Village In Bengal: Photographs and an Essay, a result of a 13-year-long engagement with his ancestral village in West Bengal and his family’s nearly two-century-old tradition of Durga Puja. He has headed the Design and Photography departments of the international arts and culture magazine Time Out’s three India editions and also been the Editor of Photography of National Geographic Traveler (India).

Chirodeep’s work documents the urban landscape and he has often been referred to as the “chronicler of Bombay”. During his career he has produced diverse documents of his home city in a range of projects –Seeing Time: Public Clocks of Bombay, The One-Rupee Entrepreneur, The Commuters, In the city, a library, among others. His work has also been featured in important publications about the city like Bombay: The Cities Within, Fort Walks, Anchoring a City Line, Bombay Then: Mumbai Now and Bombay, Meri Jaan, to name a few.

Chirodeep lives in Bombay and divides his time between his various teaching assignments and photographing subjects as diverse as café sitters, abandoned helmets and the disappearing world of the typewriters. His book on the manual typewriters has been published recently.

curated by Chirodeep Chaudhuri

Part of the Spotlight feature Madhubani

Painted wall outside a home in Jitwarpur village, Madhubani, photograph by Storyloom Films

"My first experience of Madhubani paintings, in the way that they are originally meant to exist i.e. on walls, was in Patna when I drove through the city enroute to Madhubani. Before that, like most people, I had seen these paintings on paper, framed and hanging in people’s homes. The paintings adorning the walls of Patna were part of a city beautification move. It had seemed wrong in many ways, for instance the colours – too bright and shiny (thanks to the oil paints used), the draftsmanship on much of the stretches quite questionable and the panels depicting stories, a mish-mash of the traditional and the contemporary ideas—I spotted Gandhi in a pink dhoti lifted from a Swachch Bharat message and inserted in one of the panels.

"I was also reminded of my travels through Shekhawati in Rajasthan, almost 2 decades ago, when in town after town, I encountered those marvelous frescoes on the walls of havelis. I don’t remember the name of the town now but there was a haveli that was being restored to be converted into a heritage hotel, its frescoes getting a fresh coat of paint and imagination filling in the missing gaps. I had then compared the weather-beaten frescoes, the colours of which had muted with time and desert dust, and the newer ones I was seeing coming alive and thinking what the towns might have looked like when every home was spanking new with newly painted frescoes. Could it have looked rather over-the-top, much like Patna seemed to me? Is it only weathered and flaking walls that catch the eye of a photographer? Patna’s Madhubani-painted walls reminded me of that under-restoration haveli in Shekhawati. What I saw later in the villages was more in keeping with the image in my mind. So was rusticity the right aesthetic necessary to view and appreciate this art?"

Wall of a home in Jitwarpur, Madhubani, photograph by Storyloom Films

Moti Karn in her husband's ancestral home in Jitwarpur, Madhubani, photograph by Storyloom Films

"Something that has always struck me in all my assignments documenting India’s traditional crafts and textiles is the sheer labour-intensive nature of the processes. The processes are varied and require planning and many hands – no wonder whole families and communities are involved. For weavers, for instance, someone gets the yarn ready, someone prepares the warp and someone else the weft, someone else dyes, someone stretches the yarn on the loom. Similarly, for paintings – preparing the walls or the paper or any other material the painting will be done on, collecting the raw material for the colours which involves going in search of them in the nearby forests (I am always taken with the artists' sense of local plants and flowers and the colours they offer), preparing the colours that may involve boiling and then crushing them. This is work that I have always loved watching craftspeople do before they begin. The pleasure of watching the work come alive is then, in comparison, a meditative and a calming one."

Artist preparing colour for painting, Madhubani, photograph by Storyloom Films

Gum resin, photograph by Storyloom Films

Fresh turmeric being ground to prepare colour, photograph by Storyloom Films

Outside a home in Jitwarpur, Madhubani, photograph by Storyloom Films

"When I alighted at Madhubani railway station what I encountered was a riot of colour – almost every inch of the station walls was covered with paintings done by a team of Madhubani artists from the region. As I drove through the town, it seemed the paintings were everywhere – on the exterior walls of the Circuit House, the District Magistrate’s office, the state electricity board’s office, the wall of a local school and even decorating the insides of an ATM. The famed Ram Janki temple too is no different – its walls, ceilings, pillars, alcoves, are all decorated with the paintings. It seemed, as I walked around that the instances of spotting these paintings on the surfaces that they were traditionally to be found i.e. mud plastered walls, had become rare. I’m not sure if it had to do with the time of the year – the festive season was just over. The paints used on these newer walls were almost always factory manufactured synthetic paints as opposed to the natural colours used traditionally. The artist behind the temple paintings who had accompanied us mentioned how painting on cement plaster surfaces came with new challenges as they tend to flake due to the inconsistencies in the material mixed during construction. The traditional processes of preparing walls and the natural paints were more in conjunction with each other."

Kohbar Ghar painting in a home in Madhubani, photograph by Deepa Menon

Painting on a mud hut in Jitwarpur, Madhubani, photograph by Deepa Menon